n8 HUMANISM 



VII 



slender guarantees that our faculties should have been 

 fitted for, and our energies directed towards, those aspects 

 of reality which are of the greatest theoretic importance, 1 

 and hence arguments from practical or moral necessity, 

 universal desires, and the like, are not usually supposed 

 to yield the safest approach to the ultimate reality of 

 things. 



And not only must it be said that Mr. Ritchie s tests 

 are not, properly speaking, rational at all, but it must be 

 pointed out that he actually shrinks from mentioning in 

 this place the test of rationality in its simplest and 

 severest shape, viz. that of conformity to the necessary 

 laws ot our thought. The omission is surprising, and 

 one would fain ascribe it to the perception that it would 

 have been too palpable a begging of the issue to have 

 made conformity with the laws of thought the test of 

 reality in an argument designed to show that reality 

 ultimately lay in the determinations of our thought. Or 

 can it be due to the fact that the chief characteristic of 

 reality is its Becoming, and that Becoming and its 

 defiance of the law of Contradiction is what our thought 

 has never been able to grasp ? Yet the criterion is not 

 without value. We are reluctant to admit facts and 

 explanations which seem to contravene it, such as, e.g. 

 the four-dimensionality of Space and the illusoriness of 

 Time, and would only accept them as inferences, e.g. from 

 the untying of Zollner s knots and the alleged occurrence 

 of premonitions, in the very last resort. 



What then is the result of a critical survey of the 

 various criteria of reality ? Is it not that though all may 

 be of service, none can be entirely relied upon as the 

 ratio cognoscendi of reality ? There is no royal road to 

 omniscience any more than to omnipotence, even though 

 we do not hold with Mr. Ritchie that the two coincide. 

 The cognition of reality is a slow and arduous process, 

 and of its possession we cannot be sure until we possess 

 it whole. The only certain and ultimate test of reality is 

 the absence of internal friction, is its undisputed occupa- 



1 Else should we not have developed, e.g. an electric sense? 



