acter in a
play.... The novelist and the dramatist, like the mathematician and
logician, are onlookers at the logical spectacle."[24] On the other
hand, the term "conforming" suggests a task, with the possibilities of
success and failure. Have we, then, two wholly independent possibilities
of error--one merely "psychological," the other "logical"? The same
point may be made even more obviously with reference to the term
"beholding." The term is used as if beholding were a perfectly simple
act, having no problems and no possibilities of mistakes--as if there
could be no mis-beholding.[25]

But fixing our psychological eye on the "logical spectacle," what does
it behold? A universal generating an infinite series of identical
instances of itself--i.e., instances which differ only in "logical
position." If in a world of entities that "merely are" the term
"generation" causes perplexity, the tension is soon relieved; for this
turns out to be a merely subsistential non-temporal generation which,
like Hegel's generation of the categories, in no way compromises a world
of entities that "merely are."

Steering clear of the thicket of metaphysical problems that we here
encounter, let us keep to the logical trail. First it is clear that
logical operations are of the same reproductive repetitive type that we
have found in the associational logic of empiricism, and in the logic of
the objective universal. Indeed, after objective idealism has conceded
that the finite mind merely "witnesses" or at most contributes only in
an "infinitesimal" degree to the logical activity of the objective
universal, what remains of the supposed gulf between absolute idealism
and analytic realism?

It follows, of course, that there can be no place in analytic logic for
"procedure by hypotheses." However, it is to the credit of some analytic
logicians that they see this and frankly accept the situation instead of
attempting to retain hypotheses by making them "accidents" or mere
"auxiliaries" of inference. On the other hand, others find that the
chief glory of analytic logic is precisely that it "gives thought
wings"[26] for the free construction of hypotheses. In his lectures on
"Scientific Methods in Philosophy" Mr. Russell calls some of the most
elemental and sacred entities of analytic logic "convenient fictions."
This retention of hypotheses at the cost of cogency is of course in
order to avoid a break with science. Those who see that there is no