Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/215

No. 2.] self-contradictory: it is like speaking of an absolutely fast or an absolutely slow movement. It is only possible for us to say, "all is in flux," because we are, without confessing it, placing ourselves in a position of fixity and watching the stream rush past. This new flux-philosophy, accepted uncritically as expressive of the whole truth, could only, like the old Heracleiteanism, form a basis for a scepticism which negates itself the moment it is taken quite seriously. Thus, when any such phrase as "a self-differentiating unity," or "the one in the many" is suggested as the least inadequate formula by which to describe the ultimate reality of things (i.e. the truth of things in their totality, and not merely in any of those partial aspects with which ordinary language and the special sciences are satisfied), this is no dictum of a dogmatic ontology, but the conclusion to which we are driven by a critical examination of the concepts that we find ourselves using in ordinary and in scientific experience. (If any one denies that knowledge and science are possible, with him profitable argument is not possible either.) This conclusion of epistemology (if Mr. Schiller likes that word) is moreover, if it were treated as a mere speculative hypothesis (and I hold that it is much more), the only hypothesis which seems to me capable at the same time of accepting without reserve the results of scientific discovery, however "materialistic" they may seem, and yet of explaining, and to some extent justifying, the speculations of the greatest religious thinkers. On the other hand, the theory of "pluralism" or "monadist realism," which in Mr. Schiller's view is the only alternative to the scepticism that results from what he calls "the failure of epistemology," but what seems to me only the failure to understand it, – this monadist realism is incompatible with the genuine realism of common sense, with the presuppositions of the sciences, and, I would add, while in agreement with much popular phraseology on theological subjects, it is in conflict with the higher forms of Christian thought, all of which undoubtedly seem "pantheistic" to the abstract understanding which cannot escape from dualism.

For this pluralism or animated atomism Mr. Schiller, as if a little ashamed of "Realism," endeavors to appropriate the name "ideal-