PROLEGOMENA TO ETHICS. 115 



have been hopelessly miseducated by traditional 

 systems of philosophy, the fact remains that what 

 is almost a truism to a metaphysician is a paradox 

 to " the plain, honest man." To be told that all 

 reality consists in relations, and relations are im- 

 possible except for an intelligence capable of 

 relating, sounds strange to people whose common 

 view of the real is that it is something which is 

 independent of consciousness, that is, " unrelated." 

 Ever since the days of Locke a mysterious "entity," 

 called matter, is supposed to exist as a source of 

 reality, though it is unknown and unknowable. 

 Even Kant did not succeed in laying the ghost 

 which hampered the English philosophy, and 

 which the good Bishop of Cloyne in vain sought 

 to exorcise. For this unknown something, which 

 for Bishop Berkeley was the haunt of materialism, 

 reappears in the Kantian " thing-in-itself," while 

 for the English "philosophers of relativity," it 

 remains as " a skeleton in the cupboard." Hegel 

 dared to say that it was a ghost which any man 

 of sound common sense could afford to laugh at, 

 since the intelligible is the real and the real is 

 the intelligible, and we can do better without the 

 ghost than with it, because, as Mr. Green tells us 

 in a different context, " nothing can be known by 

 reference to the unknown." 



But if the real is the related, and relation implies 

 a relating consciousness, we cannot explain con- 



