H2 HUMANISM 



VII 



of reality, and when, after establishing his metaphysical 

 view of reality to his satisfaction, he is confronted l by 

 the logical impossibility of identifying thought with its 

 object, he suddenly throws us back upon the primary 

 subjectivity of all experience. And all this without a 

 hint of a /xera/Sacrt? et? d\\o yevos. The connexion 

 is no doubt clear enough to Mr. Ritchie s mind, if, as must 

 be supposed, he follows T. H. Green in his fearful and 

 wonderful leap from the fact that all phenomena appear 

 to some individual self to the conclusion that they are, 

 therefore, appearances to a universal self; but he might at 

 least have warned us that his opponents have repeatedly 

 declared their inability to compass such saltatory exercises, 

 and regard the two halves of the argument as belonging 

 respectively to epistemology and to metaphysics, and the 

 transition from the one to the other as a paralogism. 



If, however, we refuse to take this Greenian salto 

 mortale, it is evident that the first question must be 

 settled before any of the rest can arise at all. For, as 

 Professor Seth has so well pointed out, realism and 

 idealism mean very different things according as they 

 are taken in an epistemological or a metaphysical sense, 

 and &quot; it is possible to be epistemologically a strenuous 

 realist and an idealist in the metaphysical sense of the 

 term.&quot; 2 Nay, &quot; it is only in virtue of epistemological 

 realism that we can avoid scepticism, and so much as 

 begin our journey towards metaphysical idealism.&quot; If, 

 then, epistemological idealism is solipsism and &quot;twin 

 brother to scepticism,&quot; it must be surmounted before the 

 nature of reality can be discussed. If it is not surmounted 

 cadit quaestio it becomes futile to discuss whether 

 the real is one or many, whether its criterion is consistency 

 or what, if there is no objectivity at all. Mr. Ritchie has, 

 of course, a perfect right to call a halt here, and to refuse 

 to discuss anything further until his opponents have 

 successfully emerged from the clutches of subjective 

 idealism. But once they have been permitted to escape, 



1 Darwin and Hegel, p. 102. 

 * Philosophical Review, i. p. 142. 



