influential of the practical tests of reality, which may be said to have underlain and guided the development of all the rest. It lies in the fact emphasized by Professor James in his excellent chapter on the perception of reality (Psych. II, 295) that "that is adjudged real which has intimate relation to our emotional and active life," i.e. practical value. It is this criterion which has constituted the objective world of ordinary men, by excluding from it the world of dreams, hallucinations, and the transient though normal 'illusions of the senses.' It is this which accounts for the superior reality so often ascribed to feelings, especially to pleasure and pain, which Mr. Ritchie mentions (pp. 268-9). It is this which absorbs into it Mr. Ritchie's fifth or "ethical" sense of reality. It is this, lastly, which has moulded the whole development of the intellect, and so pervades all Mr. Ritchie's criteria and reduces them to dependence upon it. Hence if we are to speak of any 'main (derivative) sense of reality' at all, it must certainly be conceded to Professor James that "whatever things have intimate and continuous connection with my life, are things of whose reality I cannot doubt."
And though there can be no doubt of the practical importance of this criterion, there may be much about its speculative value. The history of the practical struggle which has evolved us and our minds seems to offer but slender guarantees that our faculties should have been fitted for, and our energies directed towards, those aspects of reality which are of the greatest theoretic importance,[1] and hence arguments from practical or moral necessity, universal desires, and the like, do not perhaps yield the safest approach to the ultimate reality of things.
And not only must it be said that Mr. Ritchie's tests are not, properly speaking, rational at all, but it must be pointed out that he actually shrinks from mentioning in this place the test of rationality in its simplest and severest shape, viz. that of conformity to the necessary laws of our thought. The omission is surprising, and one would fain ascribe it to the perception that it would have been too palpable a begging of the issue to have made conformity with the laws of thought the test of reality in an argument designed to show that reality ultimately lay in the determinations of our thought. Or can it be due to the fact that the chief characteristic of reality is its Becoming, and that Becoming and its defiance of the law of Contradiction is what our thought has never been able to grasp? Yet the criterion is not without value. We are reluctant to admit facts and explanations which seem to contravene it, such as, e.g. the four-dimensionality of Space and the illusoriness of Time, and would only accept them as inferences, e.g. from the untying of Zöllner's knots and the alleged occurrence of premonitions, in the very last resort.
- ↑ Else should we not have developed e.g. an electric sense?
