e privat-docenten and younger professors of Germany, and whose
older champions are all passing off the stage, has found among us so
zealous and able a set of propagandists that to-day it may really be
reckoned one of the most powerful influences of the time in the higher
walks of thought. And there is no doubt that, as a movement of
reaction against the traditional British empiricism, the hegelian
influence represents expansion and freedom, and is doing service of a
certain kind. Such service, however, ought not to make us blindly
indulgent. Hegel's philosophy mingles mountain-loads of corruption
with its scanty merits, and must, now that it has become
quasi-official, make ready to defend itself as well as to attack
others. It is with no hope of converting independent thinkers, but
rather with the sole aspiration of showing some chance youthful
disciple that there _is_ another point of view in philosophy that I
fire this skirmisher's shot, which may, I hope, soon be followed by
somebody else's heavier musketry.

{264}

The point of view I have in mind will become clearer if I begin with a
few preparatory remarks on the motives and difficulties of
philosophizing in general.

To show that the real is identical with the ideal may roughly be set
down as the mainspring of philosophic activity. The atomic and
mechanical conception of the world is as ideal from the point of view
of some of our faculties as the teleological one is from the point of
view of others. In the realm of every ideal we can begin anywhere and
roam over the field, each term passing us to its neighbor, each member
calling for the next, and our reason rejoicing in its glad activity.
Where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong together by inward
kinship, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers
of reaction, to see is to approve and to understand.

Much of the real seems at the first blush to follow a different law.
The parts seem, as Hegel has said, to be shot out of a pistol at us.
Each asserts itself as a simple brute fact, uncalled for by the rest,
which, so far as we can see, might even make a better system without
it. Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous--are the adjectives by
which we are tempted to describe it. And yet from out the bosom of it
a partial ideality constantly arises which keeps alive our aspiration
that the whole may some day be construed in ideal form. Not only do
the materials lend th