In Hegel we have also an example of a thinker who approaches metaphysics along the epistemological way. But Hegel is a much more thoroughgoing thinker than Kant. He starts no doubt with the Kantian traditions in mind and his first great task, the development of his logic, is formal. But Hegel is not a formal thinker, in the sense that he divorces content and form. Thought is formal. This Hegel is not afraid to confess, but it is also ontological. At the same time there are no outlying realities, like the Kantian things in themselves. How is this? Are we to have the spectacle of a lapse into Spinoza? Our appre hensions are ungrounded, for Hegel asserts calmly that the form creates the content. Hegel asserts the identity of thought and real ity in the sense that the real is, and is only, what the thought thinks it to be. It is the real by virtue of the thought thinking it to be. This sounds like a dangerous kind of subjectivity, till we learn that by thought Hegel means, not my thought or yours, as simply m or your intellectual function, but the thou t that is universal and that thinks the un thought So much for Hegel's epistemology. In Hegel's system epistemology and metaphysics are sim ply two aspects of the same thing. In episte mology we have the system logically conceived; that is in view of the process which the finite thought of the individual must pass through in order to apprehend it; whereas in the meta physics we have the system presented in its unity as a self-completing whole. Epistemolog ically the dialectic is the movement by which results are achieved; metaphysically it is the Divine Spirit of the system as a whole. Error is accounted for precisely by the disparity be tween individual and universal thought.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the metaphysics of the past century is the strong voluntaristic or emotionalistic trend which is to be observed among writers of the most dif ferent philosophical ancestry. Schopenhauer, •though in many ways a follower of the Kantian tradition, interpreted the course of events as the manifestation of a which per forms the functions of the Kantian thing-in itself. This will manifests itself in man as will in the ordinary sense, while in matter it is seen as force. A view which displays an analogous voluntaristic or rather activistic trend, though in every other respect most unlike that of Schopenhauer, is pragmatism, the chief expo nent of which was the American philosopher, William James. This view states that the truth of a theory or the reality of a system is not merely determined but constituted by what is in some sense the ease with which it can be ap plied and the value of the results of this appli cation. A similar position is that of Henri Bergson, who maintains that the analysis of science yields us only half-truths, while the real nature of the world is shown to us by in tuition, which exhibits it to us as the working of a certain vital impulse.
There is no metaphysics at the present time which can lay claim to a general acceptance.
The 19th century domination of all philosophy by the memories of Hegel and Kant is passing away, and the tendency of worshiping these great men as philosophical demigods is lid, nigh extinct. Their followers, numerog though they are, must dispute their realm vitt the modern critical adherents of the Britik tradition, armed with modern logic, mathemat ics and science, and with the pragmatisto-Berg soman tendency.
Before closing this article,. let there be a -word of caution to the reader against thr facile metaphysical criticism which depends m labels. We have already seen that the fine oi cleavage between idealism, or the view that of things are either thoughts or their thinker, aid realism, which asserts the existence of oche entities, does nit of itself mark one of the great philosophical dichotomies; Berkeley, the first typical British idealist, and Leibnitz. the idealist of the Continent, both, fall into the epistemological difficulties which are generate accepted as characteristic of realism, in that the problem of the relation between the laver and the known remains in what is essential the Lockean or Cartesian stage. The distinc tion between spiritualism, which is almost a synonym of idealism, is that it regards matter •as constituted of psychical material, and mate rialism, which analyzes mind in terms of mat ter, is similarly not a touchstone to the rm.: nature of the views which it denies. The a* really satisfactory method of metaphysical criti cism is by the careful individual analysis of each philosophical system according to its can concepts. See EPISTEMOLOGY; PHILOSOPHT: PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY OF ; and the articles ce the individual philosophers mentioned.
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