acter of the notion could
not fail to please a mind monstrous even in its native {274} Germany,
where mental excess is endemic. Richard, for a moment brought to bay,
is himself again. He vaults into the saddle, and from that time his
career is that of a philosophic desperado,--one series of outrages upon
the chastity of thought.

And can we not ourselves sympathize with his mood in some degree? The
old receipts of squeezing the thistle and taking the bull by the horns
have many applications. An evil frankly accepted loses half its sting
and all its terror. The Stoics had their cheap and easy way of dealing
with evil. _Call_ your woes goods, they said; refuse to _call_ your
lost blessings by that name,--and you are happy. So of the
unintelligibilities: call them means of intelligibility, and what
further do you require? There is even a more legitimate excuse than
that. In the exceedingness of the facts of life over our formulas lies
a standing temptation at certain times to give up trying to say
anything adequate about them, and to take refuge in wild and whirling
words which but confess our impotence before their ineffability. Thus
Baron Bunsen writes to his wife: "Nothing is near but the far; nothing
true but the highest; nothing credible but the inconceivable; nothing
so real as the impossible; nothing clear but the deepest; nothing so
visible as the invisible; and no life is there but through death." Of
these ecstatic moments the _credo quia impossibile_ is the classical
expression. Hegel's originality lies in his making their mood
permanent and sacramental, and authorized to supersede all others,--not
as a mystical bath and refuge for feeling when tired reason sickens of
her intellectual responsibilities (thank Heaven! that bath is always
ready), but as the very form of intellectual responsibility itself.

{275}

And now after this long introduction, let me trace some of Hegel's ways
of applying his discovery. His system resembles a mouse-trap, in which
if you once pass the door you may be lost forever. Safety lies in not
entering. Hegelians have anointed, so to speak, the entrance with
various considerations which, stated in an abstract form, are so
plausible as to slide us unresistingly and almost unwittingly through
the fatal arch. It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that it
is salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving that
its premises are rotten. I shall accordi