, pressing on in the Fichtean manner
from the secondary facts of consciousness to an original real-life,
endeavors to solve the question of a universal becoming, of an
all-pervasive force, of a supporting unity ("totality") in the life of
spirit (neither in a purely noetical nor a purely metaphysical, but) in a
nooelogical way, and demands that the fundamental science or doctrine of
principles direct its attention not to cognition by itself, but to the
activity of psychical life as a whole.

[Footnote 1: Eucken: _The Unity of Spiritual Life in the Consciousness and
Deeds of Humanity_, 1888; _Prolegomena_ to this, 1885. A detailed analysis
of the latter by Falckenberg is given in the _Zeitschrift fuer Philosophie_,
vol. xc, 1887; cf. above, pp. 17 and 610.]

We have elsewhere discussed the more recent attempts to establish a
metaphysic which shall be empirically well grounded and shall cautiously
rise from facts.[1] In regard to the possibility of metaphysics three
parties are to be distinguished: On the left, the positivists, the
neo-Kantians, and the monists of consciousness, who deny it out of hand. On
the right, a series of philosophers--e.g., adherents of Hegel, Herbart, and
Schopenhauer--who, without making any concessions to the modern theory of
knowledge, hold fast to the possibility of a speculative metaphysics of the
old type. In the center, a group of thinkers who are willing to renounce
neither a solid noetical foundation nor the attainment of metaphysical
conclusions--so Eduard von Hartmann, Wundt,[2] Eucken, Volkelt (pp. 590,
617). Otto Liebmann (born 1840; _On the Analysis of Reality_, 1876, 2d
ed., 1880; _Thoughts and Facts_, Heft i. 1882) demands a sharp separation
between the certain and the uncertain and an exact estimation of the degree
of probability which theories possess; puts the principles of metaphysics
under the rubric of logical hypothesis; and, in his _Climax of the
Theories_, 1884, calls attention to the fact that experiential science, in
addition to axioms necessarily or apodictically certain and empeiremes
possessing actual or assertory certainty, needs, further, a number of
"interpolation maxims," which form an attribute of our type of intellectual
organization _(i.e._, principles, according to the standard of which we
supplement the fragmentary and discrete series of single perceptions and
isolated observations by the interpolation of the needed intermediate
links, so that they form a co