 But this modest empiricist defense of atomism was disingenuous. It was only half the story. For Fechner had a more aggressive philosophical defense of atomism, a positivist-style counterattack which claimed that the questions posed by the philosopher are meaningless. Unlike the physicist, the philosopher does not intend to stay within the limits of experience; he attempts to go beyond these limits to find the conditions of their possibility. What makes experience possible for him is the unconditioned, the thing-in-itself; and his speculations therefore are so many attempts to know the thing-in-itself. But the thing-in-itself, Fechner insists, is an illusion, something which does not really exist (Atom: 94, 98). The world does not consist in the appearances of a thing-in-itself but in nothing more than appearances (Atom: 94). Matter is only what appears, or what would appear under certain circumstances (Atom: 95). The idea that there is something behind the appearances, something that makes them all one thing, is simply an hypostasis, the reification of a concept that unites all these appearances into one (Atom: 96). As part of this counterattack, Fechner went on to argue that the dynamicist’s concept of force or power is only a reification of the concept of a law (Atom: 106). It did not even make sense to analyze a body into its powers because power is only a relational concept between bodies; to attempt to construct matter from powers would be like constructing sound from tone intervals (Atom: 112). 