admitted to exist that we can begin to distinguish the real from the unreal, and to enumerate the different sorts and criteria of each.
It is necessary in the next place to put the primitive datum explicandum in the proper light. The primary psychological fact is that everything that is is real, and that the burden of proof lies on those who deny that anything is real. Nor does Mr. Ritchie dispute this, though he minimizes its importance, and apparently fails to see that reality in this sense rests on a totally different footing from all others. 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. For their work is hypothetical and derivative, and if the conditions under which we ascribed reality to these interpreters of reality are not fulfilled, their raison d'être has vanished. But reality survives — even though its inscrutable flux of phenomena should laugh to scorn the attempts at comprehending it which it provokes.
But this unique position of primary reality Mr. Ritchie quite fails to appreciate.[1] Hence it is on the basis of an insufficient recognition of the psychological data that he proposes to consider what reality is. This question is plainly an ontological one, but Mr. Ritchie treats it as if it were epistemological, and = 'How do we know a phenomenon to be (ultimately) real?' I.e. he substitutes for the ontological inquiry into the ratio essendi of reality an epistemological inquiry into its ratio cognoscendi or the criterion of reality, and then unhesitatingly attributes to his results a metaphysical validity. Yet he seems quite unaware that
- ↑ He does not even succeed in proving the unreality of dreams, by saying that they are not self-coherent nor follow in an intelligible sequence on the events of previous dreams. For their ' incoherence ' is not, as a rule, intrinsic, but is an ex post facto judgment passed on them in our waking life. And as for the intelligible sequence of successive dreams, we should require an intelligible sequence in successive lives to make the parallel complete. Unless, then, Mr. Ritchie has a transcendent knowledge of another life, whereby he judges our waking life to be real, because of its coherence and intelligibleness from the standpoint of the former, his comparison fails. It is true that we sometimes suspect our dreams while still dreaming (though as all dreams are 'near waking,' we cannot be said to be 'nearer waking' then). But does not our waking life lie under the same suspicion on the same grounds? If it is permissible for once to appeal from the "plain man" to the man of genius, is it not "a mad, mad world, my masters"? Have not seers, prophets, and philosophers in all ages testified that our earthly life was but a dream? And if to these divinely-inspired 'dreamers' we owe all the religions that have swayed the lives of men, must not dreams and hallucinations be accounted most real — in Mr. Ritchie's "ethical" sense?
