# The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Reality and "Idealism"

DISCUSSIONS.
REALITY AND "IDEALISM."
The readers of Mr. Ritchie's papers will have learnt by this time that they may expect to be entertained with a clear account of his views, neatly phrased and intelligibly presented, and not disdainful of an occasional touch of humor. And in these respects they will have not been disappointed by his brilliant disquisition on — What is reality? — in the May number of the Philosophical Review. But if they sought fresh light on one of the most puzzling and fundamental of philosophic problems, it is to be feared that they were not equally well satisfied. Mr. Ritchie's paper is polemical rather than investigatory, and he seems more concerned to make dialectical points against his adversaries than to probe his subject to the bottom. And as his adversaries' views are very various, and often have little in common but their disagreement with Mr. Ritchie's, and as, moreover, they are not stated or definitely referred to, the total effect is somewhat confusing. Nor is the confusion improved by the way in which Mr. Ritchie discusses some two or three different questions about reality in the same breath. The justification in his mind for this procedure evidently lies in the fact that they all offer a basis for objections to his own views, which he would, perhaps, not object to have called Neo-Hegelian. But this does not constitute any intrinsic kinship between the views he criticises, and his discussion would have gained largely, if he had added to his classification of the various sorts of reality a classification of the various questions that may be raised about it. It would be too much, perhaps, to expect Mr. Ritchie to excel the rest of his school as much in substance as he does in style, but it seems evident that he has, as little as they, kept clear of the Hegelian confusion of epistemology and metaphysics, to which Professor Seth has of late drawn so much attention. There are at least four questions, which Mr. Ritchie's paper trenches upon. They are —
I. How do we know that there is any reality at all, or how do we come to assert an external world?
II. What is reality at the beginning of inquiry, i.e. what is the primary datum to be explained?
III. How is it to be explained by what criteria do we inquire into reality?
IV. What does reality turn out to be after inquiry?
​Of these, I and III seem to be epistemological, while II is psychological, and IV plainly metaphysical. Mr. Ritchie does not seem to distinguish II from III, attributes his answer to III without more ado to IV, and refers to I only at the end, by way of meeting a logical objection to his view of IV. This confusion is shown also in his method of proof. His real purpose is to establish certain metaphysical views as to the nature of ultimate reality, but he treats his subject for the most part, as if it were an epistemological inquiry into the criteria of reality, and when, after establishing his metaphysical view of reality to his satisfaction, he is confronted (p. 281) by the logical impossibility of identifying thought with its object, he suddenly throws us back upon the primary subjectivity of all experience. And all this without a hint of a μεταβάσις εἰς ἆλλο γένος. The connection is no doubt clear enough to Mr. Ritchie's mind, if, as must be supposed, he follows T. H. Green in his fearful and wonderful leap from the fact that all phenomena appear to some individual self to the conclusion that they are, therefore, appearances to a universal self; but he might at least have warned us that his opponents have repeatedly declared their inability to compass such saltatory exercises, and regard the two halves of the argument as belonging respectively to epistemology and to metaphysics, and the transition from the one to the other as a paralogism.
If, however, we refuse to take this Greenian salto mortale, it is evident that the first question must be settled before any of the rest can arise at all. For, as Professor Seth has so well pointed out, realism and idealism mean very different things according as they are taken in an epistemological or a metaphysical sense, and "it is possible to be epistemologically a strenuous realist and an idealist in the metaphysical sense of the term" (Philosophical Review, p. 142). Nay, "it is only in virtue of epistemological realism that we can avoid scepticism, and so much as begin our journey towards metaphysical idealism." If, then, epistemological idealism is solipsism and "twin brother to scepticism," it must be surmounted before the nature of reality can be discussed. If it is not surmounted—cadit quaestio—it becomes futile to discuss whether the real is one or many, whether its criterion is consistency or what, if there is no objectivity at all. Mr. Ritchie has, of course, a perfect right to call a halt here, and to refuse to discuss anything further until his opponents have successfully emerged from the clutches of subjective realism. But once they have been permitted to escape, once he has conceded the objectivity of the phenomena which form the content of consciousness, he is not entitled to revert to the prior question. In other words, the discussion of the question—What is reality?—presupposes a settlement of the question—Is there reality?—in the affirmative. It is only when reality has been ​admitted to exist that we can begin to distinguish the real from the unreal, and to enumerate the different sorts and criteria of each.
