122 HUMANISM 



VII 



attempting to prejudge the answer. It is pre-eminently a 

 question to be met with a solvitur ambulando. From 

 other points of view no doubt several different answers 

 may be given, and Mr. Ritchie s pantheistic doctrine 

 doubtless remains tenable, even though its epistemological 

 basis be insecure. But at least as much may be claimed 

 for the doctrine which Mr. Ritchie is most anxious to 

 refute, the doctrine which denies most emphatically that 

 existence is ever reducible to essence, and holds that the 

 individual is the real. 



At all events it is, I think, possible to show that this 

 doctrine is neither uncritical nor unable to maintain itself 

 against Mr. Ritchie s objections. Mr. Ritchie regards it 

 as the uncritical product of the popular Vorstellung, 

 because it makes its appearance at a very early stage in 

 the interpretation of reality. But this should rather speak 

 in its favour, if it is able to reassert its validity after the 

 fullest critical examination of the facts and of objections 

 such as Mr. Ritchie s. 



Those objections arise in the first place out of his 

 failure to appreciate the development in our conceptions 

 of individuality and reality which has corresponded to the 

 evolution of the objects which they symbolise, and in 

 the second, out of his misunderstanding the respective 

 positions which his opponents logic assigns to thought- 

 symbols and that which they symbolise. To say that the 

 individual is the real and that the real is individual, is to 

 make a proposition concerning a reality beyond it. It 

 draws our attention to a fact which its terms cannot fully 

 express. It is an adjectival description of reality in terms 

 of thought-symbols. But it is not substantival. It is no 

 definition of reality, but a reference to it, which expresses 

 a characteristic feature intelligibly to real beings who can 

 feel the extra-logical nature of reality. Hence it does not 

 even necessarily state the essence of reality ; * for the 

 theoretic validity (not the practical convenience) of the 

 doctrine of essence is called in question, and the fortunes 

 of the expression certainly do not affect the existence of 



1 I should now (1903) define essence systematically in terms of purpose. 



