AND UNION OF THOUGHT AND FEELING. 1 43 



ideals of our thought ? Why should not our thought 

 represent a higher plane of truth than the intrinsi- 

 cally unknowable Becoming of nature ? why should 

 not the definlteness and permanence of our Ideas 

 approximate more closely to the ultimate constitu- 

 tion of things than the interminable changes of 

 phenomena ? Why should not the changes of the 

 Real, instead of being a proof of the impossibility of 

 the Ideal, mark rather its efforts to approximate to 

 the Ideal ? 



And if so, the persistent fiction by which we 

 interpreted Becoming by the categories of our 

 thought, will have been prompted by a sounder in- 

 stinct than we suspected, and will be justified by the 

 issue : It Is not that our thought fails to penetrate 

 into the nature of things, but that the nature of 

 things is as yet too imperfect to come up to the 

 ideals of our thought ; it is the Real that is tainted 

 with unreality, because it cannot express the per- 

 fection of the ideal. 



And from this point of view a meaning may be 

 suggested even for the discrepancy which Scepti- 

 cism made so much of, between our thought and the 

 appearance of the reality. Might not the very 

 extravao^ance of the contradiction between what is 

 seen and what is conceived, taken in connection 

 with the Inseparable conjunction of thought and 

 feeling, be intended to lead us by a certain path to 

 what is inferred, to raise us from phenomenal 

 appearances and the strife of inadequate categories, 

 to a still higher plane of transcendent reality, capable 

 of resolving all our doubts and of reconciling fact 

 and knowledge ? 



This suggestion is one which may hereafter be 

 verified ; at present it must appear an arbitrary 



