LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 157 



" There breathes through this doctrine of Lange's 

 a strain of tragic resignation. ... A lofty moral 

 pathos speaks out in all that Lange teaches, and in 

 his manner of teaching it." He is like Carlyle, who, 

 gazing upward at the silent stars rolling through 

 the solemn and trackless night, and seeing there 

 the image and type of all existence, could only 

 ejaculate, " Ech, it's a sad sight ! " For him, life 

 has reduced itself to the phenomenon of a phenome- 

 non, to contradictions born of one fundamental con- 

 tradiction, and that an illusion we can never dispel. 

 The professed "new critique of reason" has ended 

 in representing reason as essentially irrational ; the 

 self-harmonious turns out to be a thoroughgoing 

 discord, our "organisation" is disorganisation. 



Neither can all the seeming glow of the " ideal " 

 blind us to the reach of this contradiction into Lange's 

 doctrine of action. The ideal is put forward as an 

 end in itself ; but in reality it is only viewed, and by 

 the consistent agnostic can only be viewed, as a means 

 to suppress weariness of life. So while Lange 

 proclaims duty, his implicit principle is actually 

 pleasure ; he denounces egoism, but cannot sur- 

 mount hedonism ; he declares for the autonomy of 



found it of admirable help in preparing this paper. [I ought now (1899) 

 to add that Dr. (now I'rofessor) Vaihinger seems in the course of 

 years to have receded from his extremer negations, and to have he- 

 come an idealist more after the type of Kant.] 