It is necessary in the next place to put the primitive datum explicandum in the proper light. The primary psychological fact is that everything that is is real, and that the burden of proof lies on those who deny that anything is real. Nor does Mr. Ritchie dispute this, though he minimizes its importance, and apparently fails to see that reality in this sense rests on a totally different footing from all others. For it is the primary fact which all the rest are more or less complete theories to explain, and to which they must be referred in order to test their validity. If they prove capable of explaining what they set out to explain, we may reach a loftier view of reality, which will transfigure our primary datum for us, but which even so cannot be considered in abstraction from its basis; if they do not, the other 'senses of reality' are worthless. For their work is hypothetical and derivative, and if the conditions under which we ascribed reality to these interpreters of reality are not fulfilled, their raison d'être has vanished. But reality survives — even though its inscrutable flux of phenomena should laugh to scorn the attempts at comprehending it which it provokes.
But this unique position of primary reality Mr. Ritchie quite fails to appreciate. Hence it is on the basis of an insufficient recognition of the psychological data that he proposes to consider what reality is. This question is plainly an ontological one, but Mr. Ritchie treats it as if it were epistemological, and = 'How do we know a phenomenon to be (ultimately) real?' I.e. he substitutes for the ontological inquiry into the ratio essendi of reality an epistemological inquiry into its ratio cognoscendi or the criterion of reality, and then unhesitatingly attributes to his results a metaphysical validity. Yet he seems quite unaware that ​such a method, even if successful, would be defective and inadequate. Even at its best, even if it could be shown that reality could be known only as a coherent system of thought-relations, it would not necessarily follow that reality was nothing more, and he would not necessarily have proved anything but the impotence of his thought to grasp reality, by reducing his symbolical expressions for reality to absurdity and contradiction. Thus his proofs cannot prove what he desires, and his refutations only recoil upon his method.
But it may be shown also that his criterion is not valid. He suggests (p. 267) a triple test of rationality, a triple basis for the metaphysical assertion that reality is thought, (1) "The agreement between the inferences drawn from the experience of our different senses; (2) the agreement between the judgments of different persons; (3) the harmony of present experience with the results of their and our previous experience, constitute between them the test of reality." It is to be feared that "between them" they fall very far short of giving a reliable test of reality.
(1) The first is open to objection as a matter of fact. It is doubtful how far the testimonies of the various senses really corroborate one another, and how far they are not rather incommensurable and referred to the same 'thing' for reasons of practical convenience. As Dr. Schwarz (Das Wahrnehmungs problem) has asked, are after-images and overtones, which regularly accompany sights and sounds, to be esteemed unreal because we generally find it convenient to neglect them? And yet it is hard to say to what data of touch they correspond. Again, what can this criterion make of cases of hypersesthesia of one sense, or of an occasional activity of some special sensitiveness ? Are they to be rejected because they necessarily lie beyond confirmation by the other senses? As far as this criterion goes, there is nothing to prevent a real thing from contravening it, and an 'unreal' thing from conforming to it. Is "Pepper's ghost" unreal because it cannot be touched? Or is a hallucination affecting several senses to be esteemed real?
