Page:Riddles of the Sphinx (1891).djvu/17

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ANALYSIS OF CONTENTS.
  1. page
  2. so perverse that the environment changes more rapidly

    than adaptation takes place.

    § 20. The Ideal of Goodness. The moral value of life would only aggravate its misery. But goodness is as impossible as happiness: depends on the proportion between the moral ideal and actual conduct. If then the moral ideal is capable of infinite growth, it is unattainable, and we fall further and further short of it.

    § 21. The Ideal of Beauty. The sense of beauty the least developed; its conflict with the other ideals; makes us sensitive to the ugliness of ordinary life.

    § 22. The Ideal of Knowledge. It, like the rest, requires a fixed environment, and so baffled by the Becoming of the world. 23. But the success of Pessimism

    may be due to the rejection of metaphysics.

    BOOK II.

  3. Chapter V.
    Reconstruction
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    133
  4. § 1. Result so far to prove that metaphysics alone can

    answer Pessimism, though, § 2, even that will only be an alternative. No direct answer to Scepticism or Pessimism possible. But if philosophy can solve all the problems of life, it may be esteemed successful. The three great characteristics of life to be accounted for. § 3. The one indisputable fact and basis of philosophy, viz., the reality of the Self. Attacked in vain by Hume, and by Kant (§ 4). § 5. The Self as the concrete union of thought and feeling rises superior to the sceptical attack on knowledge, and suggests that the ideals of thought are nearer to truth than sensible reality, and that the change of the real may be due to its striving after the ideal. § 6. The necessary anthropomorphism of all thought; choice only between good and bad. § 7. The bad either false or confused. § 8. The confused anthropomorphism of science, and, § 9. the ideal of true anthropomorphism: to show how all things are of

    like nature with the mind.
  5. Chapter VI.
    THE METHOD OF PHILOSOPHY
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    148
  6. § 1. Epistemological and psychological methods must

    be rejected, as they do not take the mind in its historical context. Hence, § 2, the method must be either meta-