ch a case, however, Herr
Duehring's entire book would have been love's labor lost.

Further, if no philosophy, as such, is longer required there is no
longer the necessity of any philosophy of nature even. The view that
all the phenomena of nature stand in systematic mutual relations
compels science to prove this systematic interconnection in all
respects, in single cases as well as in the entirety. But an
appropriate creative, scientific representation of this mutual
connection in such a way as to show the composition of an exact
thought-picture of the system of the universe in which we live remains
not only for us but for all time an impossibility. Should such a final
conclusive system of the interconnection of the various activities of
the universe, physical, as well as intellectual and historical, ever
be brought to completion at any point of time in the history of the
human race, human knowledge would forthwith come to an end and future
historical progress would be cut off from the very moment in which
society was directed in accordance with the system, which would be an
absurdity, mere nonsense.

Man is therefore confronted by a contradiction, on the one hand he is
obliged to study the interconnections of the world-system
exhaustively, and, on the other hand, he is unable to fully accomplish
the task either as regards himself or as regards the system of nature.
This contradiction, however, does not consist solely in the nature of
the two factors World and Man; it is the main lever also of universal
intellectual progress and is solved every day and for ever in an
endless progressive development of humanity, just as mathematical
problems find their solution in an endless progression of a recurring
decimal. As a matter of fact also every concept of the universe is
subject to objective limitations owing to the conditions of historical
knowledge, and subjectively in addition owing to the physical and
mental make up of the author of the concept. But Herr Duehring
exhibits a mode of thought which is confined in its application to a
limited and subjective idea of the universe. We saw earlier that he
was omnipresent, in all possible forms of the universe, now we see
that he is omniscient. He has solved the final problems of science and
has nailed up tight all future knowledge.

Herr Duehring considers that he can, as with the fundamental forms of
existence, produce aprioristically by means of his own cogitations the
wh