of
investigation. The metaphysician thinks in antitheses. His
conversation is "Yea, yea; Nay, nay" and whatsoever is more than these
cometh of evil. For him a thing exists or it does not exist, a thing
can never be itself and something else at the same time; positive and
negative are mutually exclusive, cause and effect stand in stiff
antagonism to each other. This method of thought seems at the first
glance to be quite plausible because it is in accordance with sound
common sense. But sound common sense, respectable fellow though he may
be in his own home surrounded by his four walls, meets with strange
adventures when he betakes himself into the wide world of
investigation; and the metaphysical way of looking at things, sound
and useful as it is, under given conditions, runs sooner or later into
a stone wall, beyond which it is one-sided, stupid and abstract, and
loses itself in insoluble contradictions. Because it omits to notice
the interrelations of the individual phenomena, their existence, their
coming and their going, their static and mobile conditions, and so to
speak does not see the forest for trees. We know for example, with
sufficient certainty for every day affairs, whether an animal is alive
or dead, but, on closer examination, we find that this is sometimes no
easy matter to decide, as jurists know very well and have gone indeed
to great pains to discover a rational border line beyond which the
killing of a child in the womb of its mother is murder. It is just as
impossible too to fix the precise moment of death, for physiology
shows that death is not a single and sudden event but a very slow
process. Just so is every organic being at the same moment itself and
not itself. Every moment it takes up matter coming to it from the
outside and throws off other matter, every moment its body-cells die
and are recreated. Indeed after a longer or shorter period the whole
material of the body is renewed through the taking up of other
particles of matter so that each organic being is at the same time
itself and something else. We find also if we look at the matter more
closely that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative,
are just as inseparable as they are antagonistic, and that they, in
spite of all their fixed antagonisms permeate each other, also that
the cause and effect are concepts which can only realise themselves in
relation to a particular case. However when we come to examine the
separate c