David George Ritchie

“ But passing that over, let us admit that, from the point of view of the physicist, if the ultimate physical reality of material things were to be found in atoms, then it would be true that there could be no thought without atoms; so that thought would be resolved into atoms as the ultimate reality. That would be true, from the point of view of the physicist; but philosophy is the endeavor not merely to speak the truth, but the whole truth. And so we have to go further and ask what an atom would be except for thought? ”

“ But if the real is the individual we are limited to singular terms — not the horse, but this horse. But if this horse be allowed to be an individual, what is to be said of this lump of clay ? Is that more an individual than this great multitude of stars? Are we not falling a prey to the popular habit of speaking of every thing as if it were an ultimate reality incapable of analysis? What is any individual thing except a meeting point of universal attributes? Qualities are all universals: are we then to say that they are not real? ”

“ So, too, one's dreams, however absurd they may be, are real to one at the time — more or less. But how do we distinguish dreams from reality? Is it not by the test of coherence or persistence in our experience? If one's dream-experience in any one dream were to be perfectly coherent with itself, and if the events of one dream were always to follow in an intelligible sequence on the events of the preceding dream, undoubtedly our dream-life would be as real as our waking life. ”

“ If the reality of things be not their intelligibility, but just that element in them which cannot be known and cannot be expressed, should we not go on, in the fashion of Gorgias, to argue that nothing exists, that reality is that which is not?
The sciences ultimately refuse to recognize dualism. The world is only intelligible by science on the assumption that it forms one coherent system. A philosophy based on the special sciences cannot recognize anything outside the material universe. ”

“ Space and Time exist for thought as forms in which we must perceive things. But if we ascribe to them an absolute existence, independent of any one's thought, we are speaking about what we cannot possibly know. Because if we did know them as absolutely existing, they would no longer exist absolutely. Thought cannot grasp anything outside itself, "outside thought" being simply a metaphorical way of saying "not thought about at all." My thought is, of course, incomplete; coming to know more of reality means that our thought comes to be more coherent, that it comes to itself. ”

“ The sensation of resistance to muscular movement gives us probably our earliest notion of reality — notion, I mean, as distinct from mere feeling. Resistance is offered by one part of our body to another, and yet both feel: so our body as both resisting and feeling is specially real to us. What does not resist, or resists only in a way not easily recognized, is not thought to be real. Thus air seems to be emptiness — empty space. ”

“ Ordinary language does indeed always suggest a dualism of thought and things. Knowing is distinguished from the known. And the distinction is necessary for our ordinary thinking, which is picture-thinking, and takes different aspects as if they were separable in fact. But any philosophical theory of dualism raises more difficulties than it solves. If thought and reality are ultimately separated, then we have to face the question how they can be combined. How can we ever know anything, if thought and reality are ultimately distinct from one another? Scepticism is the logical outcome of dualism. ”

“ I have called this a metaphysical hypothesis, but I believe it to be much more, and to be the ultimate fact to which every avenue in philosophy leads. In Logic, abstract identity brings us to a deadlock: so would abstract difference. Identity cannot exclude difference, nor difference identity. In the evolution of the physical universe, the rationality of the process can only be manifested in the chaotic multiplicity and variability of nature. We cannot know anything except by thought getting its material from sensation and feeling. ”

“ If we abstract from the mode in which alone we can know the world, we may talk of phenomena as having behind them a thing-in-itself, and we may call that the ultimate reality. The tendency of modern science is to regard all the various phenomena of nature as different manifestations of one "Energy." Consciousness or thought is then simply the highest form of energy which we know. (Will itself is not the highest form: for rational volition implies thought.) ”

“ I think I hardly need recur to the suggestion that reality must be what is in space; for that would make our feelings unreal. Nevertheless reality to beings constituted as we are must appear spread out in space and in time. Yet the very fact that we know space as space and time as time, i.e. that we recognize the outside-one-another of things and the after-one-another of events, proves that in some sense or other (whether we can explain it or not) we are not in space and time. ”

“ Is everything to be called an individual that can be thought of or spoken of as "one"? I have heard of a preacher who wished to prove that all nature testified to Unity a very good thesis but he tried to get at his conclusion by a short cut. "There is one sun, there is one moon, there is one great multitude of stars." ”

“ This absolute subjectivity is the ultimate reality: we never can get behind it. That other persons are, each of them, subjects in the same way we know only by inference. That the "I" is the same in different moments of our own experience we know only by inference. That the transcendental Ego is identical in any way with the phenomenal Ego (what we call our "real self") is an inference. The mode of that identity is a matter of speculative hypothesis, as is also the question whether or in what way it is the same or different to different persons. ”

