ese low points of view, mistakes,
or imperfections, monism certainly is a correct and necessary maxim of
investigation; but this maxim ought not to lead us so far that we--as very
often happens from the _unity_ or the possibility of grouping several forms
of existence under general conceptions--make an _identity_, that we efface
the differences instead of explaining them, and then think the effacement
is an explanation; that we set forth the _assumed_ form of unity as if one
we had found, and in this manner falsify the method of knowing. For as
certainly and as much as man is subject to the dangers of error and
falsification, just so certainly and so little is nature subject to
falsification.

But if the name "monism" is to designate a certain _view of the world_, it
is for such a designation either too comprehensive and quite applicable to
_all_ views which have a right to the name of view of the world; or it is
misleading, and not applicable to any. For the name, as if it were properly
called henism, either expresses only the _unity_ of the principle of the
world, and designates a quality which is the characteristic of every view
of the world, and which especially belongs to theism in a clearer and more
perfect way than to any other standpoint; or the name is used to attest
that the world _alone_ {180} exists, and that monism knows of but _one_
existence,--namely, that of the world; while the contrary view of the
world--that of theism, which in a manner wholly incompetent, and
historically wholly unjustified, is called dualism--supposes _two_
existences, God and the world. But then this name does not correctly
represent either itself or theism. It does not correctly represent itself:
for the so-called monism does not, indeed, suppose that that which
_appears_ in the world is the really existing, or that the processes which
come into appearance have again their _final_ cause only in the appearance,
but it seeks the final causes of the phenomena in laws and principles which
can no longer be observed by our senses, and of those it again seeks the
common, highest, and very last principle, the perception of which it
either, with Haeckel, renounces or finds it, with other theories, now in
atomism, and in attraction and repulsion, then in the law of causality.
Thus it has not only a single existence and mode of existence, but it does
exactly the same thing that theism does: it seeks the final principles of
the world. And it d