revealed these to us. I do not think thus that

'the civilisation of humanity, taken as a whole, remains equable and constant."1 I think, on the contrary, it has fallen and risen in the course of history; but, on the whole, risen. I do not further believe that human progress is "circular," as has been maintained-coming back merely to the point whence it set out, again to evolve itself endlessly and fruitlessly. I sympathise with the view that all things are working to an end, a consummation which will be a perfection. And this perfection will consist in a fuller development and in a harmony, which we can only faintly depict in outline. But an end, I believe, there is. What that end is, how it is to be reached, are to be known only by scanning closely the successive steps of order and progress in the world of nature and thought. It is that to which the successive stages point, so far as we can discern, which is or shows the end of the whole. does not seem to be anything like successive absorption-one period being taken up and annulled, and thereby marked as completed in process, so that you can say of the succeeding, It is better 1 Ritter, vol. i. p. 25.

There

always than what was before. All that you can say is, There is fuller power, freer life, a better moral advance, than anything hitherto met with. Take it all round, the world is better as it grows older-higher on the line of progress than it was before. Let us pray that this course of advancement may not be broken or interrupted by violence from without, by inroad of barbarian, by war and conquests, or any form of the brutal, -be it the selfishness, the sordidness, the avarice, the worldliness of society, which are quite as deadly as any hand of Goth or Visigoth. The abolition or annulment of a dualistic force in history, which interrupts its course and throws it back on its beginning, is a mere dream. The individual of a given time has always to contend with this force, however the speculative philosopher may ideally view it. It may be that the advance-social, moral, spiritual-is not actually spread over the whole surface of the planet, or even of a given society or nation; but if the higher thought be only in the mind and heart of certain individuals of the race, there is a true advance, and always hope for the diffusion of the thought and life,—for one thing that marks grow

ing and higher life is the impulse to communicate the diviner element to others, even at the cost of self-sacrifice.

The one thing that should not, either in reason or morality, be tolerated is the position, not simply tacked on to, but inseparable from, the evanishing formula of trinitarian development of the Idea,—the position that because there is progress in opinions and systems, it is through the untruth (non-reality) of the preceding moment or dogma. Each undermines itself-vanishes in another, becomes another-in the course of time. It is nothing to be told that the Idea takes up all in the end. No man has ever seen the Idea or ever will rise to its totality. It is as much the incognisable as the God of the direst agnosticism. Man may put it in words, but he cannot know it as absolutely timeless. His sphere is in time, and his point of view the moment of time. He is destined thus to the sphere of the endlessly untrue. What he contemplates is a long continuous suicide, the material of which is furnished by the Idea-the successive ideas. This is his sphere now and for ever. It is this relation, this dissolving between

things or ideas which he knows, and which is thus the real for him. In plain words, there never is either a true or real for the creature of time. The passing is all that is, just as much as the flux of Heraclitus. The terms are not, the relation of evanishing and reappearing is. This is all. The Idea is a metaphorical personality, that inhabits the sphere of the impossible of attainment, conjured up to give a plausible substantiality to the whole. No succeeding system of truth can ever be made out of untruth. If every moment be essentially untrue, and only its relation to something else be true,— which again is equally untrue, unless in relation to something else, there is no truth at all. The whole is a mere passing phantasmagoria. A complete system, as far as this can be achieved, is not made up of a fusion of untruths, but of an eclecticism of truths. And unless there be truth, reality, things in the moment, stable and permanent for us,-the conceit of an Absolute Idea, over, above, and in all, is a mere dream— the dream of a dream.

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II.-HEGEL'S VIEW.

IT should be noted regarding the history of philosophy that it is only, so to speak, a fragment of the history of man and the world. We may say regarding it that it is a history of the attempts made in different and successive times by reflective men to account for the fact (or being) and the cause of events and things. Philosophy is at least an effort after a fuller consciousness of the nature and meaning of things man and the world than is to be found in the observation of their actual happening. But the things that exist and happen are thus intimately connected with philosophy, or the reflection on their nature and ends. And the reflective or philosophical effort cannot either create or control these things on which it speculates. The philosopher is the spectator,