solutely as the system "kill," or the system "cure," determined the
_function_ of the digitalis. Ascend to the absolute system, instead of
biding with these relative and partial ones, and you shall see that the
law of through-and-throughness must and does obtain.

Of course, this argument is entirely reasonable, and debars us
completely from chopping logic about the concrete examples Mr. Haldane
has chosen. It is not his fault if his categories are so fine an
instrument that nothing but the sum total of things can be taken to show
us the manner of their use. It is simply our misfortune that he has not
the sum total of things to show it by. Let us fall back from all
concrete attempts and see what we can do with his notion of
through-and-throughness, avowedly taken _in abstracto_. In abstract
systems the "through-and-through" Ideal is realized on every hand. In
any system, as such, the members are only _members_ in the system.
Abolish the system and you abolish its members, for you have conceived
them through no other property than the abstract one of membership.
Neither rightness nor leftness, except through bi-laterality. Neither
mortgager nor mortgagee, except through mortgage. The logic of these
cases is this:--_If_ A, then B; but _if_ B, then A: wherefore _if_
either, Both; and if not Both, Nothing.

It costs nothing, not even a mental effort, to admit that the absolute
totality of things _may_ be organized exactly after the pattern of one
of these "through-and-through" abstractions. In fact, it is the
pleasantest and freest of mental movements. Husband makes, and is made
by, wife, through marriage; one makes other, by being itself other;
everything self-created through its opposite--you go round like a
squirrel in a cage. But if you stop and reflect upon what you are about,
you lay bare the exact point at issue between common sense and the
"through-and-through" school.

What, in fact, is the logic of these abstract systems? It is, as we said
above: If any Member, then the Whole System; if not the Whole System,
then Nothing. But how can Logic possibly do anything more with these
two hypotheses than combine them into the single disjunctive
proposition--"Either this Whole System, just as it stands, or Nothing at
all." Is not that disjunction the ultimate word of Logic in the matter,
and can any disjunction, as such, resolve _itself_? It may be that Mr.
Haldane sees how one horn, the concept of the Whole System, carri