COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



life's arduous toil, such a system as the logic 

 of contradictories above described, it is evident 

 that there must be something incurably vicious 

 in the method upon which he has proceeded. 

 Yet that method is the subjective method in 

 its absolute purity. Starting with the assump- 

 tion that whatever is in the idea is in the fact, 

 it makes but a short step to the assumption 

 that whatever is in the word is in the fact. It 

 mistakes words for ideas, and ideas for facts. 

 Hobbes has somewhere said that "words are 

 the counters of wise men, but the money of 

 fools." They are certainly the money of He- 

 gelism. That philosophy is built up of propo- 

 sitions which are verbally faultless, but which 

 correspond to no reality, which are in the like- 

 ness of nothing existing or, in the true sense 

 of the word, conceivable, in either the hea- 

 vens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters 

 under the earth. The contempt of Hegel 

 for those deluded creatures, like Newton, who 

 have spent their time in investigating facts, is 

 both amusing and instructive. Far be it from 

 HegeFs logic that it should stoop to look at 

 facts. It makes a statement which is verbally 

 perfect, and if the facts do not confirm it, so 

 much the worse for the facts. Goethe, in one 

 of his conversations with Eckermann, tells a 

 pithy story about the founding of St. Peters- 

 burg. The Czar wished it to be situated on 



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