Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I ANTIMETAPHYSIC AND NATURALISM § i. The Decay Of Idealism. The interval between Kant and Hegel was as brief as that between Plato and Aristotle. When we reflect how many centuries of philosophical thought had to elapse before the gulf was bridged between the doctrine of the Idea and that of the Pure Act, we shall not be astonished that post-Hegelian philosophers without exception failed not only to understand the Hegelian system, but even to regain the road towards it which Fichte and Schelling had traced out. Those who derived their inspiration most directly from Hegel either confined themselves to the function of interpreters and commentators, in which they did not display any great insight, or, once having mastered the simple mechanism of the dialectic, gave themselves up to fantastic and irresponsible system-building. It would be too naive an error to suppose that these harmless system-builders and literal commentators deserve either the praise or the blame of having discredited idealism and caused the naturalistic and positivist reaction. The truth is that the philosophy of these " epigoni" was itself an expression of that very naturalism and positivism which seemed to rise up threateningly against it. Those who employed the dialectic upon ready-made concepts, and whose chief interest lay in rearranging, with as much aid as they were capable of deriving from Hegel, the mass of heterogeneous material which they took over from the empirical sciences, were much nearer than they believed to the new world-builders who were appearing, armed with the weapons of induction and generalization. There waslittle to choose between the intoxication of facts and the intoxication of formulae, once the facts had themselves, under the clumsy hand of an unskilful operator, t...