Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/292

276 If a variation proves advantageous it gives rise to a new species: when a survival comes to be distinctly disadvantageous the individuals in which it exists tend to disappear. The distinction between simple objective reality and reality as rationality thus corresponds to the distinction between simple causality and teleology. In the purely physical sense the real is what can be thought of and must be thought of in the causally connected system which we call the nature of things. In the moral sense the real is what can be and must be thought of as serving an end, as having a value.

This moral sense of reality is extremely common in ordinary language. "Real jam" (to quote a vulgar expression) is the genuine article with no humbug about it. Now when the Realist Philosopher insists that an atom is more real than a thought, the vulgar are deceived; for they fancy that this means that an atom is more important than a thought, whereas all that it means is that an atom occupies space, while a thought does not. A thought, even a foolish thought, belongs to a higher type of existence than an atom.

Yes, it will be said, but does not such a phrase admit that existence is wider than thought, if thought is only some particular kind of existence? This merely quantitative way of stating the problem might well be objected to. But passing that over, let us admit that, from the point of view of the physicist, if the ultimate physical reality of material things were to be found in atoms, then it would be true that there could be no thought without atoms; so that thought would be resolved into atoms as the ultimate reality. That would be true, from the point of view of the physicist; but philosophy is the endeavor not merely to speak the truth, but the whole truth. And so we have to go further and ask what an atom would be except for thought? Will any Realist undertake to tell us what an atom is, unless it is either a way of thinking which we find convenient in trying to think out the nature of things, or an unknown and unknowable which he can neither think nor express?

That within reality we can make a distinction between greater and less reality may be used as an argument to prove that the