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Likenesses ; 07% Philosophical Anatomy 251 



so many vistas of agreement underlying difference before its 

 ken. Indeed, as Mr. Lewes says/ with, perhaps, some exag- 

 geration of expression: 'Science is in no respect a plain 

 transcript of reality .... but .... an ideal construction 

 in which the manifold relations of reals are taken up and 

 assimilated by the mind, and there transformed into relations 

 of ideas, so that the world of sense is changed into the world 

 of thought.' And again he declares : ^ ' What we call laws 

 of nature are not objective existences, but subjective abstrac- 

 tions.' We say these expressions are somewhat exaggerated, 

 because that which is the product of the 'manifold rela- 

 tions of reals' must have some real foundation and some 

 objective validity in the eyes of those who admit, as it seems 

 Mr. G. H. Lewes does not, the real and known existence 

 of an external world of more than mere feeliugs. Any one 

 who admits such existence must also admit that the various 

 ideal entities which are ultimately justified to reason as true 

 ideals have their foundation in their agreement with real 

 objective existence, ' truth ' being a relation between ' Being ' 

 and an ' Intellect.' 



The various groups into which animals and plants have 

 been divided are of this nature — i.e. are ideal entities with 

 an objective basis. Classes, orders, families, genera, and 

 species exist as such only in a mind. Objectively, there 

 is nothing but individual animals and plants. Nevertheless, 

 the different biological groups also exist objectively in those 

 facts of structure which various individual animals and 

 plants present, and which serve for the definitions of such 

 different groups. What Mr. Lewes says^ of certain other 

 abstractions apphes here with perfect correctness : ' They are 

 reahties in the sense of being drawn from real concretes ; but 

 they are not realities existing apart from their concretes. 



^ Problems of Life and Mind, vol. i. p. 342. 

 2 Op. cit., p. 297. 2 Qp cit., p. 281. 



