the same mental attitude which we should have a right to take in case our conclusions harmonised with one another. We must never lose sight of the fact that the two results do not harmonise, and that there must be something wrong somewhere. But we do not know where. And to take any step except this, would imply that we did know where the error lay. If we rejected the one conclusion in favour of the other, or if we rejected both in favour of scepticism, we should thereby assert, in the first case, that there was an error on the one side and not on the other, in the second case that there were errors on both sides. Now, if the case is as it has been stated above, we have no right to make such assertions, for we have been unable to detect errors on either side. All that we can do is to hold to both sides, and to recognise that, till one is refuted, or both are reconciled, our knowledge is in a very unsatisfactory state.
At the same time we shall have to be very careful not to let our dissatisfaction with the conflict, from which we cannot escape, carry us into an either explicit avowal or a tacit acceptance of any form of scepticism. For this would mean more than the mere equipoise of the two lines of agreement. It would involve the entire rejection, at least, of that one which asserts that the universe is completely rational. And, as has been said above, we have no right to reject either side of the contradiction, for no flaw has been found in either.
The position in which we are left appears to be this: If we cannot reject Hegel’s dialectic, our system of knowledge will contain an unsolved contradiction. But that contradiction gives us no more reason for rejecting the Hegelian dialectic than for doing anything else. We are merely left with the conviction that something is fundamentally wrong in knowledge which all looks equally trustworthy. Where to find the error we cannot tell. Such a result is sufficiently unsatisfactory. Is it possible to find a conclusion not quite so negative?
We cannot, as it seems to us at present, deny that both the propositions are true, nor deny that they are contradictory. Yet we know that one must be false, or else that they cannot be contradictory. Is there any reason to hope that the solution lies in the last alternative? This result would be less sceptical and destructive than any other. It would not involve any positive mistake in our previous reasonings, as far as they went, which would be the case if harmony was restored by the discovery that one of the two conclusions was fallacious. It would only mean that we had
