The priority of the actual as compared with the potential in the real order, suggests a proof of the existence of God in the manner indicated above. It also affords a refutation of Hegelian monism. The conception of the world, including all the phenomena of mind and matter, as the gradual self-manifestation or evolution of a potential being eternally actualizing itself, is a self-contradictory conception. Scholastics rightly maintain that the realities from which we derive our first most abstract and transcendental notion of being in general, are actual realities. Hegelians seize on the object of this notion, identify it with pure thought, proclaim it the sole reality, and endow it with the power of becoming actually everything. It is manifest, therefore, that they endow purely potential being with the power of actualizing itself. Nor can they fairly avoid this charge by pointing out that although their starting-point is not actual being (with which the scholastic philosophy of being commences), yet neither is it possible or potential being, but being which has neither of these determinations, being which abstracts from both, like the real being of the scholastics (7, 13). For though real being can be _an object of abstract human thought_ without either of the predicates “existent” or “non-existent,” yet it cannot be anything _in the real order_ without either of them. There it must be either actually existent or else merely potential. But Hegelians claim absolutely indeterminate being to be _as such_ something in the real order; and though they try to distinguish it from potential being they nevertheless think of it as potential being, for they distinctly and repeatedly declare that it can become all things, and does become all things, and is constantly, eternally transforming itself by an internal dialectic process into the phenomena which constitute the worlds of mind and matter. Contrasting it with the abstract “inert” being which they conceive to be the object of the traditional metaphysics, they endow “indeterminate being” with the active power of producing, and the passive potentiality of becoming, actually everything. Thus, in order to show _a priori_ how this indeterminate being must evolve itself by internal logical necessity into the world of our direct and immediate experience, they suppose it to be subject to change and to be at the same time self-actualizing, in direct opposition to the axiom that potential reality, reality which is subject to change, cannot actualize itself: _Quidquid movetur ab alio moveatur oportet_.