Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/285

260 imperfection that we feel in ourselves, and that we see in every dung-heap and sick-room and government on the earth, in every scattered mass of nebulous matter, in every train of meteor-fragments in the heavens — what is this but progress without a goal, blind toil? The world would be, one might think, after an infinity of growth, intensively infinite at every point of its extent. We mortals see no one point in the physical universe where one viewing things as we in this chapter have chosen to do, namely, from outside, might lay his hand and say: Here the ideal is attained.

Yet we should be very far from dreaming of accepting the opposing dogmatic theorem, the antithesis of this sublime Antinomy, namely, “The world is the product of an irrational force. The One is blind.” Schopenhauer undertook the defense of this antithesis, and, in bad logic, as we all know, he somewhat surpassed even that arch blunderer, the universal Will of his own system. This Will, after all, desired a good deal of trouble, and got his wish. But Schopenhauer desired a consistent statement, and, with all his admirable ingenuity and learning, he produced a statement whose inconsistencies have been exposed too often to need much more discussion. No; to the defenders of the alogical hypothesis, as a dogmatic doctrine, it has not yet been given to make out more than the purely negative case that we have stated above. Dogmatic panlogism can be assaulted, with much show of success. The opposite doctrine has not yet been dogmatically maintained without even worse confusion.