y_, and that nothing could claim reality but
the individual.

We cannot follow this controversy farther, as it turns up again between
Locke and Leibniz, between Herbart and Hegel. Suffice it to say that the
knot, as it was tied by language, can be untied by the science of language
alone, which teaches us that there is and can be no such thing as "a name
only." That phrase ought to be banished from all works on philosophy. A
name is and always has been the subjective side of our knowledge, but that
subjective side is as impossible without an objective side as a key is
without a lock. It is useless to ask which of the two is the more real,
for they are real only by being, not two, but one. Realism is as one-sided
as Nominalism. But there is a higher Nominalism, which might better be
called the Science of Language, and which teaches us that, apart from
sensuous perception, all human knowledge is by names and by names only,
and that the object of names is always the general.

This is but one out of hundreds and thousands of cases to show how names
and concepts which come to us by tradition must be submitted to very
careful snuffing before they will yield a pure light. What I mean by
academic teaching and academic study is exactly this process of snuffing,
this changing of traditional words into living words, this tracing of
modern thought back to ancient primitive thought, this living, as it were,
once more, so far as it concerns us, the whole history of human thought
ourselves, till we are as little afraid to differ from Plato or Aristotle
as from Comte or Darwin.

Plato and Aristotle are, no doubt, great names; every school-boy is awed
by them, even though he may have read very little of their writings. This,
too, is a kind of dogmatism that requires correction. Now, at his
University, a young student might chance to hear the following, by no
means respectful, remarks about Aristotle, which I copy from one of the
greatest English scholars and philosophers: "There is nothing so absurd
that the old philosophers, as Cicero saith, who was one of them, have not
some of them maintained; and I believe that scarce anything can be more
absurdly said in natural philosophy than that which now is called
Aristotle's Metaphysics; or more repugnant to government than much of that
he hath said in his Politics; nor more ignorantly than a great part of his
Ethics." I am far from approving this judgment, but I think that the shock
which a