Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/553

No. 5.] 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