usness of her
results, will always escape gleefully into the teeming and dramatic
richness of the concrete world.

{70}

So our study turns back here to its beginning. Every way of
classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular
purpose. Conceptions, 'kinds,' are teleological instruments. No
abstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality
except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver. The
interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but
one of a thousand human purposes. When others rear their heads, it
must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs. The
exaggerated dignity and value that philosophers have claimed for their
solutions is thus greatly reduced. The only virtue their theoretic
conception need have is simplicity, and a simple conception is an
equivalent for the world only so far as the world is simple,--the world
meanwhile, whatever simplicity it may harbor, being also a mightily
complex affair. Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgency
in our craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of the
most invincible of human impulses. The quest of the fewest elements of
things is an ideal that some will follow, as long as there are men to
think at all.

But suppose the goal attained. Suppose that at last we have a system
unified in the sense that has been explained. Our world can now be
conceived simply, and our mind enjoys the relief. Our universal
concept has made the concrete chaos rational. But now I ask, Can that
which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly
called rational? It would seem at first sight that it might. One is
tempted at any rate to say that, since the craving for rationality is
appeased by the identification of one {71} thing with another, a datum
which left nothing else outstanding might quench that craving
definitively, or be rational _in se_. No otherness being left to annoy
us, we should sit down at peace. In other words, as the theoretic
tranquillity of the boor results from his spinning no further
considerations about his chaotic universe, so any datum whatever
(provided it were simple, clear, and ultimate) ought to banish puzzle
from the universe of the philosopher and confer peace, inasmuch as
there would then be for him absolutely no further considerations to
spin.

This in fact is what some persons think. Professor Bain sa