the will, but his doctrine forces a strict heteronomy. He stands professedly for a stern socialism, the sovereignty of the Whole as the organisation of the ideal, but in his theory there lurks an utter social atomism: so many individual fantasies, so many systems of the ideal; and, for each, the sacred “duty” of meeting the antagonism of the countless other private illusions with becoming fortitude and resignation.
Beyond evasion, so long as conscious existence is, as Lange holds, shut in to mere appearance, its ghostliness cannot but betray itself in all its movements. If with Hartmann the universe becomes a colossal and shadowy Blind Tom, endowed with a clairvoyance whose infallible “intelligence” displays itself in striking through the reach of aeons with fatal precision at its own existence, and, with Dühring, a gigantic Automaton Chess-Player, matched against itself, moving with balanced “charm” to the checkmating of its own game, with Lange it fades into a phantom Panorama, in front of which sits man, a forlorn imbecile maundering over a Perhaps behind it, and shaking the flimsy rattle of the “ideal” in the fatuous persuasion that he is stilling the irrepressible sob in his heart. Let it do its best, agnostic philosophy cannot make of life anything but essential delirium, — with the shapes of its phantasmagory distinct enough, no
