will, ideal and actual shall be one: she, and I as her
champion, will be satisfied on no lower terms.

The insolence of sway, the _hubris_ on which gods take vengeance, is in
temporal and spiritual matters usually admitted to be a vice. A
Bonaparte and a Philip II. are called monsters. But when an
_intellect_ is found insatiate enough to declare that all existence
must bend the knee to its requirements, we do not call its owner a
monster, but a philosophic prophet. May not this be all wrong? Is
there any one of our functions exempted from the common lot of
liability to excess? And where everything else must be contented with
its part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shod
over the whole?

I confess I can see no _a priori_ reason for the exception. He who
claims it must be judged by the {273} consequences of his acts, and by
them alone. Let Hegel then confront the universe with his claim, and
see how he can make the two match.

The universe absolutely refuses to let him travel without jolt. Time,
space, and his ego are continuous; so are degrees of heat, shades of
light and color, and a few other serial things; so too do potatoes call
for salt, and cranberries for sugar, in the taste of one who knows what
salt and sugar are. But on the whole there is nought to soften the
shock of surprise to his intelligence, as it passes from one quality of
being to another. Light is not heat, heat is not light; and to him who
holds the one the other is not given till it give itself. Real being
comes moreover and goes from any concept at its own sweet will, with no
permission asked of the conceiver. In despair must Hegel lift vain
hands of imprecation; and since he will take nothing but the whole, he
must throw away even the part he might retain, and call the nature of
things an _absolute_ muddle and incoherence.

But, hark! What wondrous strain is this that steals upon his ear?
Incoherence itself, may it not be the very sort of coherence I require?
Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency? Is not
jolt passage? Is friction other than a kind of lubrication? Is not a
chasm a filling?--a queer kind of filling, but a filling still. Why
seek for a glue to hold things together when their very falling apart
is the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemed to
disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the
problem stands solved. The paradoxical char