That, at any rate, is the sort of thing one hears demanded, and if
only because the demand rests upon implications that reach far
beyond the region of language, it is worth considering here. It
implies, indeed, almost everything that we are endeavouring to
repudiate in this particular work. It implies that the whole
intellectual basis of mankind is established, that the rules of
logic, the systems of counting and measurement, the general
categories and schemes of resemblance and difference, are
established for the human mind for ever--blank Comte-ism, in fact,
of the blankest description. But, indeed, the science of logic and
the whole framework of philosophical thought men have kept since the
days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence as
a final expression of the human mind, than the Scottish Longer
Catechism. Amidst the welter of modern thought, a philosophy long
lost to men rises again into being, like some blind and almost
formless embryo, that must presently develop sight, and form, and
power, a philosophy in which this assumption is denied. [Footnote:
The serious reader may refer at leisure to Sidgwick's Use of Words
in Reasoning (particularly), and to Bosanquet's Essentials of Logic,
Bradley's Principles of Logic, and Sigwart's Logik; the lighter
minded may read and mark the temper of Professor Case in the British
Encyclopaedia, article Logic (Vol. XXX.). I have appended to his
book a rude sketch of a philosophy upon new lines, originally read
by me to the Oxford Phil. Soc. in 1903.]
All through this Utopian excursion, I must warn you, you shall feel
the thrust and disturbance of that insurgent movement. In the
reiterated use of "Unique," you will, as it were, get the gleam of
its integument; in the insistence upon individuality, and the
individual difference as the significance of life, you will feel the
texture of its shaping body. Nothing endures, nothing is precise and
certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere
repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the
mysterious inmost quality of Being. Being, indeed!--there is no
being, but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato turned
his back on truth when he turned towards his museum of specific
ideals. Heraclitus, that lost and misinterpreted giant, may perhaps
be coming to his own....
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