Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller

“ What though his reasoning be forged link by link, an adamantine chain of logical necessity, it will yet be hypothetical; what though he show what truth must be, if truth there be, he cannot show that truth there is. ”

“ Would it not be strange, then, to allow our own inexperience, and the stupidity of our ancestors to exercise an absolute censorship over the growth of knowledge? Besides, it so happens that in most cases when "universal experience" is appealed to, its voice is self-contradictory. (What right have we, e.g. to reject countless traditions in order to prove that miracles are "contrary to experience"?)
But perhaps Mr. Ritchie does not contend that any one of his criteria is singly sufficient as a test of reality and proposes to employ them collectively. ”

“ So supremely honest is our author that he will not dogmatise. “It is the consciousness that he can never transcend the supreme alternative of thought, that though he has grasped the truth, truth always leaves him with an if. ”

“ Similarly the goals to which the methods of our thought tend — its intrinsic ideals — acquire a hypothetical reality of a lofty order. For it is evident that if the real nature of phenomena is to be discovered by the way of thought, the supreme ideals of that thought must be, or be realized by, the ultimate reality. But it would not follow that those ideals would render reality mere thought. For they might point either at a reality which should transcend thought, or at one of which thought should be but a single activity — even as it is now the activity of real beings. ”

“ Revolt against the whole civilized environment in which he was brought up is the keynote of Nietzsche’s literary career. His revolt against Christian faith and morals turns him into a proudly atheistic “free-thinker,” and preacher of a new “master” morality, which transposes the current valuations, deposes the “Christian virtues,” and incites the “over-man” ruthlessly to trample under foot the servile herd of the weak, degenerate and poor in spirit. His revolt against the theory of state supremacy turns him into an anarchist and individualist ”

“ It simply postulates that we must learn to think of the individuality of the real as we have learned to think of its reality, not as a completed being, but as a becoming, i.e. as being a process. That which we designate by the term individuality is a varying and growing quantity, never wholly absent, but not always fully developed. At the one end of the process are the atoms — of which we can hardly discern the individuality. At the other end are — let us say the angels — individuals so perfectly individualized that, as mediæval doctors taught, each would form a species by himself. ”

“ And here the author admits that we come upon the trace of the teleology which is inseparable from all evolution. “For when the phenomena of the world’s evolution are subordinated to the general law of evolution, their relation inevitably tends to become that of a means to an end.” This he contends is not the teleology which is dreaded by the modern exponents of natural science. It does not attempt to regard all creation as existing for the use and benefit of man. ”

“ Nietzsche’s writings must be understood in their relation to these circumstances of his life, and as the outcome of a violent revolt against them on the part of an intensely emotional and nervous temperament. His philosophy, consequently, is neither systematic in itself nor expounded in systematic form. It is made up of a number of points of view which successively appeared acceptable to a personality whose self-appreciation verges more and more upon the insane, and exhibits neither consecutiveness nor consistency. ”

“ Thus it is only an infirmity of our reason, causing us to hypostasize abstractions, which leads us to speak of 'universal laws of nature,' as if they were more than shorthand expressions for the habitual interactions of realities. But as the subtlety of our insight draws nearer to the subtlety of nature, the crudeness of our 'universal laws' begins to appear. We grow better able to appreciate the real individuality of things, and so substitute specific 'laws' for general. ”

“ It is here, then, the writer brings forward his own method, which is the basing of metaphysics on science—they must be concrete, and not abstract. “In other words, they must proceed from the phenomenally real to the ultimately real, from science to metaphysics.” Where he differs from current evolutionary philosophy in determining the relation of the higher to the lower, is that, whereas the popular philosophy now endeavours to interpret the higher by the lower, this writer would have us interpret the lower by the higher—that things have had a history is the basis of the evolutionary philosophy ”

“ Ritchie wilfully strips himself of one of his chief means of understanding the world when he abstracts from his own reality, and is then puzzled to find that he must be either nothing or an unknowable thing-in-itself, if he be not a bundle of universal thought-relations. ”

“ If, then, epistemological idealism is solipsism and "twin brother to scepticism," it must be surmounted before the nature of reality can be discussed. If it is not surmounted—cadit quaestio—it becomes futile to discuss whether the real is one or many, whether its criterion is consistency or what, if there is no objectivity at all. Mr. Ritchie has, of course, a perfect right to call a halt here, and to refuse to discuss anything further until his opponents have successfully emerged from the clutches of subjective realism. ”

