158 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



the will, but his doctrine forces a strict heteronomy. 

 He stands professedly for a stern socialism, the 

 sovereignty of the Whole as the organisation of 

 the ideal, but in his theory there lurks an utter 

 social atomism : so many individual fantasies, so 

 many systems of the ideal ; and, for each, the sacred 

 "duty" of meeting the antagonism of the countless 

 other private illusions with becoming fortitude and 

 resignation. 



Beyond evasion, so long as conscious existence is, 

 as Lange holds, shut in to mere appearance, its 

 ghostliness cannot but betray itself in all its move- 

 ments. If with Hartmann the universe becomes a 

 colossal and shadowy Blind Tom, endowed with 

 a clairvoyance whose infallible "intelligence" dis- 

 plays itself in striking through the reach of aeons 

 with fatal precision at its own existence, and, 

 with Diihring, a gigantic Automaton Chess-Player, 

 matched against itself, moving with balanced " charm " 

 to the checkmating of its own game, with Lange 

 it fades into a phantom Panorama, in front of which 

 sits man, a forlorn imbecile maundering over a 

 Perhaps behind it, and shaking the flimsy rattle of 

 the " ideal " in the fatuous persuasion that he is 

 stilling the irrepressible sob in his heart. Let it 

 do its best, agnostic philosophy cannot make of 

 life anything but essential delirium, — with the 

 shapes of its phantasmagory distinct enough, no 



