Admit, however, the force of Mr. Bradley’s contention on its own terms and see how futile is the result. It is quite true, as Mr. Bradley says (p. 153), that if a man sits down to play the metaphysical game, he must abide by the rules of thinking; but if thinking be already, with respect to reality, an idle and futile game, simply abiding by the rules does not give additional value to its stakes. Grant the premises as to the character of thought, and the assertion of the final character of the theoretical standard within metaphysics--since metaphysics is a form of theory--is a warning against metaphysics. If the intellect involves self-contradiction, it is either impossible that it should be satisfied, or else self-contradiction is its satisfaction. II Let us, however, turn from Mr. Bradley’s formal proof that the criterion of philosophic truth must be exclusively a canon of formal thought. Let us ignore the contradiction involved in first making the work of thought to be the producing of appearance and then making the law of this thought the law of an Absolute Reality. What about the intellectualist criterion? The intellectualism of Mr. Bradley’s philosophy is represented in the statement that it is “the theoretical standard which guarantees that reality is a self-consistent system” (p. 148). But how can the fact that the criterion of thinking is consistency be employed to determine the nature of the consistency of its object? Consistency in one sense, consistency of reasoning with itself, we know; but what is the nature of the consistency of reality which this consistency necessitates? Thinking without doubt must be logical; but does it follow from this that the reality about which one thinks, and about which one must think consistently if one is to think to any purpose, must itself be already logical? The pivot of the argument is, of course, the old ontological argument, stripped of all theological irrelevancies and reduced to its fighting weight as a metaphysical proposition. Those who question this basic principle of intellectualism will, of course, question it here. They will urge that, instead of the consistency of “reality” resting on the basis of consistency in the reasoning process the latter derives its meaning from the material consistency at which it aims. They will say that the definition of the nature of the consistency which is the end of thinking and which prescribes its technique is to be reached from inquiry into such questions as these: What sort of an activity in the concrete is thinking? what are the specific conditions which it has to fulfil? what is its use; its relevancy; its purport in present concrete experiences? The more it is insisted that the theoretical standard--consistency--is final within theory, the more germane and the more urgent is the question: What then in the concrete is theory? and of what nature _is_ the material consistency which is the test of its formal consistency?[23]