COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



belongs to the twelfth century rather than to 

 the nineteenth. He is a schoolman reared out 

 of season. Here, I believe, we have the key to 

 Hegel's position. 



The realistic tendency — the disposition to 

 mistake words for things — is a vice inherent in 

 all ordinary thinking. It is a vice from which 

 every thinker who would arrive at truth must 

 begin by freeing himself. In all ages men 

 have fought over words, without waiting to 

 know what the words really signified. Even 

 great thinkers do not always escape the tempta- 

 tion. Mr. Mill, for example, speaks of Cae- 

 sar's " overthrowing a free government " as if 

 Caesar had been a contemporary of Pitt. He 

 reasons solely on the strength of the word 

 "free," forgetting that the "free government" 

 overthrown by Caesar was in reality a detestable 

 mixture of despotism and anarchy. Words in- 

 deed are the money of all of us, until we learn, 

 by severe discipline, to regard them merely as 

 counters. But it was in the Middle Ages that 

 realism was most uncurbed. In those days men 

 maintained, with sober faces, that because we 

 talk about Man in the abstract, there is an ac- 

 tually existing thing called Man, distinct alike 

 from all individual men and from all men taken 

 collectively. This and that man exist ; all men 

 exist ; and Man exists likewise, — such was one 

 of the fundamental theorems of the reaHstic 

 i8o 



