After all our vain attempts to subject consciousness also to law, this remains as our final wisdom, that the mutual dependence between the mental and the material is a thing subject to law; that is, we assume as axiom to begin with, that which we are going to prove, whereby we produce nothing but a paraphrase of the Buddha-thought, nothing but a lifeless formula of the actuality itself--that the _I_-process is subordinate to no laws, can _have_ no laws because it _is_ law itself. And the worth of the Baconian maxim that truth may more easily come forth from error than from confusion, is here put to a severe test, for here are combined both error and confusion. I now proceed to a brief account of the other school--that of modern positivism. What makes this system so interesting for us is the originality of its point of departure. Despite the fact that for the most part it has been developed by a physicist, it starts with the idea, unheard-of previous to perhaps twenty-five years ago, that the next step in the progress of science is to be looked for not from physics and its methods, _i.e._ the non-personal, but from the personal, from the study of sense-perceptions.[38] Since positivism, like every scientific world-theory, must apprehend the play of world-events purely as a sum of relation-values, one of its tasks is to come to an understanding with the concept of substance. As the direct successor of the criticism of Hume, its position with respect to the concept of substance remains the same as with Hume: the existence of such a concept is ascribed to the faculty of imagination. Because one can remove any single constituent part of a thing without the image thereof ceasing to represent the total whole and to be recognized again as such, it is assumed that all may be taken away and that something will still remain behind. “Thus arises the monstrous idea of a thing in itself, different from its appearance and unknowable. The thing, the body, the matter, and so on, is nothing else but the complex of colours, sounds, and so forth, nothing more than the so-called characteristics.”[39] And now it is a question of formulating a new view with respect to a world thus stripped of the concept of substance. All previous attempts at world-theories have made shipwreck on the fact that it was impossible for them in any wise to comprehend the connection between the physical and the psychical. What is original about the onset of positivism is this, that it starts out with psycho-physical units as world-elements.