GEORGE BRUCE HALSTED-THE ESSENCE OF NUMBER. 
63 
that mind-made ‘ artificial individuals’ are found in reality to be com¬ 
posed of physically originated ‘ primitive individuals.’ 
“The intuitive apperception and synthesis of a manifold has evidently 
preceded in us its conscious analysis. 
“Erst der geistige Inbegriff, dann die ueberlegte Zerlegung seines ob- 
jectiven Inhaltes. 
“And to how many false philosophies has this mental priority of the 
One over the Many given rise! 
“Formal logic with its readymade premises and purely deductive 
reasoning has almost exclusively governed our interpretation of nature 
until lately; until by means of the scientific method we are making sure 
of the objective correctness of the premises. 
“ Conceptual Realism has enticed thinkers from Heraclitus, the Eleatics 
and Plato on, throughout the middle ages in the contest raging between 
Realists and Nominalists, up to our present Neo-Hegelians. 
“ Thus have mere conceptual Unities been regarded as supreme reality, 
as something not of human make, but of independent existence, and con¬ 
stitutive of all nature. 
“ You are (like myself) convinced that the world we consciously per¬ 
ceive is out and out a mental phenomenon. 
“ But (also like myself) you seem to insist that such conceptual 
Unities as constitute ‘ artificial individuals’ are ‘ of human make’ and 
not ‘ in nature’; that on the other hand the ‘ primitive individuals’ 
forming part of them are subsisting somehow ‘ in nature’ as well as in 
conscious perception. 
“ This is perhaps the most weight} 7 philosophical conclusion one can 
arrive at.” 
