concepts, which are not real, but which serve only as paths for thought—­may be successfully employed by metaphysics also.  The abstract expression of this method runs:  The contradiction is to be removed by thinking one of its members as manifold rather than as one.  In order to observe the workings of this Herbartian machine we shall go over the four principal contradictions by which his acuteness is put to the test—­the problems of inherence, of change, of the continuous, of the ego.

We call the given sensation-complexes “things,” and ascribe “properties” to them.  How can one and the same thing have different properties—­how can the one be at the same time many?  To say that the thing “possesses” the properties does not help the matter.  The possession of the different properties is itself just as manifold and various as the properties which are possessed.  Hence the concept of the thing and its properties must be so transformed that the plurality which seems to be in the thing shall be transferred without it.  Instead of one thing let us assume several, each with a single definite property, from whose “together” the appearance of many qualities in one thing now arises.  The appearance of manifold properties in the one thing has its ground in the “together” of many things, each of which has one simple quality.  Again, it is just as impossible for a thing to have different qualities in succession, or to change, as it is for it to have them at the same time.  The popular view of change, which holds that a thing takes on different forms (ice, water, steam) and yet remains the same substance, is untenable.  How is it possible to become another, and yet to remain the same?  The universal feeling that the concept needs correction betrays itself in the fact that everyone involuntarily adds a cause to the change in thought, and seeks a cause for it, and thus of himself undertakes a transformation of the concept, though, it is true, an inadequate one.  If we think this concept through we come upon a trilemma, a threefold impossibility.  Whether we endeavor to deduce the change from external or from internal causes, or (with Hegel) to think it as causeless, in each case we involve ourselves in inconceivabilities.  All three ideas—­change as mechanism, as self-determination or freedom, as absolute becoming—­are alike absurd.  We can escape these contradictions only by the bold decision to conceive the quality of the existent as unchangeable.  For the truly existent there is no change whatever.  It remains, however, to explain the appearance of change, in which the wand of decomposition and the “together” again proves its magic power.  Supported by the motley manifoldness of phenomena, we posit real beings as qualitatively different, and view this diversity as partial contraposition; we resolve, e.g., the simple quality a into the elements x + z, and a second quality b into y — z.  So long as the individual things remain by themselves, the