Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/262

238 Natural laws only bind such tilings together, in the fashion that Kant so prettily explained, in case the phenomena to be bound together are once for all there. Why, given sea waves and star clusters and city streets, we should be bound to think them as in some sort of interconnection, Kant has told us. Only no such laws of nature can explain why there shoidd be the phenomena there that are thus to conform to law. This is capricious. This is due to our common but irrational nature. The world of the true idealism isn’t so much the world of the rational and divine self, as it is the world of the deep unreason that lies at the very basis of all of our natures, of all our common selfhood. Why should there be any world at all for us? Isn’t it just because we are all actually minded to see one? And isn’t this being minded to see a world as ultimately and brutally unreasonable a fact as you could name? Let us find for this fact, then, a name not so exalted as Fichte’s high-sounding speech would love. Let us call this ultimate nature of ours, which forces us all alike to see a woild of phenomena in the show forms of space and time, simply our own deep common Will. Let us drop the divine name for it. Will, merely as such, isn’t precisely a rational thing; it’s capricious. It wills because it does will; and if it wills in us all to be of such nature as to see just these stars and houses, then see them we must, and there is the end of it.

Thus stated, you have an irrationalism on an idealistic basis, a doctrine that may be summed up in three propositions; —

1. The world has existence only as we see it.

2. What facts we are to see can only be learned from experience, and cannot be found a priori through any absurd transcendental deductions of the so-called essence of any absolute spirit.

3. The deepest ground, however, for all these seen facts, and for the community of our various visible worlds,