ing to its organisation. If we rob the subject of all special characteristics and forms of its knowledge, all the properties of the object vanish also, and nothing remains but matter without form and quality, which can just as little occur in experience as a subject without the forms of its knowledge, but which remains opposed to the naked subject as such, as its reflex, which can only disappear along with it, Although materialism pretends to postulate nothing more than this matter – for instance, atoms – yet it unconsciously adds to it not only the subject, but also space, time, and causality, which depend upon special properties of the subject.
The world as idea, the objective world, has thus, as it were, two poles; the simple knowing subject without the forms of its knowledge, and crude matter without form and quality. Both are completely unknowable; the subject because it is that which knows, matter because without form and quality it cannot be perceived. Yet both are fundamental conditions of all empirical perception. Thus the knowing subject, merely as such, which is a presupposition of all experience, stands opposed as its pure counterpart to the crude, formless, and utterly dead (i.e., will-less) matter, which is given in no experience, but which all experience presupposes. This subject is not in time, for time is only the more definite form of all its ideas. The matter which stands over against it is, like it, eternal and imperishable, endures through all time, but is, properly speaking, not extended, for extension gives form, thus it has no spatial properties. Everything else is involved in a constant process of coming into being and passing away, while these two represent the unmoved poles of the world as idea. The permanence of matter may therefore be regarded as the reflex of the timelessness of the pure subject, which is simply assumed as the condition of all objects. Both belong to phenomena, not to the thing in itself, but they are the framework of the phenomenon. Both are arrived
