hopeless oblivion. The yearnings of her offspring, imparted to them by her “Cosmic Emotion,” Nature does not share. She brings them forth, “to laugh and weep, to suffer and rejoice” for a season, then to pass to the Abyss, whereto she also, with her latest and highest, too surely is speeding.
Life upon such terms is essentially worthless, let it be painted in what bewitching colours it may. The resistless drift of such a theory is either to despair, as in the case of the frank pessimism of a Hartmann, or else to illusions of reconstructing the future in behalf of capricious desire. We cannot hope for the abiding: let us then turn to the satisfactions of the hour! In effect, the professed hedonism of Dühring’s theory is at the last pure egoism. Covering the horror in the depths of life with an optimistic gloze upon the surface, Actualism can have no final precept but to cultivate the Whole so far, and only so far, as it may be means to the greatest sum of individual enjoyment: therefore, “whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is neither wisdom nor device nor knowledge in the grave — and thither thou goest.”
III
We have now seen monism, in two of its most strongly contrasted forms, undergo dissolution by the inner necessities of its own logic. Pseudo-idealism
