meaning only in so far as, in accordance with the
character of the disturber, it appears now as a third, now as a fifth or
seventh. This picture of the world is certainly not attractive; in it all
change and becoming, all life and all activity is offered up on the altar
of monotonous being. Happily Herbart is inconsistent enough to enliven this
comfortless waste of changeless being by the relatively real or semi-real
manifoldness of the self-conservations.

The infinite divisibility of space and of matter forms the chief difficulty
in the problem of the continuous. Herbart endeavors to solve it by the
assumption of an intelligible space with "fixed" lines (lines formed by a
definite number of points, hence finitely divisible, and not continuous).
Metaphysics demands the fixed or discrete line, although common thought
is incapable of conceiving it. Space is a mere form of combination in
representation or for the observer, and yet it is objective, _i.e._, it is
valid for all intelligences, and not merely for human intelligence.
From his complex and unproductive endeavors to derive the appearance of
continuity from discontinuous reality we hurry on to the fourth, the
psychological problem, which Herbart discusses with great acuteness. He
considers it the chief merit of Fichte's Science of Knowledge that it
called attention to this problem.

The concept of the ego, of whose reality we have so strong and immediate a
conviction that, in the formula of asseveration, "as true as I exist,"
it is made the criterion of all other certitude, labors under various
contradictions. Besides the familiar difficulty, here especially sensible,
of one thing with many marks, it contains other absurdities of its own. In
the ego or self-consciousness subject and object are to be identical.
The identity of the representing and the represented ego is a
self-contradictory idea, for the law of contradiction forbids the equation
of opposites, while a subject is subject only through the fact that it is
not object. But, again, self-consciousness can never be realized, because
it involves a _regressus in infinitum_. The ego is defined as that which
represents itself. What is this "self"? It is, in turn, the self-knower.
This new explanation contains still a further self; which once more
signifies the self-knower and so on to infinity. The ego represents the
representation (_Vorstellen_) of its representation (_Vorstellen)_, etc.
The representation (_V