Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/36

Rh knot in the way that promises most for the untying of its meshes. This way is, of course, very ancient. It is the way of Plato, and, in a sense, already the way of his Master. It is, in a different sense, the way of Kant. If you view philosophy in this fashion, you subordinate the study of the World as Fact to a reflection upon the World as Idea. Begin by accepting, upon faith and tradition, the mere brute Reality of the World as Fact, and there you are, sunk deep in an ocean of mysteries. The further you then proceed in the study of that world, the longer seems the way to God or to clearness, unless you from the start carry with you some sort of faith, perhaps a very blind and immediate faith, that God reigns, or that the facts in themselves are somehow clear. The World as Fact surprises you with all sorts of strange contrasts. Now it reveals to you, in the mechanics and physics of the stars or in the processes of living beings, vast realms of marvellous reasonableness; now it bewilders you, in the endless diversities of natural facts, by a chaos of unintelligible fragments and of scattered events; now it lifts up your heart with wondrous glimpses of ineffable goodness; and now it arouses your wrath by frightful signs of cruelty and baseness. Conceive it as a realm for pure scientific theory; and, so far as your knowledge reaches, it is full at once of the show of a noble order, and of hints of a vain chance. On the other hand, conceive it as a realm of values, attempt to estimate its worth, and it baffles you with caprices, like a charming and yet hopelessly wayward child, or like a bad fairy. That is the world of brute natural fact as you, with your present form of consciousness, are forced to observe it, if you try to get any