Page:Philosophical Review Volume 22.djvu/141

No. 2.] force it to reduce all reality to dead blocks that can be counted, arranged in order, and measured. There is nothing to hinder it from doing justice to the dynamic, living, flowing, galloping phase of experience, to that phase about which the new philosophers are so much concerned. Rationalism is not fatally bound to the mathematical-physical method of procedure and static absolutes, nor prevented by any presuppositions from reaching the conception of a dynamic and developing universe. Hegel assumed such a world and made reason move to keep step with it, or, rather, he could not hinder reason from keeping step, for, in his opinion, rational thought is just such a dynamic process as the world. No Romanticist can be more pronounced in his distrust of mere intelligence than was he of the Verstand, and more insistent on avoiding its pit-falls. But he was not, on that account, ready to throw thinking overboard and to take on faith and intuition as pilots; reason itself provided the remedy for the short-sightedness of the discursive understanding as he conceived it: die Wunden die die Vernunft schlägt heilt sie auch. But whether or not Hegel succeeded in his attempt to reproduce in thought the dynamic cosmic process, human reason does not demand a static world for its satisfaction. Nor must we, to be rational, conceive reality, in analogy with the mind of the logician, as a fleshless and bloodless skeleton of categories, or reduce it to a passionless contemplative God. Rationalism has as its aim the interpretation of experience as it finds it; it seeks to understand it, to render it intelligible, to put certain questions to the given and to answer them. It does not seek to spin reality out of a priori truths, to construct a conceptual system independently of experience, to shut its eyes and stop up its ears and just think the world out in the dark, as it were. No rationalist has ever done such a thing; if anyone has ever pretended to be able to create a philosophy blind-folded, we may safely class him among the tribe of mediums, clairvoyants, and leger-de-main artists. Rationalism proposes to look experience squarely in the face, to see things as they are and then to understand them in the only sense in which human beings can understand them, that is, in their manifold relations to one another. It will not reject