Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/286

Rh Panlogism and Alogism are difficult enough in themselves, but how much worse becomes their condition when, as in the “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” of Von Hartmann, either one of them, or a hybrid of the two, is burdened with yet another hypothesis, namely, that the One Being is unconscious, and yet in nature psychical. Founding himself on certain physiological facts, very doubtfully interpreted, on a monstrous perversion of the mathematical theory of probabilities, on an ingenious view of the history of philosophy, on a like ingenious criticism of Kant, Von Hartmann has expounded an ontological doctrine of which, after all, serious thought can make nothing. This unconscious being, existent not for itself, for it is conscious of nothing, nor for others, because all else is a part of it (and, for the rest, nobody ever thought of it before Von Hartmann), shall be the maker and upholder of the universe. Surely all this is a philosophy of round squares, and is not to be taken very seriously.

Of course the previous criticism is absurdly inadequate to the magnitude of the problems involved, and is intended only as the merest sketch, dogmatically stated, of critical objections to certain ontologies. Seeming irreverence, in this hasty style of doing battle, must be pardoned. Only against imperfect metaphysic as such do we war. Critical philosophy holds no theoretical opinion sacred, just as it regards no earnest practical faith as other than sacred. The question is here not yet what we are to believe, but what we can in argument maintain, and what our method of search ought to be. Abso-