66 INTELLIGENCE AND MORALS 



Hegel to attempt to fill in the empty reason of 

 Kant with the concrete contents of history. The 

 voice sounded like the voice of Aristotle, Thomas 

 of Aquino, and Spinoza translated into Swabian 

 German ; but the hands were as the hands of Mon 

 tesquieu, Herder, Condorcet, and the rising his 

 torical school. The outcome was the assertion that 

 history is reason, and reason is history: the actual 

 is rational, the rational is the actual. It gave the 

 pleasant appearance (which Hegel did not strenu 

 ously discourage) of being specifically an idealiza 

 tion of the Prussian nation, and incidentally a sys 

 tematized apologetic for the universe at large. 

 But in intellectual and practical effect, it lifted the 

 idea of process above that of fixed origins and fixed 

 ends, and presented the social and moral order, as 

 well as the intellectual, as a scene of becoming, and 

 it located reason somewhere within the struggles of 

 life. 



Unstable equilibrium, rapid fermentation, and a 

 succession of explosive reports are thus the chief 

 notes of modern ethics. Scepticism and tradition 

 alism, empiricism and rationalism, crude natural 

 isms and all-embracing idealisms, flourish side by 

 side all the more flourish, one suspects, because 

 side by side. Spencer exults because natural science 

 reveals that a rapid transit system of evolution is 

 carrying us automatically to the goal of perfect 

 man in perfect society; and his English idealistic 



