ly arguments
framed on the hegelian pattern. The truth is that which you implicitly
affirm in the very attempt to deny it; it is that from which every
variation refutes itself by proving self-contradictory. This is the
supreme insight of rationalism, and to-day the best _must-be's_ of
rationalist argumentation are but so many attempts to communicate it
to the hearer.

Thus, you see, my last lecture and this lecture make connexion again
and we can consider Hegel and the other absolutists to be supporting
the same system. The next point I wish to dwell on is the part played
by what I have called vicious intellectualism in this wonderful
system's structure.

Rationalism in general thinks it gets the fulness of truth by turning
away from sensation to conception, conception obviously giving the
more universal and immutable picture. Intellectualism in the vicious
sense I have already defined as the habit of assuming that a concept
_ex_cludes from any reality conceived by its means everything not
included in the concept's definition. I called such intellectualism
illegitimate as I found it used in Lotze's, Royce's, and Bradley's
proofs of the absolute (which absolute I consequently held to be
non-proven by their arguments), and I left off by asserting my own
belief that a pluralistic and incompletely integrated universe,
describable only by the free use of the word 'some,' is a legitimate
hypothesis.

Now Hegel himself, in building up his method of double negation,
offers the vividest possible example of this vice of intellectualism.
Every idea of a finite thing is of course a concept of _that_ thing
and not a concept of anything else. But Hegel treats this not being a
concept of anything else as if it were _equivalent to the concept of
anything else not being_, or in other words as if it were a denial
or negation of everything else. Then, as the other things, thus
implicitly contradicted by the thing first conceived, also by the same
law contradict _it_, the pulse of dialectic commences to beat and the
famous triads begin to grind out the cosmos. If any one finds
the process here to be a luminous one, he must be left to the
illumination, he must remain an undisturbed hegelian. What others feel
as the intolerable ambiguity, verbosity, and unscrupulousness of the
master's way of deducing things, he will probably ascribe--since
divine oracles are notoriously hard to interpret--to the 'difficulty'
that habitually accompanies