(2) The second criterion is no better than the first. So Mr. Ritchie 'smells a rat,' in the case of his hypothetical mouse (p. 267), and limits its value by stipulating that B, C, D, and E (who do not see it) should have good eyesight. But how is it to be established that A (who does see it) does not considerably surpass them in the delicacy of his senses? In this difficulty, Mr. Ritchie proposes to call in expert opinion in the shape of "a hungry cat." (What scorn he would pour on such an appeal to the lower animals if it were a question of establishing the objectivity of an apparition!) Very good. But how if the cat side with the minority? It is to be hoped that Mr. Ritchie will prefer science to democracy, and the authoritative judgment of Athanasius and the cat ​against the rest of the world! If he does not, he might work out an amusing theory making the Referendum the ultimate test of reality. That, at least, would be a definite method of utilizing the experience of others, such as is at present lacking. We act quite inconsistently in sometimes submitting to the superior delicacy of the expert's senses, and sometimes rejecting it. A room full of unmusical or inartistic people would hardly dispute about tones or colors with a single musician or painter, but an assembly of non-sensitives would probably deny that Macbeth saw a ghost (though who more qualified than Macbeth to see the ghost of Banquo?). The color-blind, perhaps because they are in a minority, do not dispute the objectivity of colors they cannot see, but upon what logical principle should we be less forbearing towards those who claim to see the ultra-violet and infra-red rays of the spectrum, or the luminosity of a magnetic field? — In short, just as the excluding value of non- conformity was impaired in the first case by the possibility of genuine hyperaesthesia in the individual, so in the second it is impaired by the possibility of collective hypersesthesia. And just as in the first case conformity did not exclude error, owing to the possibility of complex hallucination, so it fails in the second, owing to the possibility of collective hallucination.
(3) The third criterion at first seems more valuable — until we recollect that every new fact and every new experience is in some degree out of harmony with and contradictory of our previous experience. Would it not be strange, then, to allow our own inexperience, and the stupidity of our ancestors to exercise an absolute censorship over the growth of knowledge? Besides, it so happens that in most cases when "universal experience" is appealed to, its voice is self-contradictory. (What right have we, e.g. to reject countless traditions in order to prove that miracles are "contrary to experience"?)
But perhaps Mr. Ritchie does not contend that any one of his criteria is singly sufficient as a test of reality and proposes to employ them collectively. But if so, should he not show some probability that they will always, or even normally, tend in the same direction? And even if they did, that would establish, not the collective theoretic certainty of criteria, each of which was individually fallible, much less a necessary basis for metaphysical inferences, but only a sort of practical probability, which it might be convenient to act upon. Thus the boasted rationality of the real reduces itself to this: upon Mr. Ritchie's own showing rationality is not an ultimate test, but resolvable into the three criteria he mentions, and in the end their value turns out to be practical!
Yet it may be that humbling the pretensions of this pseudo-rationality does good service in drawing attention to the commonest and most ​influential of the practical tests of reality, which may be said to have underlain and guided the development of all the rest. It lies in the fact emphasized by Professor James in his excellent chapter on the perception of reality (Psych. II, 295) that "that is adjudged real which has intimate relation to our emotional and active life," i.e. practical value. It is this criterion which has constituted the objective world of ordinary men, by excluding from it the world of dreams, hallucinations, and the transient though normal 'illusions of the senses.' It is this which accounts for the superior reality so often ascribed to feelings, especially to pleasure and pain, which Mr. Ritchie mentions (pp. 268-9). It is this which absorbs into it Mr. Ritchie's fifth or "ethical" sense of reality. It is this, lastly, which has moulded the whole development of the intellect, and so pervades all Mr. Ritchie's criteria and reduces them to dependence upon it. Hence if we are to speak of any 'main (derivative) sense of reality' at all, it must certainly be conceded to Professor James that "whatever things have intimate and continuous connection with my life, are things of whose reality I cannot doubt."
And though there can be no doubt of the practical importance of this criterion, there may be much about its speculative value. The history of the practical struggle which has evolved us and our minds seems to offer but slender guarantees that our faculties should have been fitted for, and our energies directed towards, those aspects of reality which are of the greatest theoretic importance, and hence arguments from practical or moral necessity, universal desires, and the like, do not perhaps yield the safest approach to the ultimate reality of things.
