vii REALITY AND IDEALISM 125 



And with all deference to the magni nominis umbra, 

 wherewith the Absolute has overshadowed the minds of 

 philosophers, it seems to me that it is to some such 

 conclusion as this that the course of science tends, rather 

 than to a single merely rational universal law/ from 

 which all existences might be necessarily deduced by purely 

 logical processes. Of the difficulties which the latter 

 alternative involves Mr. Ritchie gives us a sample on 

 page 95, which is valuable as containing a recognition by 

 one of his school, belated and inadequate though that 

 recognition be, of the gravity of questions that should 

 have been considered before ever it was enunciated that 

 reality was Thought. This is not the place to discuss 

 what meaning, if any, can be attached to the dictum that 

 Thought realises (does not this covertly reassert the 

 distinction it pretends to explain away ?) itself in its 

 Other in order to return into itself, but it may be 

 remarked that Mr. Ritchie s dilemma/ which drives him 

 to such a solution, presents no difficulties to those who 

 hold that the real is individual. For if the universe be 

 constituted by the interactions of real individuals, some 

 or all of whom display as one of their activities what we 

 call thought/ there is no such irrational and alien 

 Other as troubles Mr. Ritchie ; for what confronts 

 thought is merely the whole of which it is the part and 

 the practical interpreter. Nor does thought itself ever 

 claim more for itself than this, whether it be in its 

 reference of every proposition to a reality beyond it, or 

 in its recognition of the necessity that an activity pre 

 supposes a real being as its substrate, or in its ultimate 

 foundation of all proof on the self-evident. 



Thus it is only an infirmity of our reason, causing us 

 to hypostasise abstractions, which leads us to speak of 

 universal laws of nature/ as if they were more than 

 shorthand expressions for the habitual interactions of 

 realities. But as the subtlety of our insight draws nearer 

 to the subtlety of nature, the crudeness of our universal 

 laws begins to appear. We grow better able to appreciate 

 the real individuality of things, and so substitute specific 



