OF REALITY. 477 



in thought or life, are rarely those who carry it on 

 in the most judicious manner or give the best ex- 

 amples and proofs of its application. Their boldness 

 and enthusiasm leads them into error, but they never- 

 theless conquer in the end. We have in another sphere 

 and more recent times a telling example in Ernest 

 Haeckel's labours in the theory of descent. Who could 

 deny that his " Generelle Morphologic " gave currency 

 to Darwinian ideas and created Darwinism on the 

 Continent, if not also in this country ? but who would 

 look upon this work as anything but a suggestive, yet 

 premature, mise en scene of those ideas ? 



II. 



When trying to define the position which Schelling 

 occupies in the idealistic movement of thought, I ob- 

 served that this is, inter alia, characterised by the fact 

 that he put the problem of reality at the centre of his 

 speculation. The same may be said of Hegel. With 

 him this problem gained even greater importance than 

 it had with his predecessors, through the fact that he 

 gave a distinct, and, to his age, intelligible answer to 

 the question, What is the truly Eeal ? and that he 

 combined with the solution of the problem of Reality 

 that of the problem of Knowledge, which was the central 

 problem in the Kantian philosophy. The answer to the 

 first question was, the Eeal is Spirit ; the answer to the 

 second question is, Knowledge, in the highest sense, is 

 the self-realisation of the Eeal or the Spirit. I must 



