Intellectualism in the vicious sense began when Socrates and Plato taught that what a thing really is, is told us by its definition.  Ever since Socrates we have been taught that reality consists of essences, not of appearances, and that the essences of things are known whenever we know their definitions.  So first we identify the thing with a concept and then we identify the concept with a definition, and only then, inasmuch as the thing is whatever the definition expresses, are we sure of apprehending the real essence of it or the full truth about it.

So far no harm is done.  The misuse of concepts begins with the habit of employing them privatively as well as positively, using them not merely to assign properties to things, but to deny the very properties with which the things sensibly present themselves.  Logic can extract all its possible consequences from any definition, and the logician who is unerbittlich consequent is often tempted, when he cannot extract a certain property from a definition, to deny that the concrete object to which the definition applies can possibly possess that property.  The definition that fails to yield it must exclude or negate it.  This is Hegel’s regular method of establishing his system.

It is but the old story, of a useful practice first becoming a method, then a habit, and finally a tyranny that defeats the end it was used for.  Concepts, first employed to make things intelligible, are clung to even when they make them unintelligible.  Thus it comes that when once you have conceived things as ‘independent,’ you must proceed to deny the possibility of any connexion whatever among them, because the notion of connexion is not contained in the definition of independence.  For a like reason you must deny any possible forms or modes of unity among things which you have begun by defining as a ‘many.’  We have cast a glance at Hegel’s and Bradley’s use of this sort of reasoning, and you will remember Sigwart’s epigram that according to it a horseman can never in his life go on foot, or a photographer ever do anything but photograph.

The classic extreme in this direction is the denial of the possibility of change, and the consequent branding of the world of change as unreal, by certain philosophers.  The definition of A is changeless, so is the definition of B. The one definition cannot change into the other, so the notion that a concrete thing A should change into another concrete thing B is made Out to be contrary to reason.  In Mr. Bradley’s difficulty in seeing how sugar can be sweet intellectualism outstrips itself and becomes openly a sort of verbalism.  Sugar is just sugar and sweet is just sweet; neither is the other; nor can the word ‘is’ ever be understood to join any subject to its predicate rationally.  Nothing ‘between’ things can connect them, for ‘between’ is just that third thing, ‘between,’ and would need itself to be connected to the first and second things by two still finer betweens, and so on ad infinitum.