at truth," Blood writes, "cannot be
doubted. The eyes of philosophy, if not set directly on him, are set
towards the region which he occupied. Though he may not be the final
philosopher, yet pull him out, and all the rest will be drawn into his
vacancy."

Drawn into the same whirlpool, Mr. Blood means. Non-dialectic thought
takes facts as singly given, and accounts for one fact by another. But
when we think of "_all_ fact," we see that nothing of the nature of
fact can explain it, "for that were but one more added to the list of
things to be accounted for. . . . The beginning of curiosity, in the
philosophic sense," Mr. Blood again writes, "is the stare
[Transcriber's note: state?] of being at itself, in the wonder why
anything is at all, and what this being signifies. Naturally we first
assume the void, and then wonder how, with no ground and no fertility,
anything should come into it." We treat it as a positive nihility, "a
barrier from which all our batted balls of being rebound."

Upon this idea Mr. Blood passes the usual transcendentalist criticism.
There _is_ no such separate opposite to being; yet we never think of
being as such--of pure being as distinguished from specific forms of
being--save as what stands relieved against this imaginary background.
Being has no _outline_ but that which non-being makes, and the two
ideas form an inseparable pair. "Each limits and defines the other.
Either would be the other in the same position, for here (where there
is as yet no question of content, but only of being itself) the
position is all and the content is nothing. Hence arose that paradox:
'Being is by nothing more real than not-being.'"

"Popularly," Mr. Blood goes on, "we think of all that is as having got
the better of non-being. If all were not--_that_, we think, were easy:
there were no wonder then, no tax on ingenuity, nothing to be accounted
for. This conclusion is from the thinking which assumes all reality as
immediately given assumes knowledge as a simple physical light, rather
than as a distinction involving light and darkness equally. We assume
that if the light were to go out, the show would be ended (and so it
would); but we forget that if the darkness were to go out, that would
be equally calamitous. It were bad enough if the master had lost his
crayon, but the loss of the blackboard would be just as fatal to the
demonstration. Without darkness light would be useless--universal
light as