ngs is not their sensuous qualities; the latter belong rather
to the mere phenomenon. No one of them indicates what the object is by
itself, when left alone. They depend on contingent circumstances, and apart
from these they would not exist--what is color in the dark? what sound
in airless space? what weight in empty space? what fusibility without
fire?--they are each and all relative. Since being excludes negation of
every kind, the quality of the existent must be absolutely _simple and
unchangeable_; it brooks no manifoldness, no quantity, no distinctions in
degree, no becoming; all this were a corruption of the purely affirmative
or positive character of being. The existent is unextended and eternal.
The Eleatics are to be praised because the need of escaping from the
contradictions in the world of experience led them to make themselves
masters of the concept of being without relation and without negation, and
of the simple, homogeneous quality of the existent in its full purity. But
while the Eleatics conceived the existent as one, the atomists made an
advance by assuming a _plurality_ of reals. The truly one never becomes
a plurality; plurality is given, hence an original plurality must be
postulated. Herbart characterizes his own standpoint as qualitative
atomism, since his reals are differentiated by their properties, not by
quantitative relations (size and figure). The idealists and the pantheists
make a false use of the tendency toward unity which, no doubt, is present
in our reason, when they maintain that true being must be one. There is
absolutely nothing in the concept of being to forbid us to think the
existent as many; while the world of phenomena, with its many things and
their many properties, gives irrefragable grounds which compel us to this
conclusion. Hence, according to Herbart, the true reality is a (very
large, though not, it is true, an infinite[1]) plurality of supra-sensible
(non-spatial and non-temporal) reals, or, according to the Leibnitzian
expression, monads, which all their life have nothing further to do than
to preserve intact against disturbances the simple quality in which they
consist (for the existent is not distinct from its quality; it does not
have the quality, but is the quality). Each thing has but one response for
the most varied influences: it answers all suggestions from without by
affirming its _what_, by continually repeating, as it were, the same note,
which gains a varying