to mean, Can we know reality apart from its activities? A negative answer to this, however, does not dispose of the issue. We may with entire conviction accept the truism that reality is revealed only by its activities, and still see the two problems as distinct the one from the other. What then is this problem of reality? The great masters of philosophy have repeatedly given the answer—it is the problem of finding the individual in its concrete entirety.
Where shall we look for it? Sense perception itself is a nexus of abstractions, beginning in the act of fixating an aspect of the temporal flow and making that representative of the rest. The individual thing, thus obtained, science forthwith analyzes away till all the fixated elements disappear, except the ideational framework. This framework is of course wholly conceptual, and consists of rules that apply more or less accurately to the thing world of common sense. To reverse the process and restore what abstracting science rejected or ignored helps very little, for that merely carries us back to the original flow of 'impressions' as the immediate antecedent of sense perception. Whether then we go with science or turn back with philosophy, we find everywhere and only the ceaseless process. The solid earth of experience is then only a disguised flux of events and nothing more. This seems decisive. It is the more curious and perplexing because thought content is by nature static, so that movement and change are thinkable only as the mind passes from one static content to another in rapid succession. What more is needed to convince us that we have in this conception of the world process the ultimate fact in the universe? The utter emptiness of this result is often concealed by thinking of the cosmic whole as a System in which every part is interrelated with every other. By calling this the Absolute all difficulties disappear. The Absolute is the long-sought individual, wholly concrete, all-embracing and eternal. Now this conclusion is neither good science nor good philosophy. It passes without warrant the limits of science, and turns out for philosophy to be only an hypostasis—or rather a name for the problem instead of its solution. The philosophical student is aware that no system, however inclusive, is self-sus-
