vii REALITY AND IDEALISM 123 



reality. But Mr. Ritchie treats it as if the sum and 

 substance of all reality were supposed to be contained in 

 it, and dissects it mercilessly in order to show that there 

 is nothing in it. But in criticising the terms of the 

 proposition he thinks he annihilates also the reality 

 beyond it. He is mistaken ; for he tramples only on the 

 shadow of his foe. The individual and the real (i.e. the 

 thing symbolised by those symbols of our speech) are not 

 a couple of categories, nor even fully defined concepts. 

 They are just sign-posts, which to a purely thinking 

 mind might convey no meaning, or the contradictory 

 meanings Mr. Ritchie criticises, but which are meant for 

 beings who are real as well as rational. Mr. Ritchie 

 wilfully strips himself of one of his chief means of 

 understanding the world when he abstracts from his own 

 reality, and is then puzzled to find that he must be 

 either nothing or an unknowable thing-in-itself, if he be 

 not a bundle of universal thought-relations. So he comes 

 to the absurd conclusion that he is made up of the 

 products of one of his own activities ! Does not this 

 remind one of the hero of Andersen s fairy tale, who 

 became subservient to his shadow? And so it is not 

 surprising that to one who holds that the individual is 

 the real, his polemic l should appear a a-xiafjua^ia, which 

 cannot grasp the logical position of reality, and results 

 only in a series of hystera protera. 



For example, the individual is not everything which 

 is called one things are called one because we attribute 

 to them this extra-logical character of individuality. Nor 

 is the individual what can be expressed by a single term 

 because the latter is only the nearest logic can get to 

 expressing individuality. The individual is not a spiritual 

 or thinking substance because the whole category of 

 substance rests upon and is abstracted from the individual, 

 is an attempt thought makes to symbolise a substantivity, 

 which its own adjectivity never properly expresses. The 

 individual is more than a meeting-point of universals, 

 because universals are not individuals, nor able to form 



1 Darwin and Hegel, pp. 93-100. 



