the distilled result of all the sciences, its method and organon must be identical with theirs. The method is hypothesis, verified by experimental induction and criticised by thought. The organon is the imagination checked by the understanding, and the understanding checked by dialectic. The imagination gives us the requisite hypotheses; the understanding tests and settles their rival claims, dialectic purging it from the illusory contradictions into which it naturally runs when facing the problems of ultimate reality. These problems all concern the notion of infinity, either in the form of the infinitely great or the infinitely small; and the contradictions, seemingly unavoidable, to which they give rise, are in truth, says Dühring, mere illusions, springing from the lack of a First Principle that has genuine reality. These contradictions, he continues, formed the basis of Kant’s boasted dialectic, by which he is thought to have exposed the illusion hiding in our very faculties. Kant would have it that these contradictions issue from the inmost nature of the understanding itself, when it presumes to grapple with things as they are; but their appearance in the form of his famous “antinomies” was in fact owing to his imperfect conception of the origin of knowledge, and his consequent falsification of Nature into a mere phenomenon.
With this assertion, Dühring confronts Kant’s
