It is indeed Hegel's fundamental axiom that actuality is reasonable. But the actuality is not the appearance--the temporary phases--the succession of event: it is the appearance rooted in its essence--the succession concentrated (yet not lost) in its unity. There is room for much so-called irrationality within these ranges. For, when human beings pronounce something irrational, they only mean that their practical intelligence would have adopted other methods to arrive at certain conclusions. They judge, in fact, by their limited understandings and not _ex ordine universi._ Hegel's doctrine is after all only another way of stating the maintenance of the fittest; and it is liable to the v same misconception by those who employ their personal aims as the standards of judgment.
So too there is reason--there is the Idea--in Nature. But it is there only for the artist, the religious man, and the philosopher; and they see it respectively by the eye of genius, by the power of faith, by the thought of reason. They see it from the standpoint of the absolute_--sub specie quadam aeternitatis._ It is therefore a recalcitrant matter in which Nature presents the Idea: or, if recalcitrant suggests a positive opposition, let us say rather a realm in which the Idea fails to come out whole and clear, where unity has to be forced upon and read into the facts. Science, says one writer, is an ideal construction: it implies an abstraction from irregularities and inequalities: it smoothes and sublimates the rough and imperfect material into a more rounded and perfect whole. Its object, which it terms a reality, is a non-sensible, imperceptible reality: what one might as well call an ideality, were it not that here again the popular imagination twists the word into a subjective sense to mean the private and personal ideas of the student.
But the obvious individual reality never quite in its obviousness equals the 'golden mediocrity' of the ideal. Its myriad grapes must be crushed to yield the wine of the spirit.
'It's a lifelong toil till our lump be leavened'
--till the ore be transformed into the fine gold. But the gold is there, and in the great laboratory of _natura_ _naturans_ is the principle and agent of its own purification. 'Nature is made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean'--for nature is spirit in disguise.