 To say that something exists in actuality is to say that it exists not only as a figment of someone’s imagination, or as a mere determination of their consciousness, but that it exists for itself independently of consciousness. “Being is something in which not only I but also others, above all also the object itself, participate” (GPZ 304/40). In affirming the distinction between thought and being, repudiating Hegel’s critique of sense certainty, and affirming the claim that nature exists through itself, independently of thought, the new philosophy also affirms the reality of time and space, insisting that real existence is finite, determinate, corporeal existence. Whereas in his lectures on logic and metaphysics, and in his writings from the mid-1830’s, Feuerbach had defended the Hegelian method of the logical Entwicklung or development of the various moments of the absolute Idea, he now argues that the concept of development entails temporality, so that a non-temporal developmental process is a contradiction in terms. If speculative philosophy is the philosophy of the infinite, the new philosophy aims to disclose the truth of finitude by reversing the path taken by speculation from the infinite to the finite, and from the indeterminate to the determinate (VT 249).