“There breathes through this doctrine of Lange’s a strain of tragic resignation. . . . A lofty moral pathos speaks out in all that Lange teaches, and in his manner of teaching it.” He is like Carlyle, who, gazing upward at the silent stars rolling through the solemn and trackless night, and seeing there the image and type of all existence, could only ejaculate, “Ech, it’s a sad sight!” For him, life has reduced itself to the phenomenon of a phenomenon, to contradictions born of one fundamental contradiction, and that an illusion we can never dispel. The professed “new critique of reason” has ended in representing reason as essentially irrational; the self-harmonious turns out to be a thoroughgoing discord, our “organisation” is disorganisation.
Neither can all the seeming glow of the “ideal” blind us to the reach of this contradiction into Lange’s doctrine of action. The ideal is put forward as an end in itself; but in reality it is only viewed, and by the consistent agnostic can only be viewed, as a means to suppress weariness of life. So while Lange proclaims duty, his implicit principle is actually pleasure; he denounces egoism, but cannot surmount hedonism; he declares for the autonomy of
