If this name is to indicate only a maxim of _investigation_--the directive which scientific investigation has to take, in order to reach more general points of view--we could declare ourselves in full accord with it. All investigation strives after a unity of principle; this impulse is a scientific leading motive of our nature. Besides the absolute limits of our knowledge, there are still enough relative and provisory limits to it; and there also are enough low points of view, mistakes, and imperfections in science, to justify us when we expressly form and establish monism as a maxim of scientific investigation. All those theories and points of view need such a spur and corrective, which are hastily satisfied with a dualistic or a still farther expanded limit of our knowledge. Among them we rank in theology the antique heathenish dualism which separates God and the world in such a way that God is but the architect of the eternal matter, existing independently of God; and also the modern deistic dualism which considers only the elements, principles, and beginning of the world, as dependent on God, but not the entire course of their developments as a whole and in detail. In philosophy, taken in a narrower sense, we reckon with them the one-sided atomism which can no longer find the connecting link between the single elements of the world, or the one-sided assertion of realism or idealism, since at this time all views of the world which win acceptance from the present generation claim the praise of showing the reconciliation and higher unity of realism and idealism. In anthropology, there belongs to them {179} such a treatment of psychology and physiology, that the one science does not trouble itself about the other, and the investigation does not seek or keep in mind that which is common to both, or that which is higher and superior to them; and in all natural sciences, every mode of investigation belongs to them, where the single science retains no sympathy with all other sciences and with the principles of all scientific investigation. In regard to these 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.