CXC ADMINISTRATIVE REPORT [fth. asn. 20 



of 1 nil nan reason the first incentive to an investigation of the 

 other categories is derived from a knowledge of their quaUties, 

 and so long as thev are nnknown they are believed to be only 

 (jnalities. 



It is this characteristic of (|ualities that seems to give war- 

 rant to idealism. Qualities always change with the change 

 in view, and they are ideal when we consider things with 

 relation to purposes. You can always discover that idealists 

 consider only qualities among the categories and confuse 

 nil others with them. Even while I am writing this state- 

 ment there comes to hand a new work on idealism, titled The 

 World and the Individual, by Royce. On every page of this 

 book he considers qualities and only (jualities. On page 209 

 he says: 



Tho.se other objects of coinnioii himuui interest arc viewed, hy eoin- 

 nioii sense, iiiinicly, not as bidependent Being-s, which would retain 

 their reality unaltered even if nobody ever were able to think of 

 them, but rather as objects, such that, while people can and often do 

 think of them, their own sole Beino- consists in their character as ren- 

 dering such thoughts about themselves objectively valid for ever}-- 

 body concerned. Their whole mse then consists in their value as giving^ 

 warrant and validity to the thoughts that refer to them. They are 

 external to any particular ideas, yet they can not be detined independ- 

 ently of all ideas. 



Do vou ask me to name such objects of ordinary conversation^ I 

 answer at once by asking whether the credit of a commeirial house, 

 the debts that a man owes, the present price of a given stock hi the 

 stock market, j'es. the market price current of any given commodity; 

 or. again, whether the rank of a given official, the social status of anj^ 

 member of the community, the mai-ks received by a student at any 

 examination: or. to pa.ss to another field, whether this or that commer- 

 cial pai'tnership, or international treaty, or still once more, whether 

 the British constitution — whether, 1 say, any or all of the o1)jects thus 

 named, will not 1)e regarded, in ordinaiT conversation, as in some sense 

 real beings, facts possessed of a genuinely ontological character^ One 

 surely says: The debt exists; the credit is a fact; the constitution has 

 objective Being. Yet none of these facts, prices, credits, debts, ranks, 

 standings, marks, partnerships, constitutions, arc viewed as real inde- 

 pendently of any and of all possible ideas that shall refer to them. 

 The objects now under our notice have, moreover, like physical things, 

 very various grades of supposed endurance and of recognized signifi- 

 cance. Some vanish hourlv. Others mav outlast centuries. The 



