be its logical consequence, has landed us in what seems to be a glaring contradiction to the facts. Is it not inevitable that we must reject a system which leads us to such a result?
Before deciding on such a course, however, it might be wise to see if we can really escape from the difficulty in such a way. If the same problem, or one of like nature, proves equally insoluble in any possible system, we may be forced to admit the existence of an incompleteness in our philosophy, but we shall no longer have any reason to reject one system in favour of another. Now, besides the theory which has brought us into this trouble — the theory that reality is fundamentally rational — there are, it would seem, three other possibilities. Reality may be fundamentally irrational. It may be the product of two independent principles of rationality and irrationality. Or it may be the work of some principle to which rationality and irrationahty are equally indifferent — some blind fate, or mechanical chance.
These possibilities may be taken as exhausting the case. It is true that, on Hegelian principles, a fifth alternative has sometimes to be added, when we are considering the different combinations in which two predicates may be asserted or denied of a subject. We may say that it is also possible that the two predicates should be combined in a higher unity. This would leave it scarcely correct to say, without qualification, that either is asserted or either denied of the subject. But synthesis is itself a process of reasoning, and unites its two terms by a category in which we recognise the nature of each extreme as a subordinate moment, which is harmonised with the other. The harmony involves that, wherever a synthesis is possible, reason is supreme. And so, if the truth were to be found in a synthesis of the rational and the irrational, that synthesis would itself be rational — re.solving, as it would, the whole universe into a unity expressible by thought. Thus we should have come round again to Hegel’s position that the world is fundamentally rational.
We need not spend much time over the supposition that the world is fundamentally irrational — not merely regardless of reason, but contrary to reason. To begin with, such a hypothesis refutes itself — first, because it would explain the world by the fact that it was completely incapable of explanation, and, secondly, because the conception of complete irrationality is self-contradictory. The completely irrational could never be known to exist, for even to say a thing exists implies its determination by at least one predicate, and
