AN ABUSE OF ABSTRACTION 489 



I say nothing of the personal inconsistency of some of these critics 

 whose printed works furnish exquisite illustrations of the will to 

 believe, in spite of their denunciations of it as a phrase and as a 

 recommended thing. Mr. McTaggart, whom I will once more take as 

 an example, is sure that " reality is rational and righteous " and 

 " destined sub specie temporis to become perfectly good " ; and his 

 calling this belief a result of necessary logic has surely never deceived 

 any reader as to its real genesis in the gifted author's mind. Mankind 

 is made on too uniform a pattern for any of us to escape successfully 

 from acts of faith. We have a lively vision of what a certain view of 

 the universe would mean for us. We kindle or we shudder at the 

 thought, and our feeling runs through our whole logical nature and 

 animates its workings. It can't be that, we feel, it must be this. It 

 must be what it ougJit to be, and it ought to be this; and then we 

 seek for every reason, good or bad, to make this which so deeply ought 

 to be, seem objectively the probable thing. We show the arguments 

 against it to be insufficient, so that it may be true; we represent its 

 appeal to be to our whole nature's loyalty and not to any emaciated 

 faculty of syllogistic proof. We reinforce it by remembering the 

 enlargement of our world by music, by thinking of the promises of 

 sunsets and the impulses from vernal woods. And the essence of the 

 whole experience, when the individual swept through it says finally 

 " I believe," is the intense concreteness of his vision, the individuality 

 of the hypothesis before him, and the complexity of the various mo- 

 tives and perceptions that issue in his final state. 



But see now how the abstractionist treats this rich and intricate 

 vision that a certain state of things must be true. He accuses the 

 believer of reasoning by the following syllogism : 



All good desires must be fulfilled ; 



The desire to believe this proposition is a good desire ; 



Ergo, this proposition must be believed. 



He substitutes this abstraction for the concrete state of mind of 

 the believer, pins the naked absurdity of it upon him, and easily 

 proves that any one who defends him must be the greatest fool on 

 earth. As if any real believer ever thought in this preposterous way, 

 or as if any defender of the legitimacy of men's concrete ways of con- 

 cluding ever used the general premise " All desires must be fulfilled " ! 

 ISTevertheless Mr. McTaggart solemnly and laboriously refutes the syl- 

 logism in sections 47 to 57 of his very readable book. He shows that 

 there is no fixed rational link, no link in the dictionary, between the 

 abstract concepts " desire," " goodness " and " reality " ; and he 

 ignores all the singular links which in the concrete case the believer 

 feels and perceives. He says: 



When the reality of a thing is uncertain, the argument encourages us to 

 suppose that our approval of a thing can determine its reality. And when 



