intrinsically tends towards harmony. And this is more than a purely 'scientific' evolutionism is probably as yet ready to admit.
As to the, I admit, generally impracticable, test of self-evidence, it does indeed include the logical test of inconceivability, but it is much wider, as it may equally well rest on an emotional basis. And if Mr. Ritchie will think out all that is involved in a completely congruous experience, freed from every shadow of a doubt and every trace of disharmony, he will see that 'self-evidence' is a lofty metaphysical ideal rather than a psychological accident.
As regards Mr. Ritchie's criticism of my views, I utterly deny that I have yielded any ground to his, and if he had quoted me completely and in my own words, this would, I think, be quite clear. Thus in the passage he quotes (p. 544), he omits to complete my admission that individuality was an ideal by the addition "as well as a characteristic of reality." He should be careful, too, about his adjectives in so delicate a matter. Thus that of "unalterable" seems singularly inappropriate to the individual, even of pre-evolutionist days. For the chief value of the individual as an explanation surely always lay in his flexibility, as contrasted with the rigid immutability of the logical category 'out of Time.' Again "absolutely independent" is an epithet I never used of the individual, and it does not, I believe, occur in the book to which Mr. Ritchie refers us for a statement of the views he combats – "Riddles of the Sphinx." It is, indeed, in its most obvious sense, incompatible with the conception of a world constituted by the interactions of individuals.[1]
As to the subject of Becoming, I must deny that Becoming is a thinkable conception – that it is more than a symbol to designate the contradiction of Thought implicit in all reality, the , as it were, of rationalism. Of course, therefore, "absolute Becoming" is "unthinkable," "self-contradictory," "the basis for scepticism," &c.; but all these abusive epithets do not mend matters, for they simply re-state its incomprehensibility to thought. And no reconciliation is, I submit, possible from the side of mere thought, but only from that of the real self, which both becomes and thinks, and forms the permanent subject by which the flux is measured, and so, grasping it from the side of feeling, can reduce Becoming to an appearance, to be interpreted by the finite and definitely determinable conception of
- ↑ For the reasons why these do not justify a hypostasization of "the element of unity and reason," I may refer to "Riddles of the Sphinx," p. 356-8; for reasons why pluralism is not polytheism, ibid. p. 374.
