change, neither has it parts—­any more than abstract independence as such interacts.  But then neither abstract oneness nor abstract independence exists; only concrete real things exist, which add to these properties the other properties which they possess, to make up what we call their total nature.  To construe any one of their abstract names as making their total nature impossible is a misuse of the function of naming.  The real way of rescue from the abstract consequences of one name is not to fly to an opposite name, equally abstract, but rather to correct the first name by qualifying adjectives that restore some concreteness to the case.  Don’t take your ‘independence’ simpliciter, as Lotze does, take it secundum quid.  Only when we know what the process of interaction literally and concretely consists in can we tell whether beings independent in definite respects, distinct, for example, in origin, separate in place, different in kind, etc., can or cannot interact.

The treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what the name’s definition fails positively to include, is what I call ‘vicious intellectualism.’  Later I shall have more to say about this intellectualism, but that Lotze’s argument is tainted by it I hardly think we can deny.  As well might you contend (to use an instance from Sigwart) that a person whom you have once called an ‘equestrian’ is thereby forever made unable to walk on his own feet.

I almost feel as if I should apologize for criticising such subtle arguments in rapid lectures of this kind.  The criticisms have to be as abstract as the arguments, and in exposing their unreality, take on such an unreal sound themselves that a hearer not nursed in the intellectualist atmosphere knows not which of them to accuse.  But le vin est verse, il faut le boire, and I must cite a couple more instances before I stop.

If we are empiricists and go from parts to wholes, we believe that beings may first exist and feed so to speak on their own existence, and then secondarily become known to one another.  But philosophers of the absolute tell us that such independence of being from being known would, if once admitted, disintegrate the universe beyond all hope of mending.  The argument is one of Professor Royce’s proofs that the only alternative we have is to choose the complete disunion of all things or their complete union in the absolute One.

Take, for instance, the proverb ‘a cat may look at a king’ and adopt the realistic view that the king’s being is independent of the cat’s witnessing.  This assumption, which amounts to saying that it need make no essential difference to the royal object whether the feline subject cognizes him or not, that the cat may look away from him or may even be annihilated, and the king remain unchanged,—­this assumption, I say, is considered by my ingenious colleague to lead to the absurd practical consequence that the