Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/204

Rh and intellectualised materialism have alike brought monism to a reductio ad absurdum when they faced those problems of practice which are the touchstone of all philosophy. It was only natural that metaphysics of this order should give way, then, to an agnostic interpretation of the critical principle, and that philosophy should at length undertake a return to Kant, in the hope of some sounder development from his doctrines. We have next to see how this renewed agnosticism, in its aim to be completely rigorous, also comes to self-dismemberment, and supplants itself against its own intent.

In passing thus to Lange, it is not surprising to find him animated by the desire to lay a better foundation for ethics than either pseudo-idealism or materialism has proved able to build. His History of Materialism is not properly a history, but a philosophy buttressed by history, in which, by exhibiting materialism in the utmost possibilities that ages of restatement have been able to give it, he aims to expose its deficiencies exhaustively, and to assign the true weight which its principle and the principle of idealism respectively should have in a rational theory.

There must be sought, Lange begins, some higher standpoint than either materialism or current idealism affords; and this, he is convinced, is to be found in the doctrine of Kant, provided it be rigidly main-