The reasoning by which this conclusion is supported is too subtle and complicated to be properly dealt with in a public lecture, and you will thank me for not inviting you to consider it at all.[13] I feel the more free to pass it by now as I think that the cursory account of the absolutistic attitude which I have already given is sufficient for our present purpose, and that my own verdict on the philosophy of the absolute as ’not proven’—­please observe that I go no farther now—­need not be backed by argument at every special point.  Flanking operations are less costly and in some ways more effective than frontal attacks.  Possibly you will yourselves think after hearing my remaining lectures that the alternative of an universe absolutely rational or absolutely irrational is forced and strained, and that a via media exists which some of you may agree with me is to be preferred. Some rationality certainly does characterize our universe; and, weighing one kind with another, we may deem that the incomplete kinds that appear are on the whole as acceptable as the through-and-through sort of rationality on which the monistic systematizers insist.

All the said systematizers who have written since Hegel have owed their inspiration largely to him.  Even when they have found no use for his particular triadic dialectic, they have drawn confidence and courage from his authoritative and conquering tone.  I have said nothing about Hegel in this lecture, so I must repair the omission in the next.

LECTURE III

HEGEL AND HIS METHOD

Directly or indirectly, that strange and powerful genius Hegel has done more to strengthen idealistic pantheism in thoughtful circles than all other influences put together.  I must talk a little about him before drawing my final conclusions about the cogency of the arguments for the absolute.  In no philosophy is the fact that a philosopher’s vision and the technique he uses in proof of it are two different things more palpably evident than in Hegel.  The vision in his case was that of a world in which reason holds all things in solution and accounts for all the irrationality that superficially appears by taking it up as a ‘moment’ into itself.  This vision was so intense in Hegel, and the tone of authority with which he spoke from out of the midst of it was so weighty, that the impression he made has never been effaced.  Once dilated to the scale of the master’s eye, the disciples’ sight could not contract to any lesser prospect.  The technique which Hegel used to prove his vision was the so-called dialectic method, but here his fortune has been quite contrary.  Hardly a recent disciple has felt his particular applications of the method to be satisfactory.  Many have let them drop entirely, treating them rather as a sort of provisional stop-gap, symbolic of what might some day prove possible of execution, but having no literal cogency or value now.  Yet these very same disciples hold to the vision itself as a revelation that can never pass away.  The case is curious and worthy of our study.