anything at all about this one sole thing, far less to get all there
might be to be said about it into a single statement, no scientific
proposition can be more than 'partially' true, and unhappily _we_ do not
know what alterations would be required to make our 'partial' truths
quite true. Naturally enough Kant's allegation that mathematical first
principles are so self-contradictory that you can rigidly demonstrate
mathematical propositions which contradict each other was grist to the
Hegelian mill. That our notions of space, time, the infinitely great,
the infinitely little, are all a jumble of contradictions was steadily
repeated by the Hegelian philosophers, and indeed the mathematicians
were accustomed to state their own principles so loosely and confusedly
that there was a great deal of excuse for the suspicion that the fault
lay with Mathematics and not with the mathematicians.

It is clear that such a philosophy ought to end in unqualified
Agnosticism. The Hegelians, to be sure, made merry over the Unknowable
of Mr. Spencer, but their own Absolute is really just the Unknowable in
its 'Sunday best'. Nothing that we can say about anything which is not
the Absolute is really true, because there really _is_ nothing but the
Absolute to speak about, and nothing that we can say about the Absolute
is quite true either, because we can never succeed in saying itself of
it. Mr. Bradley, far the most eminent of the philosophers of the
Absolute, has made persistent and brilliant attempts to show that, in
spite of this, we do know enough to be sure that our own mind is more
like the Absolute than a cray-fish, and a cray-fish more like it than a
crystal. But when all is said, though I owe more to Mr. Bradley than I
can ever acknowledge adequately, I cannot help feeling that there are
two men in Mr. Bradley, a great constructive thinker and a subtle
destructive critic, and that the destructive Hyde is perpetually pulling
to pieces all that the constructive Jekyll has built up. Of course it is