110 DOGMATISM AND EVOLUTION 



his philosophy is the most magnificent that the mind of man ever 

 conceived: on the one hand, to exhibit in a complete outline the 

 system of concepts by which all thought is organized; and on 

 the other hand to transform the chief results of ancient and mod- 

 ern science into a thought-universe, wherein all should be in- 

 terrelated by a necessity as absolute as that of pure thought itself. 

 If the dialectic which he professed had included the full par- 

 ticularity of experience, it would have amounted to an oracle 

 of prophetic omniscience. 



But while the acceptance of the existing irrational saves ab- 

 solute idealism from relapsing into a mere charlatanism, this is 

 only at the expense of admitting an irreconcilable contradiction 

 into its theory of actuality. On the one hand, the irrational 

 aspect of the phenomenon is condemned as mere untruth; but, 

 on the other hand, the actual, as compared with this untruth, is 

 itself a mere negative, equally untrue. If history fails to square 

 with thought, so much the worse for history but also so much 

 the worse for thought. For its relation to the merely historical 

 is an external relation, which in no wise affects its intrinsic sig- 

 nificance. But because it stands in an external relation, the 

 actual is not the actual, but a mere phenomenon. 



Thus the theory of the essentiality of relations refutes itself 

 in very much the same fashion as the dogmatic theory of their 

 externality and for a similar reason. Each is valid as a descrip- 

 tion, not of any real human thought, but of a one-sidedly idealized 

 thought. For the old rationalism, the improvement of the under- 

 standing consisted essentially in the analysis of concepts ; and its 

 ideal was definition in simple terms. For the new rationalism, 

 the improvement consists essentially in the enrichment of con- 

 cepts ; and its ideal is the all-inclusive, self-supporting Idea. Per- 

 haps it is too much to say that either ideal is intrinsically self- 

 contradictory. But as applied to the explanation of human ex- 

 perience, each is alike absolutely futile. The plain fact of the 

 matter is that expanding knowledge means, on the one hand, 

 the transformation of external relations into essential relations, and, 



