156 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



adroit preservation, too, of the play of the ideal 

 in the world of fact is evidence of quick suscepti- 

 bility to imagination, and to its necessity and value 

 in the conduct of life. In this respect, Lange 

 reminds one of Stuart Mill, though with far greater 

 ethical fervour, as Mill appears in his Three Essays 

 on Religion. Like Mill, too, he will prove in the 

 end to have been a man of feeling, even more than 

 of intellect, determined in his judgments by the 

 wants of the heart more than by the lights of the 

 head. We cannot long conceal it from ourselves 

 that his belief in the ethical energy of his "Ideal" 

 is without foundation in his theoretic view ; that 

 to talk of duty based on what we knozv to be pure 

 fiction of the fantasy is a hollow mockery ; that the 

 only reason which agnosticism can put forward for 

 acting under the ideal is the anodyne this offers 

 for the otherwise insupportable pain of existence. 



Nor are clear indications wanting that Lange 

 forebodes the spectral nature of even this excuse — 

 that he divines the foregone failure of a remedy 

 applied in defiance of our knowledge that its essence 

 is illusion. Vaihingcr, himself a thinker who pushes 

 the agnostic view to an extreme almost deserving 

 the Scotch epithet of fey, says truly enough : ^ 



^ Dr. Hans Vaihingcr : Ilartmann, Duhritig tind Lange : fin krit- 

 ischer Essay. Iserlolm, 1S76. A book full of interest and of acute 

 criticism, thougii marked by some agnostic extravagances. I have 



