Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/562

546 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.

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