wills nothing in particular, is a pure fiction; and (to put the same thing differently) so is will without desire, conscious or unconscious, special or habitual. It is simply a psychological monster. It is admitted that, if real, it is inexplicable; it is admitted to be in no single case verifiable; and surely Schopenhauer (op. cit. p. 168) is not wrong when he says that, if what is neither conceivable nor to be found in experience is not incredible, then nothing is incredible. If any theory requires such a supposition, then that proves the theory to be false.
We have shown that a formal will is self-contradictory, since the essence of will is that it should not be formal. Duty for duty’s sake is false and impossible. It may not be superfluous to show in addition that, even if such a principle of action were possible, yet it would be worthless and of no avail for practice.
The maxim of non-contradiction is useless. We have seen that it contradicts itself, since it posits a content which is the contradiction of its bare form; but, apart from that, it gives us no information. What am I to do? ‘Produce a tautology’ is the answer. ‘Everything which contradicts itself is wrong. Everything which is tautological is right. Nothing which is tautological is wrong.’ Then what does contradict itself? Everything in one sense; nothing in another.
The principle of non-contradiction does not mean Do not contradict yourself; produce a harmony, a system in your acts and yourself; realize yourself as an organic whole. That would be vague enough without further directions; but what our principle here says is not that. It says the act must not contradict itself. What does this mean? It means that the matter realized, the determination posited by the act, must be self-consistent. Property e.g. is self-consistent. Theft of property is a contradiction.
In the first place, however, is any determination free from contradiction? Take what you will, you must take something definite, and the definite is what it is by the negation of something else. It belongs to the essence of any possible A that it should be not B, C, D, &c., and without this negation it would not be A. A mere positive affirmative is a fictitious abstraction. ‘Affirm A’ means ‘negate B, C, D, &c.’ Property e.g. implies in its appro-
