Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/165

SOME PROBLEMS OF CONCEPTION. 149 generality has disappeared. A quality as a quality can only exist in an individual, that is, here and now, as a particular case. True, we can drop the particularity out of sight and think of the content as merely qualifying reality. But if we forget that the qualification must take place after all in individual instances we are on the high road to another fiction which will consist essentially in this, that we try to find the essence of universality in a mode of existence which is not individual. The universal will be thrown into contrast with its manifestations and a nervous sense of insecurity will make us shout very loud about its superior reality as compared with the mere particular. And this tendency will find support in many of the cases to which we have just refer- red. When the common content cannot be distinctly pointed out ground is given for the charge that no individual ade- quately represents it. No instance is really typical; still less is it ideal. Here at least there seems, to be a bona-fide qualitative contrast. And if so, surely the ideal must have a reality of its own to which the mere particular is an imperfect approx- imation. Deny this and you appear as an iconoclast, a de- stroyer of all that men most cherish in experience, while the opposing theory ' upholds the banner of the ideal ' and applauds itself as saviour of society. This is the fallacy of the supersensible, a fallacy which is always at bottom the same though its forms are many and various. Professing to be superior to sensationalism it rests on a view of reality quite as crude as the sensationalist. Its reality must be some- thing which it can metaphorically touch and see. It must have its object distinct, crystallised, and unchanging. It insists on what is intellectually solid quite as much as sensationalism on what is physically solid. And when you point out that the principles in which it is interested are of a quite different character it supposes you to be destroying them. In a word, while imagining itself possessor of the spirit it is the hopeless bondslave of the letter. It is but another step, and the whole force and value of the world of ideas is taken violently from it and thrown into the super- natural. Right and wrong, for example, are taken to be worth so little that, unless there is hell fire behind, they may follow the national honour and be ' expunged from the dic- tionary '. And the irony of the situation is that the very same man who thus insists on the nullity of moral obliga- tion poses, and quite honestly to boot, as the defender of morality against the wicked Sceptic who ventures to find an intrinsic and adequate authority in the honourable and the right, as right and honourable. This is the descensus