naturalism of the eighteenth century with its crass ignorance of the epistemological problem. Scientific intellectualism, however, after vainly striving to express the highest manifestations of life and consciousness by the aid of its formulas, is forced to stop short at the limits already defined by the genius of Kant. The “Ignorabimus” of Du Bois-Reymond, the Unknowable of the philosopher of First Principles, are the most explicit confession of the inability of that method to solve the problems of most vital interest to the mind of man.
3. Causes of the Reaction from Intellectualism. — Could thought rest easy in this complacent agnosticism? Could it silence the ever-questioning voice within? There were two ways of escaping this intolerable situation: either to turn to the other functions of the mind for the solution of the problem which had baffled the intellect, or to eliminate the problem altogether, by proving it to be due to faulty perspective and to a false conception of science and of the value of scientific theories. Both ways have been tried; on the one hand, by a return to the moralism of Fichte and the aestheticism of the romanticists, into which the rebellious genius of Nietzsche had breathed new life, the will, as the creative source of all values and of unfettered aesthetic intuition, is exalted above the intelligence; while, on the other, the bases of the mechanical conception and of its chief instruments — geometrical intuition and mathematical calculation — are subjected to a searching examination. This analysis, to which men of science themselves were impelled by the discovery of the new principles of energy, and by meta-geometrical conceptions, resulted in stress being laid upon the active work of the mind in the construction of scientific laws and theories, and has therefore contributed to the triumph of that fine of philosophic thought which holds that the fullest revelation of reality is to be found in the aesthetic point of view, and in the practical functions of consciousness. In this way speculative
