120 HUMANISM 



VII 



element in experience. The plain man s things, the 

 physicist s atoms, and Mr. Ritchie s Absolute, are all of 

 them more or less persevering and well-considered schemes 

 to interpret the primary reality of phenomena, and in this 

 sense Mr. Ritchie is entitled to call the sunrise a theory. 1 

 But the chaos of presentations, out of which we have (by 

 criteria ultimately practical] isolated the phenomenon we 

 subsequently call sunrise, is not a theory, but the fact 

 which has called all theories into being. 



In addition to generating hypothetical objects to 

 explain phenomena, this process of the interpretation of 

 reality by our thought also bestows a derivative reality on 

 the abstractions themselves with which thought works. If 

 they are the instruments wherewith thought accomplishes 

 such effects upon reality, they must surely be themselves 

 real. Hence philosophers have long asserted the reality 

 of Ideas, and we commonly hold the triangle and the 

 space of mathematical abstraction to be the real triangle 

 and the real space. (Mr. Ritchie s fourth sense.) Similarly 

 the goals to which the methods of our thought tend its 

 intrinsic ideals acquire a hypothetical reality of a lofty 

 order. For it is evident that if the real nature of 

 phenomena is to be discovered by the way of thought, 

 the supreme ideals of that thought must be, or be realised 

 fy, the ultimate reality. But it would not follow that 

 those ideals would render reality mere thought. For they 

 might point either at a reality which should transcend 

 thought, or at one of which thought should be but a 

 single activity even as it is now the activity of real 

 beings. 



But it is needless to discuss what would happen to 

 thought if reality had been rendered harmonious, in view 

 of the fact that no philosophy has succeeded in doing this. 

 The whole attempt is dependent for its validity on its 

 success, and its success is, to put it mildly, imperfect. 

 The scientific view of atoms goes behind the popular view 

 of things/ because it holds that the latter do not construct 

 a tenable view of phenomena. Mr. Ritchie would treat 



1 Darwin and Hegel, p. 91. 



