Formally, this scheme of an organism of truth that has already fed as it were on its own liability to death, so that, death once dead for it, there’s no more dying then, is the very fulfilment of the rationalistic aspiration.  That one and only whole, with all its parts involved in it, negating and making one another impossible if abstracted and taken singly, but necessitating and holding one another in place if the whole of them be taken integrally, is the literal ideal sought after; it is the very diagram and picture of that notion of the truth with no outlying alternative, to which nothing can be added, nor from it anything withdrawn, and all variations from which are absurd, which so dominates the human imagination.  Once we have taken in the features of this diagram that so successfully solves the world-old problem, the older ways of proving the necessity of judgments cease to give us satisfaction.  Hegel’s way we think must be the right way.  The true must be essentially the self-reflecting self-contained recurrent, that which secures itself by including its own other and negating it; that makes a spherical system with no loose ends hanging out for foreignness to get a hold upon; that is forever rounded in and closed, not strung along rectilinearly and open at its ends like that universe of simply collective or additive form which Hegel calls the world of the bad infinite, and which is all that empiricism, starting with simply posited single parts and elements, is ever able to attain to.

No one can possibly deny the sublimity of this hegelian conception.  It is surely in the grand style, if there be such a thing as a grand style in philosophy.  For us, however, it remains, so far, a merely formal and diagrammatic conception; for with the actual content of absolute truth, as Hegel materially tries to set it forth, few disciples have been satisfied, and I do not propose to refer at all to the concreter parts of his philosophy.  The main thing now is to grasp the generalized vision, and feel the authority of the abstract scheme of a statement self-secured by involving double negation.  Absolutists who make no use of Hegel’s own technique are really working by his method.  You remember the proofs of the absolute which I instanced in my last lecture, Lotze’s and Royce’s proofs by reductio ad absurdum, to the effect that any smallest connexion rashly supposed in things will logically work out into absolute union, and any minimal disconnexion into absolute disunion,—­these are really arguments framed on the hegelian pattern.  The truth is that which you implicitly affirm in the very attempt to deny it; it is that from which every variation refutes itself by proving self-contradictory.  This is the supreme insight of rationalism, and to-day the best must-be’s of rationalist argumentation are but so many attempts to communicate it to the hearer.

Thus, you see, my last lecture and this lecture make connexion again and we can consider Hegel and the other absolutists to be supporting the same system.  The next point I wish to dwell on is the part played by what I have called vicious intellectualism in this wonderful system’s structure.