Rationalism in general thinks it gets the fulness of truth by turning away from sensation to conception, conception obviously giving the more universal and immutable picture.  Intellectualism in the vicious sense I have already defined as the habit of assuming that a concept excludes from any reality conceived by its means everything not included in the concept’s definition.  I called such intellectualism illegitimate as I found it used in Lotze’s, Royce’s, and Bradley’s proofs of the absolute (which absolute I consequently held to be non-proven by their arguments), and I left off by asserting my own belief that a pluralistic and incompletely integrated universe, describable only by the free use of the word ‘some,’ is a legitimate hypothesis.

Now Hegel himself, in building up his method of double negation, offers the vividest possible example of this vice of intellectualism.  Every idea of a finite thing is of course a concept of that thing and not a concept of anything else.  But Hegel treats this not being a concept of anything else as if it were equivalent to the concept of anything else not being, or in other words as if it were a denial or negation of everything else.  Then, as the other things, thus implicitly contradicted by the thing first conceived, also by the same law contradict it, the pulse of dialectic commences to beat and the famous triads begin to grind out the cosmos.  If any one finds the process here to be a luminous one, he must be left to the illumination, he must remain an undisturbed hegelian.  What others feel as the intolerable ambiguity, verbosity, and unscrupulousness of the master’s way of deducing things, he will probably ascribe—­since divine oracles are notoriously hard to interpret—­to the ‘difficulty’ that habitually accompanies profundity.  For my own part, there seems something grotesque and saugrenu in the pretension of a style so disobedient to the first rules of sound communication between minds, to be the authentic mother-tongue of reason, and to keep step more accurately than any other style does with the absolute’s own ways of thinking.  I do not therefore take Hegel’s technical apparatus seriously at all.  I regard him rather as one of those numerous original seers who can never learn how to articulate.  His would-be coercive logic counts for nothing in my eyes; but that does not in the least impugn the philosophic importance of his conception of the absolute, if we take it merely hypothetically as one of the great types of cosmic vision.

Taken thus hypothetically, I wish to discuss it briefly.  But before doing so I must call your attention to an odd peculiarity in the hegelian procedure.  The peculiarity is one which will come before us again for a final judgment in my seventh lecture, so at present I only note it in passing.  Hegel, you remember, considers that the immediate finite data of experience are ‘untrue’ because they are not their