THE closing lecture of the foregoing series has begun the statement of the doctrine of the Individual. The reality of Many within One, and the necessity of the union of the One and the Many, have been maintained, side by side with some account of the nature that, as I also maintain, ought to be attributed to the Individual, whether you consider the Absolute Individual, or the Individuals of our finite world,—the men whose wills are expressed in our life. Now I should be glad to allow the general theory to stand, for the present, simply as stated; and to postpone altogether, until the second series of these lectures, the further defence of the doctrine,—were it not that the most thorough, and in very many respects by far the most important contribution to pure Metaphysics which has of late years appeared in England, has made known a Theory of Being with which, in some of its most significant theses, I heartily agree, while, nevertheless, this very Theory of Being, as it has been stated by its author, undertakes to render wholly impossible, for our human minds, as now we are constituted, any explicit and detailed reconciliation of the One and the Many, or any positive theory of how Individuals find their real place in the Absolute. Defining and defending a conception of the Absolute as “one system,” whose contents are “experience,” Mr. Bradley, to whose well-known book, Appearance and Reality, I am here referring, has, nevertheless, maintained that we are wholly unable to “construe” to ourselves the way in which the realm of Appearance finds its unity in the Absolute. He rejects, in consequence, every more detailed effort to interpret our own life in its relations to the Absolute, such as, in the foregoing discussions I have begun, and, in the second series of these lectures, hope to continue. The reason for this rejection, in Mr. Bradley's case, is of the most fundamental kind. It is founded upon the most central theses of his Theory of Being, The proper place to discuss it is in close connection, therefore, with the general theory in question. I have stated my own case; but I feel obliged to try to do justice to Mr. Bradley's interpretation. For if he is right, there is little hope for our further undertaking.
The task is no easy one. I myself owe a great debt to Mr. Bradley's book, a debt manifest in my criticism of Realism in Lecture III, and in many other parts of my discussion. The book is itself a very elaborate argumentative structure. One ought not to make light of it by chance quotations. One cannot easily summarize its well-wrought reasonings in a few sentences. To discuss it carefully would have been wholly impossible in ray general course of lectures. On the other hand, to sunder the discussion of it wholly from the present discourse, would have made such a critical enterprise as here follows, seem, for me, a thankless polemical task. For lengthy polemic regarding so serious a piece of work as Mr. Bradley's is hardly to be tolerated apart from an attempt at construction. And so I have resolved to attempt the task in the form of an essay, supplementary to my own statement of a Theory of Being in these lectures, and preparatory to the discussion of Man and Nature in the next series.
Even here, however, I must attempt to construct as well as to object. And the effort will lead at once to problems which 1 had no time to discuss in the general lectures. Mr. Bradley, for instance, has shown that every effort to bring to unity the manifoldness of our world involves us in what he himself often calls an “infinite process.” In other words, if, in tellingabout the Absolute you try to show how the One and the Many are brought into unity, and how the Many develope out of the One, you find that, in attempting to define the Many at all, you have defined an actually infinite number. But an actually infinite multitude, according to Mr. Bradley, is a self-contradictory conception. The problem thus stated is an ancient phase of the general problem as to unity and plurality.
From the very outset of the philosophical study of the diversities of the universe, it has been noticed, that in many cases, where common sense is content to enumerate two, or three, or some other limited number of aspects or constituents of a supposed object, closer analysis shows that the variety contained in this object, if really existent at all, must be boundless, so that the dilemma: “Either no true variety of the supposed type is real, or else this variety involves an infinity of aspects,” has often been used as a critical test, to discredit some commonly received view as to the unity and variety of the universe or of some supposed portion thereof. Mr. Bradley has not been wanting in his appeal to this type of critical argument. But to give this argument its due weight, when it comes as a device for discrediting all efforts to define the nature of Individuals, requires one to attack the whole question of the actual Infinite, a question that recent discussions of the Philosophy of Mathematics have set in a decidedly new light, but that these discussions have also made more technical than ever. If I am to be just to this matter, I must therefore needs wander far afield. Nobody, I fear, except a decidedly technical reader, will care to follow. I have, therefore, hesitated long before venturing seriously to entertain the plan of saying, either here or elsewhere, anything about what seems to me the true, and, as I believe, the highly positive implication, of Mr. Bradley's apparently most destructive arguments concerning Individual Being and concerning the meaning of the world of Appearance.
Yet the problem of the reality of infinite variety and multiplicity,—a problem thus made so prominent by Mr. Bradley's whole method of procedure,—is one that no metaphysician can permanently evade. The doctrine that the conception of the actually infinite multitude is a self-contradictory conception is a familiar thesis ever since Aristotle. If this thesis is correct, as Mr. Bradley himself assumes, then Mr. Bradley's results, as regards the limitations of our human knowledge of the Absolute, appear to be inevitable, and the effort of these present lectures to define the essential relations of the world and the individual must fail. On the other hand, however, if, as I believe, the very doctrine of the true nature of Individual Being, which these lectures defend, enables us, for the first time perhaps in the history of the discussion of the Infinite, to give a precise statement of the sense in which an Infinite Multitude can, without contradiction, be viewed as determinately real,—then a discussion of Mr. Bradley's position, and of the whole problem of the One, the Many, and the Infinite, will prove an important supplement to our Theory of Being, and an essential basis for the vindication of our human knowledge of the general constitution of Reality. And so I must feel that, if the present task is extended and technical, the goal is nothing less than the defence of what I take to be a true theory of the whole meaning of life.
