philosophy ought to end in unqualified
Agnosticism. The Hegelians, to be sure, made merry over the Unknowable
of Mr. Spencer, but their own Absolute is really just the Unknowable in
its 'Sunday best'. Nothing that we can say about anything which is not
the Absolute is really true, because there really _is_ nothing but the
Absolute to speak about, and nothing that we can say about the Absolute
is quite true either, because we can never succeed in saying itself of
it. Mr. Bradley, far the most eminent of the philosophers of the
Absolute, has made persistent and brilliant attempts to show that, in
spite of this, we do know enough to be sure that our own mind is more
like the Absolute than a cray-fish, and a cray-fish more like it than a
crystal. But when all is said, though I owe more to Mr. Bradley than I
can ever acknowledge adequately, I cannot help feeling that there are
two men in Mr. Bradley, a great constructive thinker and a subtle
destructive critic, and that the destructive Hyde is perpetually pulling
to pieces all that the constructive Jekyll has built up. Of course it is
obvious that the truth of mathematics, if mathematics are true, is a
fatal stone of stumbling for this type of philosophy. Mathematics never
attempts to say anything about the 'Absolute'--the only 'Absolute' of
which it knows is only a 'degraded conic'--yet it claims that its
statements, if once they have been correctly expressed, are not
'partial' but complete.

Over against the Hegelianizing philosophers, we had, of course, the men
of science. No one could wish to speak of the scientific men of the
days of Huxley without deep respect for their success in adding to our
positive knowledge of facts. But it may perhaps be said at this distance
of time that it was not precisely the greatest among them who were most
prominent as mystagogues of Science with the big S, and it may certainly
be said that when the mystagogues, the Cliffords, Huxleys, and the rest,
undertook to improvise a theory of first principles, their achievement
was little better than infantile. They took it on trust from Hume that
the whole of knowledge is built up of sensations, actual or 'revived',
and quite missed Kant's point that their empiricism left the formal
constituent in knowledge, the type of order by which data are organized
into an intelligible pattern, wholly out of account. Even when they
deigned to read Kant, they read him without any inkling of the character
of t