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consistency, he should have stuck to the proposition which cost him his place at Jena, that God is nothing but the abstract law of duty. Similarly, it seems to me, consistency commanded Kant to draw the same positive conclusions as to a real ground from his analysis of the cognitive reason, which he drew from the freedom of the will and the moral imperative. Be this as it may, Will, with Kant, is the practical reason, and it is in the neglect of the implications of that term and of the fundamental ground of Kant's recognition of the primacy of the practical reason, that what seem to me the monstrous errors of much recent German philosophy of the will have their beginning. Hegel's dictum, "The Real is the Rational," went through the same distorted and mischievous development, the pessimism which struck root in it forgetting that with Hegel the Real is not the actual. There is no freedom, no moral obligation, for anything but an intelligence; freewill postulates reason, is practical or active reason. It was the freedom of the will, which involves intelligence, the consciousness and rationality of the force, from which Kant made all his deductions and in which he found his principle of certitude. But the stress which he laid upon the practical reason as opposed to the cognitive, and the unfortunate distinction by which he declined to trust the validity of his own logic outside the moral sphere, led to a rapid overemphasizing of the practical in reason, till at last

Schopenhauer and Hartmann drop the reason altogether, making the practical without the reason, pure will, or unconscious force, the first principle, and so give up precisely that factor in the will in which Kant found his principle of certitude. The process is simple enough, though fraught with such momentous consequences, and when it is finished it bringeth forth death. Hegel alone, of all the followers of Kant, grasped the problem on both sides, and developed the idea of will as practical reason in an adequate manner.

The law of duty does certainly contain infallible implications of the transcendental and yield a principle of certitude; but it does this no more infallibly, if indeed more directly and plainly, than the law of cognition and the law of the objective world, and it does it only as the law of the will is seen to be the freedom or intelligence of the will: an unconscious conscience is a monstrosity, a contradiction of terms. "Love is ever the beginning of knowledge, as fire is of light," says Carlyle, and it is true, just as true- and no more -as that knowledge is the beginning of love. Again, involving the principle more distinctly, "He that has done nothing has known nothing." But he that knows nothing can do no duty; the act performed unconsciously is not a moral act. Take the best possible recognition of the primacy of the practical reason, the words of Christ, "He that doeth the will shall know the doctrine." They

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are of no significance save as addressed to a will that is conscious of good and evil and wills well. All this means that reason is simultaneously cognitive and practical. Right acting is as essential to right knowing as right knowing to right acting. The reason that permits itself to become simply passive and cognitive has put in abeyance that function or violated that law of itself, whereby alone larger or true knowledge is possible. When Carlyle says, "Do one thing, for the first time in thy life do a thing; a new light will rise to thee on the doing of all things whatsoever," he is speaking in accordance with the truest philosophy, which sees that in action, not in passive cognition, lie life and acquirement. No abstract metaphysics, no philosophy which does not spring at once from the understanding and the character, is a living philosophy. But when the principle of duty is insulated, and we are told to do the "duty which lies nearest "with that emphasis which comes to mean that we are to do small duties and stop thinking, reason, which is as truly speculative as practical and knows that the moral suffers when the speculative is slighted, rebels and in due time. restores the equilibrium in its own way. "Hopefulness, in some shape or other," says Mr. Morley, "is an indispensable mark of the most valuable thought, and we may be sure that what omits the future is no adequate nor stable solution of the present." A too prolonged and monotonous glo

rification of silence, renunciation and the rest ends finally in the fatalism which cancels that very factor in the will, by reason of which alone the will began to be made a first principle. "Could you ever spell-bind man into a scholar merely," says Carlyle, "so that he had nothing to discover, to correct; could you ever establish a theory of the universe that were entire, unimprovable, and which needed only to be got by heart; man then were spiritually defunct. The species we now name man had ceased to exist." That is true; but a one-sided emphasis of will brings us to the same result. Every system which makes pure intellect its first principle, like Spinozism, and every system which, like Schopenhauer's, makes pure will its first principle, must run alike into a fatalism which admits of no positive freedom, and consequently, as it seems to me, of no adequate or consistent ethics. No competent, no efficient answer can be given to the question, What ought I to do, which does not indicate at least some promising quarter in which to urge the questions, What can I know, and What may I hope.

VII.

A one-sided emphasizing of duty as the only key to the great mystery leads, I say, to fatalism, to a philosophy of force; and the connection between Carlyle's glorification of renunciation and his glori

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fication of force, such as both are, is not far to seek. That Carlyle never glorifies mere force, brute force, I have already, I trust, sufficiently shown. "In all, even the rudest communities," he says, man never yields himself wholly to brute force, but always to moral greatness; thus the universal title of respect, from the Oriental sheik, from the sachem of the Red Indians, down to our English Sir, implies only that he whom we mean to honor is our senior." And I shall show why it was impossible for Carlyle to draw any fatalistic conclusions. But we have to consider first the ground of a second line of thought in Carlyle which, uncorrected or isolated, tends to pessimism and which pessimism itself sedulously cultivates. This line of thought finds its completest expression, as I have already intimated, in the essay, Characteristics, written, it is important to observe, three years before Sartor Resartus, with its too narrow emphasis of duty and renunciation, in which fatalism also so easily roots itself. The opening sentence of this famous essay will be well remembered: "The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick." This is repeated in every possible form, with reference to every sphere of life: “The beginning of inquiry is disease;" "life itself is a disease, a working incited by suffering;" "the truly strong mind is unacquainted with its strength;" "genius is ever a secret to itself;" "of the wrong we are always conscious, of the right never ;