CHAPTER IX.
THE WORLD OF POSTULATES.
Das beständige Wetzen der Messer ist langweilig, wenn man Nichts zu schneiden vorhat. — Lotze, Metaphysik.
What’s so false as truth is
False to thee?
If the reader has become thoroughly weary of the
world of doubt, we are only glad of the fact. Armed
with a gemiine philosophy, a man may indeed go
back to that world, and find in it an expression of
ideal truth in empirical form. We hope to have
such a right ourselves in time; but, without a well
thought out philosophy, a man venturing into the
world of empirical facts to find there any religious
significance actually discovers himself to be in a nest
of hornets; and he deserves as much. We desired
to bring the reader to feel this with us; else our
own prudent flight from that world to another might
seem to him unnecessary. Now we are ready to
come nearer to our former question. What right
has any one to assume that empirical external world
at all as having any absolute truth? “O thou that
hast troubled us,” we may say, “what art thou at
bottom more than our own assumption?” What
right has that external world to be the sole region
