1S2 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [ft. i 



went on. Tins was what Hegelism would be if carried out 

 practically and transferred from the world of supra-sensibles 

 to the world of phenomena. When a fact is unwelcome, 

 just take the principle of contradiction, and cut it down. 

 Hegel will not hear of verification ; he looks with unutter- 

 able scorn upon such men as Bacon for insisting upon the 

 necessity of it. And we need not therefore be surprised 

 when we find him proclaiming the philosophic superiority 

 of the Ptolemaic astronomy over the Copernican, for the 

 subjective reason that it consorts better with the dignity of 

 man that he should occupy the central point of the universe ! 

 This opens to us a new point of view. Hegel is vir- 

 tually a pre-Copernican. For him modern science and 

 its methods are practically non-existent. His philosophy 

 was born too late. It belongs to the twelfth century 

 rather than to the nineteenth. He is a schoolman reared 

 out of season. Here, I believe, we have the key to Hegel's 

 position. 



The realistic tendency — the disposition to mistake words 

 for things — is a vice inherent in all ordinary thinking. It is 

 a vice from which every thinker who would arrive at truth 

 must begin by freeing himself. In all ages, men have fought 

 over words, without waiting to know what the words really 

 signified. Even great thinkers do not always escape the 

 temptation. Mr. Mill, for example, speaks of Caesar's " over- 

 throwing a free government," as if Caesar had been a con- 

 temporary of Pitt. He reasons solely on the strength of the 

 word "free," forgetting that the "free government" over- 

 thrown by Caesar was in reality a detestable mixture of 

 despotism and anarchy. Words indeed are the money of all 

 of us, until we learn, by severe discipline, to regard them 

 merely as counters. But it was in the Middle Ages that 

 realism was most uncurbed. In those days men maintained, 

 with sober faces, that because we talk about Man in the 

 abstract, there is an actually existing thing called Man, 



