Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/559

No. 5.] 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