“ He has begun, but he has not ended the philosophy of Evolution.” While admitting the truth of Mr. Spencer’s formula, he insists that it is not all the truth, and the same with Von Hartmann’s. As to his own conclusion, the author gives what is rather an illustration than a formula, though he uses it as the latter. “All real progress develops both the individual and the social medium. It is a development of the individual in society, and of society through the individual.” ”

“ The individual is more than a meeting-point of universals, because universals are not individuals, nor able to form one, however many of them meet together. But they never do meet in numbers sufficient for a quorum: the attempt to reduce the individuals to universals generates an infinite process, which is never equivalent to the finite individual.
It is not, then, any logical difficulty which compels us to modify the original sense of the assertion that individuality is an ultimate and definitely determined characteristic of reality, but the general flux of reality itself. ”

“ That this principle will carry him very far the writer feels assured, as he proceeds to test and verify it by its applicability to the different stages of Evolution—to the evolution of human society, to that of the lower animals, and finally to that of the inorganic world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This amorphous mass of primitive perplexity is overlaid with successive strata of metaphysical interpretation, and these deposits will go on with growing precision and refinement until a completely congruous account of all the facts is reached. But though it is well to be reminded of the foundations on which we must build, and of the primary data our solutions must satisfy, the truth surely lies ahead of us and not behind us. ”

“ Spencer’s glory if, contrary to the drift of his own utterances, we maintain that, being the first, he cannot for this very reason be the last, and express a hope that he may prove the founder of a long dynasty of evolutionist philosophers. ”

“ In the case of the lower orders of individuality such appreciation of the peculiar nature of each thing may still be an impracticable and indefinitely distant ideal, but with regard to higher orders the principle is well established. We could hardly say with the poet that "the proper study for mankind is man," if there were not, even in the meanest, an inexhaustible store of idiosyncratic reactions, — an individuality, in short, which becomes more and more conspicuous as we pass from the lower to the higher, and looks less and less like a combination of abstract universals! ”

“ Ritchie will prefer science to democracy, and the authoritative judgment of Athanasius and the cat against the rest of the world! If he does not, he might work out an amusing theory making the Referendum the ultimate test of reality. That, at least, would be a definite method of utilizing the experience of others, such as is at present lacking. We act quite inconsistently in sometimes submitting to the superior delicacy of the expert's senses, and sometimes rejecting it. ”

“ He rejects alike the epistemological and psychological methods: the fact that the mind has a history is fatal to the claims of the psychological method, as it cannot take account of that history without ceasing to be psychological, and submitting to the restrictions of historical and metaphysical methods. ”

“ For it is the primary fact which all the rest are more or less complete theories to explain, and to which they must be referred in order to test their validity. If they prove capable of explaining what they set out to explain, we may reach a loftier view of reality, which will transfigure our primary datum for us, but which even so cannot be considered in abstraction from its basis; if they do not, the other 'senses of reality' are worthless. ”

“ Ritchie's.
Those objections arise in the first place out of his failure to appreciate the development in our conceptions of individuality and reality which has corresponded to the evolution of the objects which they symbolize, and in the second, out of his misunderstanding the respective positions which his opponents' logic assigns to thought- symbols and that which they symbolize. To say that the individual is the real and that the real is individual, is to make a proposition concerning a reality beyond it. It draws our attention to a fact which its terms cannot fully express. ”

“ Individuality thereby becomes a hypothesis and an ideal, as well as a characteristic of reality. The atom of physics is such a hypothetical prolongation of the individual in one direction. Monads and the like, are prolongations in another, and, in the writer's opinion, a far more promising, direction. So we can come to say that an individual is lacking in individuality, i.e. shows this universal characteristic of reality too indistinctly, seems to lend himself too easily to 'explanation' by universals, seems to borrow too much from others, and the like. ”

“ Ritchie's sense, reality is thought, but whether that assertion is a valid defence against the objection that Mr. Ritchie has given away his case when he has admitted that reality is not thought to human minds. Until, then, Mr. Ritchie can bring rather more convincing proof of his approaching apotheosis and omniscience, it must be contended that he has neither made out his assertion that rationality is the test of reality, nor its connection with the metaphysical dogma that the real is ultimately the thought of a "divine mind." ”