Note 361 — Chapter VIII · PRAGMATISM AND ANGLO-HEGELIAN RATIONALISM

And the general reader must remember that the “whole” is always (with all due respect to his high dialectic ability and his high temper of mind and his scholarship) a kind of ignis fatuus in Dr. Bosanquet’s book, a kind of shadow thrown by the lamps and the tools of his own choosing in his Quixotic search. The “whole” is the “perfected individuality” of the individual who sets out to find truth in this great world of ours with all its real possibilities of gain and loss. It is the completion of the “system” of truth to which the truth-seeker would fain reduce the entire universe, that becomes for him (for the time being) the mere “subject-matter” of his thought. It is, that is to say, in both cases, a purely formal conception—an abstraction, although to Dr. Bosanquet it is the reality implied in the very existence and activity of the individual thinker. But the latter is the case to him only because he looks upon man as existing to think instead of as thinking to exist.