And not only must it be said that Mr. Ritchie's tests are not, properly speaking, rational at all, but it must be pointed out that he actually shrinks from mentioning in this place the test of rationality in its simplest and severest shape, viz. that of conformity to the necessary laws of our thought. The omission is surprising, and one would fain ascribe it to the perception that it would have been too palpable a begging of the issue to have made conformity with the laws of thought the test of reality in an argument designed to show that reality ultimately lay in the determinations of our thought. Or can it be due to the fact that the chief characteristic of reality is its Becoming, and that Becoming and its defiance of the law of Contradiction is what our thought has never been able to grasp? Yet the criterion is not without value. We are reluctant to admit facts and explanations which seem to contravene it, such as, e.g. the four-dimensionality of Space and the illusoriness of Time, and would only accept them as inferences, e.g. from the untying of Zöllner's knots and the alleged occurrence of premonitions, in the very last resort.
​What then is the result of a critical survey of the various criteria of reality? Is it not that though all may be of service, none can be entirely relied upon as the ratio cognoscendi of reality? There is no royal road to omniscience any more than to omnipotence, even though we do not hold with Mr. Ritchie that the two coincide. The cognition of reality is a slow and arduous process, and of its possession we cannot be sure until we possess it whole. The only certain and ultimate test of reality is the absence of internal friction, is its undisputed occupation of the field of consciousness, in a word, its self-evidence. It is because reality does not display this character that thought has to be called in to interpret it. If it did, there would be no distinction between real and unreal, between what is 'real-ly' presented and 'merely imagined,' between the self and the world, and there would be no such thing as thought. As Professor James so well points out (Psychology, II, 287) a hallucinatory candle occupying the whole field of consciousness would be equivalent to a real one. But as a matter of fact the contents of consciousness present no such permanence and self-evidence; their initial state is a fleeting succession of conflicting presentations which supplant and contradict one another. Some of these are frequently followed by painful, others by pleasurable feelings, and the penalty of idle acquiescence in the flux of phenomena is rapid death. So a dire necessity is laid upon the subject to distinguish himself from the world, and to set about thinking how phenomena may be controlled. He naturally begins by ascribing to the phenomena which are followed by pains or other practically important consequences a reality not shared by the rest. This first interpretation of the chaos of presentations is probably the first for which we can have direct testimony, and represents the view of reality taken by savages and small children. It is merely an extension of this view when the "plain man," in the condition of "natural realism" distinguishes hallucinations, fancies, and dreams from true reality.
To effect this he uses whatever tests seem most practically useful — among others those of "coherence" and "consistency." Thus, the plain man's view is simply the first stage in the attempt to reach a harmony of the real. The view of the physicists represents a second and subsequent stage. And Mr. Ritchie's philosophy of the ultimate nature of reality is possibly a third. Each leads on to the other, because each is successively recognized not to be a coherent and consistent account of the world and not to eliminate the irrational and unsatisfactory element in experience. The plain man's 'things,' the physicist's 'atoms,' and Mr. Ritchie's 'Absolute,' are all of them more or less persevering and well-considered schemes to interpret the primary reality of phenomena, and in this sense Mr. Ritchie is entitled to call the "sunrise" a theory (p. 274). But the chaos of presentations, out of which we have ​(by criteria ultimately practical) isolated the phenomenon we call sunrise, is not a theory, but the fact which has called all theories into being.
In addition to generalizing hypothetical objects to explain phenomena, this process of the interpretation of reality by our thought also bestows a derivative reality on the abstractions themselves with which thought works. If they are the instruments wherewith thought accomplishes such effects upon reality, they must surely be themselves real. Hence philosophers have long asserted the reality of Ideas, and we commonly hold the triangle and the space of mathematical abstraction to be the real triangle and the real space. (Mr. Ritchie's fourth sense.) Similarly the goals to which the methods of our thought tend — its intrinsic ideals — acquire a hypothetical reality of a lofty order. For it is evident that if the real nature of phenomena is to be discovered by the way of thought, the supreme ideals of that thought must be, or be realized by, the ultimate reality. But it would not follow that those ideals would render reality mere thought. For they might point either at a reality which should transcend thought, or at one of which thought should be but a single activity — even as it is now the activity of real beings.
