adroit preservation, too, of the play of the ideal in the world of fact is evidence of quick susceptibility to imagination, and to its necessity and value in the conduct of life. In this respect, Lange reminds one of Stuart Mill, though with far greater ethical fervour, as Mill appears in his Three Essays on Religion. Like Mill, too, he will prove in the end to have been a man of feeling, even more than of intellect, determined in his judgments by the wants of the heart more than by the lights of the head. We cannot long conceal it from ourselves that his belief in the ethical energy of his “Ideal” is without foundation in his theoretic view ; that to talk of duty based on what we know to be pure fiction of the fantasy is a hollow mockery; that the only reason which agnosticism can put forward for acting under the ideal is the anodyne this offers for the otherwise insupportable pain of existence.
Nor are clear indications wanting that Lange forebodes the spectral nature of even this excuse — that he divines the foregone failure of a remedy applied in defiance of our knowledge that its essence is illusion. Vaihinger, himself a thinker who pushes the agnostic view to an extreme almost deserving the Scotch epithet of fey, says truly enough:[1]
- ↑ Dr. Hans Vaihinger: Hartmann, Dühring und Lange: ein kritischer Essay. Iserlohn, 1876. A book full of interest and of acute criticism, though marked by some agnostic extravagances. I have found it of admirable help in preparing this paper. [I ought now (1899) to add that Dr. (now Professor) Vaihinger seems in the course of years to have receded from his extremer negations, and to have become an idealist more after the type of Kant.]
