418 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



to the real essence and meaning of Life. Now, such 

 is still more the case if we deal with the phenomena 

 and workings of the spirit, if we attempt to trace the 

 hidden lines of the inwoven spiritual or Divine Order 

 with the same accuracy and confidence with which we 

 have learnt to trace those of the natural order of 

 things. Here, even less than in the region of the 

 biologist, does uniformity obtain ; our formulae and 

 analogies forsake us ; every spiritual phenomenon, like 

 every living thing, is unique ; the unexpected, the mar- 

 vellous nay, even the miraculous and seemingly 

 irrational continually happens, and will seem to many 

 to denote the very essence and character of the 

 Spiritual. This is what naturally follows from the 

 twofold order, the dualism, which the theological view 

 of things upholds and which it considers to be in- 

 herent in the constitution, in the nature and position 

 of us human beings who do not, as Lotze somewhere 

 says, dwell at the root of the tree of knowledge, nor 

 survey the whole of it from an outside position, but 

 are modestly lodged somewhere in its branches. To 

 infer from this that the whole scheme is irrational 

 would be legitimate only if we limit rationality to 

 those trains of reasoning which are common to formal 

 logic and fully applicable and fruitful only in an 

 abstract geometrical world. But if we extend the 

 meaning of the term Eeason so that it embraces also 

 the spiritual and transcendent, then, even what may 

 now appear to be miraculous, paradoxical, or irrational, 

 will dissolve in that higher reasonableness which was 

 the ideal of Hegel's system, and which, though never 



