oint take in the total
perspective, with all mere possibilities abolished, should there ever
have been anything more than that act? Why duplicate it by the tedious
unrolling, inch by inch, of the foredone reality? No answer seems
possible. On the other hand, if we stipulate only a partial community
of partially independent powers, we see perfectly why no one part
controls the whole view, but each detail must come and be actually
given, before, in any special sense, it can be said to be determined at
all. This is the moral view, the view that gives to other powers the
same freedom it would have itself,--not the ridiculous 'freedom to do
right,' which in my mouth can only mean the freedom to do as _I_ think
right, but the freedom to do as _they_ think right, or wrong either.
After all, what accounts do the nether-most bounds of the universe owe
to me? By what insatiate conceit and lust of intellectual despotism do
I arrogate the right to know their secrets, and from my philosophic
throne to play the only airs they shall march to, as if I were the
Lord's anointed? Is not my knowing them at all a gift and not a right?
And shall it be given before they are given? _Data! gifts!_ something
to be thankful for! It is a gift that we can approach things at all,
and, by means of the time and space of which our minds and they
partake, alter our actions so as to meet them.

There are 'bounds of ord'nance' set for all things, where they must
pause or rue it. 'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for
it, not by it.

{272}

Now, to a mind like Hegel's such pusillanimous twaddle sounds simply
loathsome. Bounds that we can't overpass! Data! facts that say,
"Hands off, till we are given"! possibilities we can't control! a
banquet of which we merely share! Heavens, this is intolerable; such a
world is no world for a philosopher to have to do with. He must have
all or nothing. If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in the
sense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it is rational
at all. It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whose
haphazard sway I will not truckle. But, no! this is not the world.
The world is philosophy's own,--a single block, of which, if she once
get her teeth on any part, the whole shall inevitably become her prey
and feed her all-devouring theoretic maw. Naught shall be but the
necessities she creates and impossibilities; freedom shall mean freedom
to obey her