THE SUPREME ALTERNATIVE. 455 



as to supply a complete answer to all our problems. 

 And if this answer bethought unsatisfactory because 

 it is too dependent on ideas, and is true only if our 

 ideas are realized, we may reply that according to 

 the terms of our bond, this is all we undertook to 

 prove. We did not undertake absolutely to predict 

 the facts, but only to discover what would happen 

 if our ideas were valid. And yet it may perhaps 

 afford some consolation to such objectors to be as- 

 sured that the realization of our ideas by reality is 

 by no means a rare or unheard-of fact, inasmuch as 

 every advance of knowledge proves an idea to be a 

 fact.^ 



§ 13. It is not, therefore, any failure to fulfil his 

 promise, nor any defect human science could avoid, 

 that fills the philosopher's heart with apprehension, 

 as he goes forth to his last dread encounter with the 

 Sphinx. It is the consciousness that he can never 

 transcend the supreme alternative of thought, that 

 though he have grasped the truth, truth always leaves 

 him with an if. What though his reasoning be 

 forged, link by link, an adamantine chain of logical 

 necessity, it will yet be hypothetical (ch. iii. §^ 15, 

 17, 18); what though he show what truth must be, 

 if tritth there be, he cannot show that truth there is. 

 The Terror of the Threshold, the Pessimist's fear 

 of the inherent perversity of things (ch. iv. § i), the 

 dread lest the Veil of Truth should conceal, not 

 the loving countenance of a pitying Saviour, but 

 the fiendish grin of a Mokanna, deriding our 

 miseries with malicious glee, or the fantastic 

 nightmare of an insane Absolute, forms a spectre 

 no reasoning can exorcize. And so a revulsion of 

 feeling seizes upon the philosopher in the very hour 

 1 I.e., shows that a thought determination holds of reality. 



