to be self-contradictory, so the ultimate
reality must be a single all-inclusive systematic whole. Yet all he
can say of this whole at the end of his excellently written book is
that the notion of it 'can make no addition to our information and can
of itself supply no motives for practical endeavor.'

Mr. McTaggart treats us to almost as thin a fare. 'The main practical
interest of Hegel's philosophy,' he says, 'is to be found in the
abstract certainty which the logic gives us that all reality is
rational and righteous, even when we cannot see in the least how it is
so.... Not that it shows us how the facts around us are good, not that
it shows us how we can make them better, but that it proves that they,
like other reality, are _sub specie eternitatis_, perfectly good, and
_sub specie temporis_, destined to become perfectly good.'

Here again, no detail whatever, only the abstract certainty that
whatever the detail may prove to be, it will be good. Common
non-dialectical men have already this certainty as a result of the
generous vital enthusiasm about the universe with which they are born.
The peculiarity of transcendental philosophy is its sovereign contempt
for merely vital functions like enthusiasm, and its pretension to turn
our simple and immediate trusts and faiths into the form of logically
mediated certainties, to question which would be absurd. But the whole
basis on which Mr. McTaggart's own certainty so solidly rests, settles
down into the one nutshell of an assertion into which he puts Hegel's
gospel, namely, that in every bit of experience and thought, however
finite, the whole of reality (the absolute idea, as Hegel calls it) is
'implicitly present.'

This indeed is Hegel's _vision_, and Hegel thought that the details of
his dialectic proved its truth. But disciples who treat the details of
the proof as unsatisfactory and yet cling to the vision, are surely,
in spite of their pretension to a more rational consciousness, no
better than common men with their enthusiasms or deliberately adopted
faiths. We have ourselves seen some of the weakness of the monistic
proofs. Mr. McTaggart picks plenty of holes of his own in Hegel's
logic, and finally concludes that 'all true philosophy must be
mystical, not indeed in its methods but in its final conclusions,'
which is as much as to say that the rationalistic methods leave us
in the lurch, in spite of all their superiority, and that in the end
vision and faith