But it is needless to discuss what would happen to thought if reality had been rendered harmonious, in view of the fact that no philosophy has succeeded in doing this. The whole attempt is dependent for its validity on its success, and its success is, to put it mildly, imperfect. The scientific view of atoms goes behind the popular view of "things," because it holds that the latter do not construct a tenable view of phenomena. Mr. Ritchie would treat the atoms similarly. But would he seriously contend that he can already give an entirely consistent, coherent, and intelligible view of the whole world, giving a reason why everything is exactly what it is and not otherwise? Of course Mr. Ritchie does not lay claim to omniscience. But if he cannot, in what respect is he better than those publicans and sinners, the "plain men" and the realists? If he cannot, why make such a fuss about coherency and consistency as the test of reality? By his own admission they represent a postulate which is never actually realized, and for aught we know never can be. If he cannot, lastly, what boots it to explain that though reality is not thought for us, it is for God (p. 272)? This free and easy appeal to the Deity, in the midst of a discussion of human knowledge, in order to silence an opponent and to fill up any gap in the argument, ought surely to be as severely reprobated as the medieval practice of ascribing any ill-understood fact or bit of knowledge to the agency of the Devil. The question is not whether to a divine mind, supposing its existence to be tenable in Mr. Ritchie's sense, reality is thought, but whether that assertion is a valid defence against the objection that Mr. Ritchie has given away his case when he has admitted that reality is not thought to ​human minds. Until, then, Mr. Ritchie can bring rather more convincing proof of his approaching apotheosis and omniscience, it must be contended that he has neither made out his assertion that rationality is the test of reality, nor its connection with the metaphysical dogma that the real is ultimately the thought of a "divine mind."
This question as to the ultimate nature of reality, forming the ultimate problem of ontology, brings us to the fourth and last question which may be raised about reality. And enough has been said concerning the imperfections of our methods of interpreting reality, to render it clear that we are perhaps hardly yet entitled to give any very confident answer to this question. From a purely scientific standpoint, I can see no reason for attempting to prejudge the answer. It is pre-eminently a question to be met with a solvitur ambulando. From other points of view no doubt several different answers may be given, and Mr. Ritchie's pantheistic doctrine doubtless remains tenable, even though its epistemological basis be insecure. But at least as much may be claimed for the doctrine which Mr. Ritchie is most anxious to refute, the doctrine which denies most emphatically that existence is ever reducible to essence, and holds that the individual is the real.
At all events it is, I think, possible to show that this doctrine is neither uncritical nor unable to maintain itself against Mr. Ritchie's objections. Mr. Ritchie regards it as the uncritical product of the popular Vorsbeltung, because it makes its appearance at a very early stage in the interpretation of reality. But this should rather speak in its favor, if it is able to reassert its validity after the fullest critical examination of the facts and of objections such as Mr. Ritchie's.
