There is a sense, no doubt, in which some such version of the facts as this is unanswerable, but controversial advantage is paid for, here as elsewhere in the logic of absolute idealism, at the cost of tangible meaning and practical importance. Just what does the contention come to? Let us say, for example, that one has learned to use a typewriter. What has happened is like an illiterate person's learning to read and write. Correspondence with one's friends begins to take on new meaning and to acquire new value; one begins to find a new pleasure and stimulation taking the place of the ineffectual drivings of an uneasy conscience. All this, let us say, has come from the moderate outlay for a superior mechanical instrument. And now let it be granted that it would not have come if the fortunate individual had not been "what he was." If it has come it is because the individual and the rest of the world were "of such a sort" that the revival and new growth of interest _could_ take its rise with the provision of the new instrumentality. But what, precisely, does such a statement mean? What sort of verification does it admit of? What fruitful insight into the concrete facts of the case does it convey? Of _what_ sort, prior to the event, does it show the individual to have been? The truth is, of course, that he was of _no_ sort, then and there and with reference to the purchase--he was of no sort decisively. He was neither purchaser nor rejector. He was neither a convinced "typist" nor piously confirmed in his predilection for writing "by hand." He was neither wholly weary of his correspondence nor fully cognizant of the importance of intercourse with his friends for his soul's good. He may have been dissatisfied and rebellious or he may have been comfortably persuaded that letter-writing, though an irksome labor, was even at that sufficiently worth while. The most that can be said is simply that he must have been willing and desirous to try the experiment for the sake of any good, imaginable or beyond present imagination, that might come of it. But being of "such a sort" as this could not prejudge the issue--although, undoubtedly, in willingness to raise an issue there lies always the possibility of change. All the plausibility of the dogma we are here considering comes from its hasty inclusion of this general attitude of constructively experimental inquiry and effort, this essential character of creative intelligence, as _one among_ the concrete interests which constitute and define our particular problems in their inception. To say _ex post facto_ that the individual must have been "of such a sort" as to do what he has in fact done is a purely verbal comment which, whatever may be its uses, can assuredly be of no use whatever in suggesting either solution or method for the next situation to arise. It may be comfortably reassuring afterwards, but it is an empty oracle beforehand.