Page:Philosophical Review Volume 31.djvu/273

No. 3.] or self-explanatory. The conception of a universe which is mere process is hopelessly contradictory. It gives us opacity for insight; it flaunts in the face of intelligence the assertion that never by thinking can truth be attained; it denies that the problem of philosophy is soluble. No thinker who clearly sees such an impasse can willingly accept this outcome as final. Hence we find philosophers of the day at work as diligently as their predecessors, trying to discover some type of being, some feature of experience that will withstand the pulverizing intellect—the alleszermalmenden. Are any of them successful? A glance at the three typical findings will at least show the direction of fruitful research, even if it indicates only the broad outlines of a final solution.

The realist of whatever school tends in his thinking to the limiting conception of cosmic reality as an independent somewhat, about which we may think, but which is not in any sense a creature of the knower's activity. Thus by a tour de force reality is set up as a non-mental entity existing in its own right and in essentially complete isolation. Royce is not the first to expose the emptiness of this solution. The real for the realist escapes the intellect by withdrawing into vacuity and becoming strictly unintelligible. That many realists directly challenge this disposition of their central doctrine does not materially alter the case. We are not criticizing realistic systems as such, for that would take us into a maze of ambiguities and subtleties. We are merely calling attention to the obvious logic in their doctrine of independence when taken in any thoroughgoing sense. Let the non-independence of the object be granted even to the extent of its having to 'sail' into consciousness in order to be known, and logic grapples with it for a life and death struggle in which there is not the slightest doubt of the outcome. While failing to meet the demands of an intelligible answer, realism at least recognizes the problem, and makes a sort of preliminary effort at a solution. From our present point of view, this attempt seems rather naïve; yet how any other school of thought can succeed where the realist has failed is not immediately evident.

The idealist makes a decided advance in showing that external