DUALISM 



of the imagination may be called "fiction" in a broad 

 sense — ^hypotheses when they are in science, faith when 

 they belong to religion. However, these imaginative 

 constructions must always take a concrete form. As a 

 fact, the imagination that constructs the ideal world is 

 never content merely to assume its existence, but al- 

 ways proceeds to form an image of it. But these forms 

 of faith have no theoretical value for philosophy if they 

 contradict scientific truth, or profess to be more than 

 provisional hypotheses ; otherwise they may be of prac- 

 tical service, but are theoretically useless. Hence we 

 fully recognize the great ethical and pedagogical value 

 of poetry and myths, but are by no means disposed to 

 give them precedence of empirical knowledge in our 

 quest of the truth. I agree entirely with the excellent 

 criticism of Kant which Albert Lange gives in his History 

 of Materialism (vol. ii.) ; but I am unable to follow him 

 when he transfers his idealism from practical to theo- 

 retical questions, and urges the erroneous theory of 

 knowledge derived from it in opposition to monism and 

 realism. It is true that, as Lange says: 



Kant did not lack the sense for the conception of this intelligi- 

 ble world (as an imaginative world) ; but his whole education 

 and the period in which his mental life developed prevented him 

 from indulging it. As he was denied the liberty of giving a 

 noble form , free from all medieval distortion , to the vast structure 

 of his ideas, his positive philosophj' was never fully developed. 

 His system, with its Janus face, stands at the limit of two ages. 

 He himself, in spite of all the defects of his deductions, is a 

 teacher of the ideal. Schiller especially has grasped with pro- 

 phetic insight the very essence of his teaching, and purified it 

 of its scholastic dross. Kant held that we must only think, 

 not see, the intelligible world; though what he thinks must 

 have objective reality. Schiller has rightly brought the intel- 

 ligible world visibly before us by treating it as a poet, and thus 

 following in the footsteps of Plato, who, in contradiction to his 

 own dialectic, reached his highest thought when he allowed the 

 supersensual to become a thing of sense in the myth. Schiller, 



439 



