Here again, no detail whatever, only the abstract certainty that whatever the detail may prove to be, it will be good.  Common non-dialectical men have already this certainty as a result of the generous vital enthusiasm about the universe with which they are born.  The peculiarity of transcendental philosophy is its sovereign contempt for merely vital functions like enthusiasm, and its pretension to turn our simple and immediate trusts and faiths into the form of logically mediated certainties, to question which would be absurd.  But the whole basis on which Mr. McTaggart’s own certainty so solidly rests, settles down into the one nutshell of an assertion into which he puts Hegel’s gospel, namely, that in every bit of experience and thought, however finite, the whole of reality (the absolute idea, as Hegel calls it) is ‘implicitly present.’

This indeed is Hegel’s vision, and Hegel thought that the details of his dialectic proved its truth.  But disciples who treat the details of the proof as unsatisfactory and yet cling to the vision, are surely, in spite of their pretension to a more rational consciousness, no better than common men with their enthusiasms or deliberately adopted faiths.  We have ourselves seen some of the weakness of the monistic proofs.  Mr. McTaggart picks plenty of holes of his own in Hegel’s logic, and finally concludes that ’all true philosophy must be mystical, not indeed in its methods but in its final conclusions,’ which is as much as to say that the rationalistic methods leave us in the lurch, in spite of all their superiority, and that in the end vision and faith must eke them out.  But how abstract and thin is here the vision, to say nothing of the faith!  The whole of reality, explicitly absent from our finite experiences, must nevertheless be present in them all implicitly, altho no one of us can ever see how—­the bare word ‘implicit’ here bearing the whole pyramid of the monistic system on its slender point.  Mr. Joachim’s monistic system of truth rests on an even slenderer point.—­I have never doubted,’ he says, ’that universal and timeless truth is a single content or significance, one and whole and complete,’ and he candidly confesses the failure of rationalistic attempts ’to raise this immediate certainty’ to the level of reflective knowledge.  There is, in short, no mediation for him between the Truth in capital letters and all the little ‘lower-case’ truths—­and errors—­which life presents.  The psychological fact that he never has ‘doubted’ is enough.

The whole monistic pyramid, resting on points as thin as these, seems to me to be a machtspruch, a product of will far more than one of reason.  Unity is good, therefore things shall cohere; they shall be one; there shall be categories to make them one, no matter what empirical disjunctions may appear.  In Hegel’s own writings, the shall-be temper is ubiquitous and towering; it overrides verbal and logical resistances alike.  Hegel’s error, as Professor Royce so well says, ‘lay not in introducing logic into passion,’ as some people charge, ’but in conceiving the logic of passion as the only logic....  He is [thus] suggestive,’ Royce says, ’but never final.  His system as a system has crumbled, but his vital comprehension of our life remains forever.’[1]