Practically a system of metaphysics, with whatever pretensions to pure thought and absolute rationality it may start is always in the end one man's personal vision about the universe, and the "metaphysical craving" often so strong in the young is nothing but the desire to tell the universe what one thinks of it. Of course, the tale may be worth telling if told well.
This describes the "Riddles of the Sphinx" exactly. In it the youthful Schiller tells the universe what he thinks of it and it is told well. But his thoughts have changed in the twenty-five years since this volume was published so that even in its revised form it does not so well express his views as do his later volumes, "Humanism" and "Studies in Humanism", of which revised editions were brought out in 1912.
The doctrine known as Absolute Idealism was, Schiller explains, imported from Germany, "soon after its demise in its native country", for the purpose of counteracting the anti-religious developments of science. But the abstract conception of the Absolute is, in his opinion, of no value to religion or anything else. The pragmatic demand for God is, first, as "a human moral principle of help and justice", and second, as "an aid to the intellectual comprehension of the universe", but the meta-
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