Those objections arise in the first place out of his failure to appreciate the development in our conceptions of individuality and reality which has corresponded to the evolution of the objects which they symbolize, and in the second, out of his misunderstanding the respective positions which his opponents' logic assigns to thought- symbols and that which they symbolize. To say that the individual is the real and that the real is individual, is to make a proposition concerning a reality beyond it. It draws our attention to a fact which its terms cannot fully express. It is an adjectival description of reality in terms of thought-symbols. But it is not substantival. It is no definition of reality, but a reference to it, which expresses a characteristic feature intelligibly to real beings who can feel the extra-logical nature of reality. Hence it does not even necessarily state the essence of reality; for the theoretic validity (not the practical convenience) of the doctrine of essence is called in question, and the fortunes of the expression certainly do not affect the existence of reality. But Mr. Ritchie treats it as if the sum and substance of all reality were supposed to be contained in it, and dissects it mercilessly in order to ​show that there is nothing in it. But in criticising the terms of the proposition he thinks he annihilates also the reality beyond it. He is mistaken; for he tramples only on the shadow of his foe. The individual and the real (i.e. the thing symbolized by those symbols of our speech) are not a couple of categories, nor even fully defined concepts. They are just sign-posts, which to a purely thinking mind might convey no meaning, or the contradictory meanings Mr. Ritchie criticises, but which are meant for beings who are real as well as rational. Mr. Ritchie wilfully strips himself of one of his chief means of understanding the world when he abstracts from his own reality, and is then puzzled to find that he must be either nothing or an unknowable thing-in-itself, if he be not a bundle of universal thought-relations. So he comes to the absurd conclusion that he is made up of the products of one of his own activities! Does not this remind one of the hero of Andersen's fairy tale, who became subservient to his shadow? And so it is not surprising that to one who holds that the individual is the real, his polemic (pp. 276–80) should appear a σκιαμαχία, which cannot grasp the logical position of reality, and results only in a series of hystera protera.
For example, the individual is not 'everything which is called one'—things are called one because we attribute to them this extra-logical character of individuality. Nor is the individual what can be expressed by a single term—because the latter is only the nearest logic can get to expressing individuality. The individual is not a spiritual or thinking substance—because the whole category of substance rests upon and is abstracted from the individual, is an attempt thought makes to symbolize a substantivity, which its own adjectivity never properly expresses. The individual is more than a meeting-point of universals, because universals are not individuals, nor able to form one, however many of them meet together. But they never do meet in numbers sufficient for a quorum: the attempt to reduce the individuals to universals generates an infinite process, which is never equivalent to the finite individual.
It is not, then, any logical difficulty which compels us to modify the original sense of the assertion that individuality is an ultimate and definitely determined characteristic of reality, but the general flux of reality itself. The individual also is in process, and so individuality becomes a characteristic of which reality may be seen to have less or more. The individuality of a drop of water is very evanescent; the individuality of a schoolboy, or even of a mule, is often found to be a very stubborn fact. Once we have degrees, we can form a standard of individuality; and the scale may be prolonged inferentially beyond what is actually given. Individuality thereby becomes a hypothesis and an ideal, as well as a characteristic of reality. The atom of physics is such a hypothetical prolongation of the individual in one direction. Monads ​and the like, are prolongations in another, and, in the writer's opinion, a far more promising, direction. So we can come to say that an individual is lacking in individuality, i.e. shows this universal characteristic of reality too indistinctly, seems to lend himself too easily to 'explanation' by universals, seems to borrow too much from others, and the like.
But this in nowise trenches upon the value of individuality. It simply postulates that we must learn to think of the individuality of the real as we have learned to think of its reality, not as a completed being, but as a becoming, i.e. as being a process. That which we designate by the term individuality is a varying and growing quantity, never wholly absent, but not always fully developed. At the one end of the process are the atoms — of which we can hardly discern the individuality. At the other end are — let us say the angels — individuals so perfectly individualized that, as mediæval doctors taught, each would form a species by himself.
And with all deference to the magni nominis umbra, wherewith the Absolute has overshadowed the minds of philosophers, it seems to me that it is to some such conclusion as this that the course of science tends, rather than to a single merely rational 'universal law,' from which all existences might be necessarily deduced by purely logical processes. Of the difficulties which the latter alternative involves Mr. Ritchie gives us a sample on page 277, which is valuable as containing a recognition by one of his school, belated and inadequate though that recognition be, of the gravity of questions that should have been considered before ever it was enunciated that reality was Thought. This is not the place to discuss what meaning, if any, can be attached to the dictum that "Thought realizes (does not this covertly reassert the distinction it pretends to explain away?) itself in its Other in order to return into itself," but it may be remarked that Mr. Ritchie's "dilemma," which drives him to such a solution, presents no difficulties to those who hold that the real is individual. For if the universe be constituted by the interactions of real individuals, some or all of whom display as one of their activities what we call 'thought,' there is no such 'irrational' and 'alien' Other as troubles Mr. Ritchie; for what 'confronts thought' is merely the whole of which it is the part and the practical interpreter. Nor does thought itself ever claim more for itself than this, whether it be in its reference of every proposition to a reality beyond it, or in its recognition of the necessity that an activity presupposes a real being as its substrate, or in its ultimate foundation of all proof on the self-evident.
