It may be said that the best of philosophers can do no more than give us _a_ System and _an_ Absolute. Undoubtedly that is so. Each philosophy is from one point of view a strictly individualist performance. It is not, in one way, _the_ Absolute truth, which it promises or hopes to disclose. The truth is seen through one being's eyes; and his 'measure,' as Protagoras might have said, is upon it. Yet it is still _the_ Absolute, as seen through those eyes; it is still in a marvellous measure that truth, that absolute truth, 'which the actual generations garble.' For both the artist and the philosopher, if they create, only re-create or imitate; if they are makers, they are still more seers: and their power of 'imitation' and of 'vision' rests on their capacity to de-individualise themselves of their eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, and to bring out only that in them which is the common truth of all essential thought and vision. In proportion as they purge themselves of this _evil_ subjectivity are they true artists and philosophers. They are both--and so, too, is the religious genius--idealists: but the test of the value of their idealism is its power of including and synthetising reality. That is their verification: that, and not their concord with this or that opinion, this or that theory of individuals or of groups. Not that the views either of groups or individuals are unimportant. But often they are but frozen lumps in the stream, temporary islands which have lost their fluidity, and which imagine themselves continental and permanent.
Truth, then, reasoned truth, harmonious experience, absolute system, is the theme of philosophy. Or, in Hegelian language, its theme is the Truth, and that Truth, God. Not alum, an aggregate, or even what is ordinarily styled a system, of truths: but the one and yet diverse pulse of truth, which beats through all: the supreme point of view in which all the parts and differences, occasionally standing out as if independent, sink into their due relation and are seen in their right proportion.
[Footnote 1: Schelling, iv. 231, 235, 236.]
[Footnote 3: 'In things thou seest nought but the misplaced images of that absolute unity; and even in knowledge, so far as it is a relative unity, thou seest nought but an image--only drawn amiss in another direction--of that absolute cognition, in which being is as little determined by thought as thought by being.']