The Cows in the Dark Night

Abstract

In the far-off days before the first World War, the British journalMindwas full of articles by writers who thought of themselves as “Neoidealists”. So when theenfant terribleof the groves of Academic Oxford in that generation—a “pragmatic Humanist” by the name of Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller—played his most notorious practical joke upon his colleagues by publishing a mock-issue of the journal (under the titleMind!) he offered as a frontispiece “A portrait of the Absolute in the pink of condition”. Beneath a pale-pink semi-transparent tissue (which, except for its colour, was quite normal for the photographic plates in Victorian memoirs) one found a printed frame that embraced a perfectly blank white sheet of paper.