His use of the word belief[383] shows that it is, after all his professional homage to “mediation” and to the necessary abstractions of logic and system, _belief and not knowledge_ that is to him the final and “working” estimate of truth and of reality. And the same conclusion follows from the second matter of the confession of which we have spoken, that his entire argumentation is but the expression of a strong conviction.[384] It is again, therefore, we would insist a _spiritual conviction_, and not a conceptual system that is actually and necessarily the moving force of _his_ entire intellectual activity. And, we would add to his own face, it is a conviction moreover that “_works_,” and not a “logical whole” or a mere conceptual ideal, that he must (as a philosopher) engender in the mind of his average reader about reality. His “logical whole” and his “individuality as logical completeness,” “work” with him [Professor Bosanquet] for the reason that he is primarily an intellectual worker, a worker in the realm of mind. But reality (as the whole world of human work and human effort is there to tell us) is more than an intellectual system. And what is a conviction to him is not necessarily a conviction that works with the ordinary man, who knows reality better than he does, or who knows it (like himself) in his desires and in his beliefs rather than in the terms and conceptions that are the mere tools of the intellect and the specialist. For, taking his book as a whole, we may say about it that the dissolution of reality into a conceptual system that is effected there is at best but another convincing proof of the truth of the words of the great David Hume,[385] that the understanding, “_when it acts alone_, and according to its most general principles, _entirely subverts itself_, and leaves not the slightest degree of evidence in any proposition, either in philosophy or common life.” NOTE