n 4 HUMANISM vn 



insufficient recognition of the psychological data that he 

 proposes to consider what reality is. This question is 

 plainly an ontological one, but Mr. Ritchie treats it as if it 

 were epistemological, and = How do we know a pheno 

 menon to be (ultimately) real? I.e. he substitutes for 

 the ontological inquiry into the ratio essendi of reality an 

 epistemological inquiry into its ratio cognoscendi or the 

 criterion of reality, and then unhesitatingly attributes to 

 his results a metaphysical validity. Yet he seems quite 

 unaware that such a method, even if successful, would be 

 defective and inadequate. Even at its best, even if it 

 could be shown that reality could be known only as 

 a coherent system of thought-relations, it would not 

 necessarily follow that reality was nothing more, and he 

 would not necessarily have proved anything but the 

 impotence of his thought to grasp reality, by reducing 

 his symbolical expressions for reality to absurdity and 

 contradiction. Thus his proofs cannot prove what he 

 desires, and his refutations only recoil upon his method. 



But it may be shown also that his criterion is not 

 valid. He suggests l a triple test of rationality, a triple 

 basis for the metaphysical assertion that reality is 

 thought, (i) &quot;The agreement between the inferences 

 drawn from the experience of our different senses ; (2) 

 the agreement between the judgments of different 

 persons; (3) the harmony of present experience with 

 the results of their and our previous experience, constitute 

 between them the test of reality.&quot; It is to be feared that 



effected, e.g. by death if we awake after it? For comparison therefore 

 with the intelligible sequence of successive dreams, we should require an 

 intelligible sequence in successive lives to make the parallel complete. Unless, 

 then, Mr. Ritchie has a transcendent knowledge of another life, whereby he 

 judges our waking life to be real, because of its coherence and intelligibleness 

 from the standpoint of the former, his comparison fails. It is true that we 

 sometimes suspect our dreams while still dreaming (though as all dreams are 

 near waking, we cannot be said to be nearer waking then). But does not 

 our waking life lie under the same suspicion on the same grounds? If it is 

 permissible for once to appeal from the plain man to the man of genius, is it 

 not a mad, mad world, my masters ? Have not seers, prophets, and 

 philosophers in all ages testified that our earthly life was but a dream? And 

 if to these divinely-inspired dreamers we owe all the religions that have 

 swayed the lives of men, must not dreams and hallucinations be accounted most 

 real in Mr. Ritchie s ethical sense ? 

 1 Loc. cit. p. 80. 



