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527 has changed his view of the world or not is of interest mainly to himself. So far as I am concerned, at any rate, the matter is of small importance. To my mind the only point of any consequence is, not whether Mr. Seth affirms that the world is actually made up of a number of separate individuals or consists of a single individual having a number of parts, but whether he is entitled to affirm either the one or the other. Now, as I understand him, our author still maintains that we have no knowledge of real existence and no knowledge of God as he really is. Under these circumstances we can assert of both anything we please, but what we cannot do is to produce any warrant for our assertion. An unknown world and an unknown God are for us nothing.

That this objection is valid will perhaps be more evident by looking at another of our author's explanations. Replying to Mr. Ritchie's strictures upon the assertion that "the individual alone is the real," he tells us that "after we have banished the 'metaphysical phantom of the thing in itself,' … a distinction remains to be made between knowledge and existence." For, "as all knowledge consists of universals, it is obvious, that, however far we may penetrate into the essence of any individual thing, our account of it will be a set of universal attributes." Hence "there is a complete solution of continuity between the abstractions of knowledge and the concrete texture of existence."

But has Mr. Seth banished the 'metaphysical phantom of the thing in itself?' It has always seemed to me that that phantom is as inseparable from a theory which denies knowledge of reality as shadow from substance. Mr. Seth seems to maintain that, as no judgment can be made about a thing which does not involve a 'universal' or 'abstraction,' our knowledge can never be of reality as it actually is. Granting that this contention is sound, it would seem to follow that we can be conscious of reality only if we rigidly exclude all judgment or predication. Now, such an elimination of predicates must leave us with pure being, or rather with pure nothing; and this pure nothing, it must be observed, is not even the