Besides the contradictions in the concepts of inherence, of change, and action and passion, it is the concept of being which prevents our philosopher from ascribing a living character to reality.  Being, as Kant correctly perceived, contains nothing qualitative; it is absolute position.  Whoever affirms that an object is, expresses thereby that the matter is to rest with the simple position; in which is included that it is nothing dependent, relative, or negative. (Every negation is something relative, relates to a precedent position, which is to be annulled by it.) Besides being, the existent contains something more—­a quality; it consists of this absolute position and a what.  If this what is separated from being we reach an “image”; united with being it yields an essence or a real.  This what of things is not their sensuous qualities; the latter belong rather to the mere phenomenon.  No one of them indicates what the object is by itself, when left alone.  They depend on contingent circumstances, and apart from these they would not exist—­what is color in the dark? what sound in airless space? what weight in empty space? what fusibility without fire?—­they are each and all relative.  Since being excludes negation of every kind, the quality of the existent must be absolutely simple and unchangeable; it brooks no manifoldness, no quantity, no distinctions in degree, no becoming; all this were a corruption of the purely affirmative or positive character of being.  The existent is unextended and eternal.  The Eleatics are to be praised because the need of escaping from the contradictions in the world of experience led them to make themselves masters of the concept of being without relation and without negation, and of the simple, homogeneous quality of the existent in its full purity.  But while the Eleatics conceived the existent as one, the atomists made an advance by assuming a plurality of reals.  The truly one never becomes a plurality; plurality is given, hence an original plurality must be postulated.  Herbart characterizes his own standpoint as qualitative atomism, since his reals are differentiated by their properties, not by quantitative relations (size and figure).  The idealists and the pantheists make a false use of the tendency toward unity which, no doubt, is present in our reason, when they maintain that true being must be one.  There is absolutely nothing in the concept of being to forbid us to think the existent as many; while the world of phenomena, with its many things and their many properties, gives irrefragable grounds which compel us to this conclusion.  Hence, according to Herbart, the true reality is a (very large, though not, it is true, an infinite[1]) plurality of supra-sensible (non-spatial and non-temporal) reals, or, according to the Leibnitzian expression, monads, which all their life have nothing further to do than to preserve intact against disturbances the simple quality in which they consist (for the existent