dissonance of our nature, with the whole array of its derivative discords, serve when once mastered to enrich the diapason of life and raise it to orchestral fulness and harmony. The metaphysical passion, born of this illusion, is indeed worthless for knowledge, but it is precious for experience. In its immature stages, it burns to transcend the limits of experience, in the vain hope of bringing back knowledge of that mysterious Beyond; and so long as it has continued in this delusion, it has been the bane of the world. But when once freed from the error, it will become, with religion and poetry, the benign solvent of the ills of life. It springs from the same source as poetry and religion, and is, indeed, the strongest and most precious jet of the fountain. For it is the work of the imagination, in fact the highest and noblest work; while imagination comes from the illusion of the noumenon, and without this would not exist.
Although, then, we must hold fast by the actual for knowledge, for all the inspiration of life we must take refuge in the ideal. Phenomenal and noumenal — the actual and the ideal — together, and only together, make up the total of experience, of our vital Whole. In not less than this Whole are we to live, —
Im Ganzen, Guten, Treuen resolut zu leben, —
and the good and the true are to be sought for in the