Thus it is only an infirmity of our reason, causing us to hypostasize abstractions, which leads us to speak of 'universal laws of nature,' as if they were more than shorthand expressions for the habitual interactions of realities. But as the subtlety of our insight draws nearer to the ​subtlety of nature, the crudeness of our 'universal laws' begins to appear. We grow better able to appreciate the real individuality of things, and so substitute specific 'laws' for general. We no longer ascribe John Doe's death to the universal mortality of humanity, but get the doctor to tell us precisely why John Doe, and no other, died. As we know him better, we do not account for a friend's conduct 'because he is a man,' but by a 'because he is this man.' In all our explanations we seek to get down to the particular, to do justice to the individual peculiarity of things, to enlarge the part assigned to personal idiosyncrasy. In the case of the lower orders of individuality such appreciation of the peculiar nature of each thing may still be an impracticable and indefinitely distant ideal, but with regard to higher orders the principle is well established. We could hardly say with the poet that "the proper study for mankind is man," if there were not, even in the meanest, an inexhaustible store of idiosyncratic reactions, — an individuality, in short, which becomes more and more conspicuous as we pass from the lower to the higher, and looks less and less like a combination of abstract universals! Hence, if we are to hazard any assertions concerning 'Omniscience,' is it not clear that it could have no use for universals, and so far from regarding the individual as compounded of them, would apprehend the idiosyncrasy of leach thing in its action, without the clumsy mediation of 'universal laws'?
In conclusion, then, let us contend against Mr. Ritchie that other views than his own of ultimate reality are tenable, that they answer the epistemological and metaphysical difficulties at least as well as his, and are at least as deserving of the name of idealism (if Berkeley retains any claim to the doctrine he discovered!), and that they are far concreter and in closer interaction with the sciences than a metempiric misconception like the Absolute. Nor need we blush to own that a view like ours would not prove the popular Vorstellung of "persons" wholly false (even though it would tend to regard 'things' as being only 'persons' of a lower development of individuality), and so might prove more attractive to the "plain man." For it is possible to be "critical," without disregarding either humanity or reality.
F. C. S. Schiller.
* ↑ He does not even succeed in proving the unreality of dreams, by saying that they are not self-coherent nor follow in an intelligible sequence on the events of previous dreams. For their ' incoherence ' is not, as a rule, intrinsic, but is an ex post facto judgment passed on them in our waking life. And as for the intelligible sequence of successive dreams, we should require an intelligible sequence in successive lives to make the parallel complete. Unless, then, Mr. Ritchie has a transcendent knowledge of another life, whereby he judges our waking life to be real, because of its coherence and intelligibleness from the standpoint of the former, his comparison fails. It is true that we sometimes suspect our dreams while still dreaming (though as all dreams are 'near waking,' we cannot be said to be 'nearer waking' then). But does not our waking life lie under the same suspicion on the same grounds? If it is permissible for once to appeal from the "plain man" to the man of genius, is it not "a mad, mad world, my masters"? Have not seers, prophets, and philosophers in all ages testified that our earthly life was but a dream? And if to these divinely-inspired 'dreamers' we owe all the religions that have swayed the lives of men, must not dreams and hallucinations be accounted most real — in Mr. Ritchie's "ethical" sense?
* ↑ Else should we not have developed e.g. an electric sense?
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