in their
relation to phenomena? If many of them are correlatives they are not
all so, and the relations which subsist between them vary from a mere
association up to a necessary connexion. Nor is it easy to determine
how far the unknown element affects the known, whether, for example, new
discoveries may not one day supersede our most elementary notions about
nature. To a certain extent all our knowledge is conditional upon
what may be known in future ages of the world. We must admit this
hypothetical element, which we cannot get rid of by an assumption that
we have already discovered the method to which all philosophy must
conform. Hegel is right in preferring the concrete to the abstract,
in setting actuality before possibility, in excluding from the
philosopher's vocabulary the word 'inconceivable.' But he is too well
satisfied with his own system ever to consider the effect of what is
unknown on the element which is known. To the Hegelian all things are
plain and clear, while he who is outside the charmed circle is in
the mire of ignorance and 'logical impurity': he who is within is
omniscient, or at least has all the elements of knowledge under his
hand.

Hegelianism may be said to be a transcendental defence of the world
as it is. There is no room for aspiration and no need of any: 'What is
actual is rational, what is rational is actual.' But a good man will not
readily acquiesce in this aphorism. He knows of course that all things
proceed according to law whether for good or evil. But when he sees
the misery and ignorance of mankind he is convinced that without any
interruption of the uniformity of nature the condition of the world may
be indefinitely improved by human effort. There is also an adaptation
of persons to times and countries, but this is very far from being the
fulfilment of their higher natures. The man of the seventeenth century
is unfitted for the eighteenth, and the man of the eighteenth for the
nineteenth, and most of us would be out of place in the world of a
hundred years hence. But all higher minds are much more akin than
they are different: genius is of all ages, and there is perhaps more
uniformity in excellence than in mediocrity. The sublimer intelligences
of mankind--Plato, Dante, Sir Thomas More--meet in a higher sphere
above the ordinary ways of men; they understand one another from
afar, notwithstanding the interval which separates them. They are 'the
spectators of all time and of al