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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY required its culmination. Therefore, it was impossible to resist the historical striving for the proper appreciation of the far-reaching theoretical value of scientific discoveries in their entirety with the object of weaving them into a conprehensive System of philosophy. To disown the materialist tendency of its birth, modern philosophy launched upon the wild career of idealism which was raised to a giddy height by Hegel. In his cagerness to vindicate the basic principle of true philosophy the primal unity of things-Hegel destroyed modern classical Idealism. Without a dualist conception of the Universe-matter and spirit idealist philosophy is not possible. The monist conception must be either materialist, or be lost in the incxtricable wilderness of solipsism or nihilism. If the original unity is reduced to a spiritual existence, the phenomenal world must be declared to be a hallucination. For, matter can never evolve out of pure spirit, except with the intervention of omnipotence which knows no law. With the postulate of such intervention, religion is restored to the throne of authority, and philosophy must accept a humble space at the foot of the throne. Besides, spirit itself cannot exist without being subordinated to the limitation of space, in which case it would cease to be what it claims to be. Since in the age of science and positive knowledge mankind cannot possibly believe that the grand process of the evolution of the Universe is a bad dream, 284
