ABSOLUTISM AND EMPIRICISM. 283 stop and reflect upon what you are about, you lay bare the exact point at issue between common-sense and the " through-and- through " school. What, in fact, is the logic of these abstract systems? It is, as we said above : If any Member, then the Whole System ; if not the Whole System, then Nothing. But how can Logic possibly do anything more with these two hypotheses than combine them into the single disjunctive proposition " Either this Whole Sys- tem, just as it stands, or Nothing at all ". Is not that disjunction the ultimate word of Logic in the matter, and can any disjunction, as such, resolve it-self'"} It may be that Mr. Haldane sees how one horn, the concept of the Whole System, carries real existence with it. But if he has been as unsuccessful as I in assimilating the Hegelian re-editings of the Anselmian proof, he will have to say thai though Logic may determine what the system must be, -if it is, something else than Logic must tell us that it is. Mr. Hal- dane in this case would probably consciously, or unconsciously, make an appeal to Fact : the disjunction 12 decided, since nobody can dispute that now, as a matter of fact, something, and not nothing, is. We must therefore, he would probably say, go on to admit the Whole System in the desiderated sense. Is not then the validity of the Anselmian proof the nucleus of the whole question between Logic and Fact ? Ought not the efforts of Mr. Haldane and his friends to be principally devoted to its elucida- tion ? Is it not the real door of separation between Empiricism and Eationalism ? And if the Eationalists leave that door for a moment off its hinges, can any power keep that abstract, opaque, unmediated, external, irrational, and irresponsible monster, known to the vulgar as bare Fact, from getting in and contaminating the whole sanctuary with his presence ? Can anything prevent Faust from changing "Am Anfang war das Wort" into "Am Anfang war die That " ? Nothing in earth or heaven. Only the Anselmian proof can keep Fact out of philosophy. The question, " Shall Fact be recognised as an ultimate principle ? " is the whole issue between the Eationalists and the Empiricism of vulgar thought. Of course, if so recognised, Fact sets a limit to the " through - and-through " character of the world's rationality. That ra- tionality might then mediate between all the members of our conception of the world, but not between the conception itself and reality. Eeality would have to be given, not by Eeason, but by Fact. Fact holds out blankly, brutally and blindly, against that universal deliquescence of everything into logical relations which the Absolutist Logic demands, and it is the only thing that does hold out. Hence the ire of the Absolutist Logic hence its non-recognition, its ' cutting ' of Fact. The reasons it gives for the 'cutting' are that Fact is speechless, a mere word for the negation of thought, a vacuous unknowability,
