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.

The particular intellectualistic difficulty that had held my own
thought so long in a vise was, as we have seen at such tedious length,
the impossibility of understanding how 'your' experience and 'mine,'
which 'as such' are defined as not conscious of each other, can
nevertheless at the same ti