“ The primary qualities of matter thus seem, from the scientific point of view, to have greater reality than the secondary. Not that which is felt, but that which can be thought in terms of mathematical conceptions, has the greater reality to the scientific mind. A thing really is — that way of thinking about it which fits it into its place in an intelligible system of the universe. ”

“ We often hear it argued "thought implies a thinker." True, but a thinker is not necessarily a thinking substance: a thinker is a thinking subject. All that is immediately given in consciousness is the mere Ego, the mere selfness, a unique and individual experience in the moment of feeling or thinking or willing. [5] As already said, a feeling is only real, in the lowest sense of reality, as my feeling, a thought as my thought. ”

“ Good has no meaning to us save in reference to imperfection and evil. But all these distinctions fall within thought—in its widest sense. In theological language, God is both transcendent and immanent: nothing in the world is outside God and yet God is not simply the sum of particular existences. This idea of Thought realizing itself in nature, its own "other," in order to return into itself seems the only way out of the difficulties of these philosophical problems. If it is asked "Why should the Absolute be this self-differentiating unity?" ”

“ But this particular self is, as I have shown, not an individual incapable of further analysis, but like other things it is a unity of the manifold, an identity with differences in it. The ultimate subject of knowing, the ultimate reality, is incapable of further analysis, in the sense that we cannot get behind or round it: we cannot know it as an object like other objects. But on the other hand it only becomes properly "real," knowledge only passes from mere possibility into actuality, by the recognition of differences, of a manifold, within consciousness. ”

“ When people try to argue one out of a feeling of pleasure or of pain, they do so by saying that it is not real; i.e. it is unimportant, it is not connected with what is permanent and persistent in our experience, it is not such as the sane or healthy man would feel. [1] That is to say, so far as the meaning of reality is concerned, pleasures and pains are real or unreal just as thoughts are subjectively real if they are actually experienced by any one, objectively real if they fit in with the rest of experience, i.e. if they belong to a coherent and intelligible system of thought-relations. ”

“ The logical tests of the value of any scientific theory always imply that that alone can be real which is coherent, which forms part of an intelligible system. To say that thinking is the test of reality may seem to open up the way to the most mischievous and unscientific delusions of metaphysics: metaphysicians being supposed to be persons who evolve the world out of their inner consciousness, instead of making their minds the passive mirrors of reality (whatever that may mean) . But we are familiar with this test of reality in its negative form — the inconceivability of the opposite. ”

“ Will any Realist undertake to tell us what an atom is, unless it is either a way of thinking which we find convenient in trying to think out the nature of things, or an unknown and unknowable which he can neither think nor express?
That within reality we can make a distinction between greater and less reality may be used as an argument to prove that the universe contains an element which cannot be rational: in other words that Thought finds itself confronted by an irrational "Other" (θάτερον) . So that we seem thrown back on the Platonic dualism. ”

“ I fancy that to some persons a sensation might seem to have more reality than a thought, because the organism is affected in an obvious way in the case of sensation, either by some external or internal stimulus, whereas a thought does not so obviously depend on any organic process, and was in old-fashioned psychological theories supposed to occur independently of anything happening in the brain. ”

“ Self-identity is not an immediate datum of consciousness: it is a matter of inference. I think of myself as the permanent substance of which particular actions, feelings, etc., are predicable. But the real self is not a bare unity: the real human individual is his ancestry and his age epitomized. ”

“ Thinking is, therefore, the test of objective reality.
Such a sentence seems far away from the plain man's mode of expression, and I fancy the objection would be made here that I am ignoring an important distinction: that which is in space is real in a sense in which that which does not occupy space is not. Real things, it will be said, are different from ideas. ”

“ WHAT IS REALITY?
THE critics of Idealism, so numerous at the present time, seem to me more ready to uphold against the claims of thought the superior dignity of the Real, than to explain what they mean by that very ambiguous term. Our "Realists" nowadays are too cautious, or too polite, to speak about "the Vulgar" ”

“ Spiritual substance, like material substance, is either simply a meeting point of universal qualities or a metaphysical phantom — like the geometrical abstraction of a point treated as if it were a real thing. But it will be said "there is the difference of consciousness." Well, if by reality he meant consciousness, an idealist is not likely to quarrel with the statement. But then, I suspect, the realist means by consciousness simply an attribute of a substance: he has got his Vorstellung of spiritual substance in the background. ”