h, when shaped and fitted into its place, will help to raise
higher the pyramid of knowledge. Hegel's doctrine of the necessity
and motive force of contradictories, of the relative justification of
standpoints, and the systematic development of speculation, has great and
permanent value as a general point of view. It needs only to be guarded
from narrow scholastic application to become a safe canon for the
historical treatment of philosophy.

In speaking above of the worth of the philosophical doctrines of the past
as defying time, and as comparable to the standard character of finished
works of art, the special reference was to those elements in speculation
which proceed less from abstract thinking than from the fancy, the heart,
and the character of the individual, and even more directly from the
disposition of the people; and which to a certain degree may be divorced
from logical reasoning and the scientific treatment of particular
questions. These may be summed up under the phrase, views of the world. The
necessity for constant reconsideration of them is from this standpoint at
once evident. The Greek view of the world is as classic as the plastic art
of Phidias and the epic of Homer; the Christian, as eternally valid as the
architecture of the Middle Ages; the modern, as irrefutable as Goethe's
poetry and the music of Beethoven. The views of the world which proceed
from the spirits of different ages, as products of the general development
of culture, are not so much thoughts as rhythms in thinking, not theories
but modes of intuition saturated with feelings of worth. We may dispute
about them, it is true; we may argue against them or in their defense; but
they can neither be established nor overthrown by cogent proofs. It is not
only optimism and pessimism, determinism and indeterminism, that have their
ultimate roots in the affective side of our nature, but pantheism and
individualism, also idealism and materialism, even rationalism and
sensationalism. Even though they operate with the instruments of thought,
they remain in the last analysis matters of faith, of feeling, and of
resolution. The aesthetic view of the world held by the Greeks, the
transcendental-religious view of Christianity, the intellectual view of
Leibnitz and Hegel, the panthelistic views of Fichte I and Schopenhauer are
vital forces, not doctrines, postulates, not results of thought. One view
of the world is forced to yield its pre-eminence to an