Metaphysics starts with the given, but cannot rest content with it, for it contains contradictions.  In resolving these we rise above the given.  What is given?  Kant has not answered this question with entire correctness.  We may, indeed, term the totality of the given “phenomena,” but this presupposes something which appears.  If nothing existed there would also nothing appear.  As smoke points to fire, so appearance to being.  So much seeming, so much indication of being.  Things in themselves may be known mediately, though not immediately, by following out the indications of being contained by the given appearance.  Further, not merely the unformed matter of cognition is given to us, but it is rather true that everything comes under this concept which experience so presses on us that we cannot resist it; hence not merely single sensations, but entire sensation-groups, not merely the matter, but also the forms of experience.  If the latter were really subjective products, as Kant holds, it would necessarily be possible for us at will to think each perceptive-content either under the category of substance, or property, or cause—­possible for us, if we chose, to see a round table quadrilateral.  In reality we are bound in the application of these forms; they are given for each object in a definite way.  The given forms—­Herbart calls them experience-concepts—­contain contradictions.  How can these contradictions be removed?  We may neither simply reject the concepts which are burdened with contradictions, for they are given, nor leave them as they are, for the logical principium contradictionis requires that the contradiction as such be rooted out.  The experience-concepts are valid (they find application in experience), but they are not thinkable.  Therefore we must so transform and supplement them that they shall become free from contradictions and thinkable.  The method which Herbart employs to remove the contradictions is as follows:  The contradiction always consists in the fact that an a should be the same as a b, but is not so.  The desiderated likeness of the two is impossible so long as we think a as one thing.  That which is unsuccessful in this case will succeed, perhaps, if in thought we break up the a into several things—­[Greek:  a b g].  Then we shall be able to explain through the “together” (Zusammen) of this plurality what we were unable to explain from the undecomposed a, or from the single constituents of it.  The “together” is a “relation” established by thought among the elements of the real.  For this reason Herbart terms his method of finding out necessary supplements to the given “the method of relations.”  Another name for the same thing is “the method of contingent aspects.”  Mechanics operates with contingent aspects when, for the sake of explanation, it resolves a given motion into several components.  Such fictions and substitutions—­auxiliary