abandons the attempt to solve this problem, it is changed into a theory
of knowledge itself." Here you have a brief recapitulation of the
history of philosophy from Thales to Kant, including the medieval
scholasticism upon which it endeavoured to establish religious beliefs.
But has philosophy no other office to perform, and may not its office be
to reflect upon the tragic sense of life itself, such as we have been
studying it, to formulate this conflict between reason and faith,
between science and religion, and deliberately to perpetuate this
conflict?

Later on Windelband says: "By philosophy in the systematic, not in the
historical, sense, I understand the critical knowledge of values of
universal validity (_allgemeingiltigen Werten_)." But what values are
there of more universal validity than that of the human will seeking
before all else the personal, individual, and concrete immortality of
the soul--or, in other words, the human finality of the Universe--and
that of the human reason denying the rationality and even the
possibility of this desire? What values are there of more universal
validity than the rational or mathematical value and the volitional or
teleological value of the Universe in conflict with one another?

For Windelband, as for Kantians and neo-Kantians in general, there are
only three normative categories, three universal norms--those of the
true or the false, the beautiful or the ugly, and the morally good or
evil. Philosophy is reduced to logics, esthetics, and ethics,
accordingly as it studies science, art, or morality. Another category
remains excluded--namely, that of the pleasing and the unpleasing, or
the agreeable and the disagreeable: in other words, the hedonic. The
hedonic cannot, according to them, pretend to universal validity, it
cannot be normative. "Whosoever throws upon philosophy," wrote
Windelband, "the burden of deciding the question of optimism and
pessimism, whosoever demands that philosophy should pronounce judgement
on the question as to whether the world is more adapted to produce pain
than pleasure, or _vice versa_--such a one, if his attitude is not
merely that of a dilettante, sets himself the fantastic task of finding
an absolute determination in a region in which no reasonable man has
ever looked for one." It remains to be seen, nevertheless, whether this
is as clear as it seems, in the case of a man like myself, who am at the
same time reasonable and yet nothing but