And so I am now minded to undertake the task of vindicating the concept of the actual Infinite against the charge of self-contradiction. I am minded, also, to attempt the closely related task of defending the concept of the Self against a like charge. In the same connection I shall undertake to show something of the true relations of the One and the Many in the real world. And in the course of this enterprise I shall found the positive discussion upon a criticism of Mr. Bradley's position.
But now, at this point, let any weary reader whom my lectures may have already disheartened,—but who nevertheless may kindly have proceeded so far,—turn finally back. When you enter the realm of Mr. Bradley's Absolute, it is much, as it is at the close of Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, after the ship that carries away the lady has sunk below the horizon, and after the tide has just covered the rock where the desolate lover had been watching. “There was nothing,” says the poet, in his last words, “there was nothing now visible but the sea.” As for me, I love the sea, and am minded to find in it life, and individuality, and explicit law. And I go upon that quest. Whoever is not weary, and is not yet disheartened, and is fond of metaphysical technicality, is welcome to join the quest. But in the sea there are also, as Victor Hugo explained to us, very strange monsters. And Mr. Bradley, too, in his book, has had much to say of the “monsters,” philosophic and psychological, that the realm of Appearance contains, even in the immediate neighborhood of the Absolute. We shall meet some such reputed “monsters” in the course of this discussion. Let him who fears such trouble also turn back.
In this essay, I shall first try to state Mr. Bradley's theses as to the problem of the One and the Many. Then I shall try to show how he himself seems to suggest a way by which, if we follow that way far enough, something may be done to solve what he leaves apparently hopeless. And, finally, I shall proceed upon the way thus opened until we have found whither it leads. We shall find it inevitably leading to the conception of the actually Infinite. We shall examine the known difficulties of that conception, and shall at last solve them by means of our own conception of the nature of determinateness and Individuality.
The general doctrine of the Absolute which Mr. Bradley maintains is the result of a critical analysis of a number of metaphysical conceptions which he opposes. Mr. Bradley's work is divided into two books. The first book, entitled Appearance, has a mainly negative result. Beginning with the examination of the traditional distinction between primary and secondary qualities, Mr. Bradley shows that this distinction is incapable of furnishing a consistent account of the relation of the phenomenal to the real. The problem of inherence, attacked next in order, is declared to be, upon the basis of the ordinary conception of things and qualities, and of their relationship, insoluble. The reason given in this case is typical of Mr. Bradley's position throughout the book, and, despite the general familiarity of the argument to readers of the Hegelian and Herbartian discussions of the concept of the thing, deserves special mention at this point.
A thing is somehow to be one, and “it has properties, adjectives which qualify it.1 We say that the thing is this or that, predicating of it the adjectives that express its qualities.” “But it cannot be all its properties if you take them each severally.” “Its reality lies somehow in its unity.” “But if, on the other hand, we inquire what there can be in the thing besides its several qualities, we are baffled once more. We can discover no real unity existing outside these qualities, or, again, existing within them.” To the hypothesis that the unity of the thing may be sufficiently expressed by asserting that “the qualities are, and are in relation,” Mr. Bradley replies that the meaning of is remains still doubtful when we say, “One quality, A is in relation with another quality, B” (p. 20). For still one does not, by here using is, intend to reduce A to simple identity with its relations to B, and so one is led to say, “The word to use, when we are pressed, should not be is, but only has.” But the has seems metaphorical. “And we seem unable to clear ourselves from the old dilemma, If you predicate what is different, you ascribe to the subject what it is not; and if you predicate what is not different you say nothing at all.” Nor does one better the case (p. 21) if one amends the phraseology here in question by asserting that the relation belongs equally to both A and B, instead of limiting the assertion in form to A alone. If the relation, however, be no mere attribute of A or of B, or of both of them, but a “more or less independent” fact, namely, the fact that “There is a relation C in which A and B stand,” then the problem of the unity of the thing becomes the problem as to the genuine tie that binds both A and B to their now relatively independent relation C. For C is now supposed to possess an existence which is not that of A or B, but something apart from either. This tie which unites A and B, in the thing, to C, hereupon appears as a new fact of relation, D, viz., the fact that A and B are so related to C that C becomes their relation to each other. “But such a makeshift at once leads to the infinite process. The new relation D can be predicated in no way of C, or of A and B; and hence we must have recourse to a fresh relation, E, which comes between D and whatever we had before. But this must lead to another, F; and so on indefinitely.” The consequence is that we are not aided by letting the “qualities and their relation fall entirely apart.” “There must be a whole embracing what is related, or there would be no differences, and no relation.” This remark applies not merely to things, and to the relations that are to bind into unity their qualities, but to space, and time, and to every case where varieties are in any way related. But although Mr. Bradley asserts thus early the general principle that variety must always find its basis in unity, he wholly denies that, in the present case, we have yet found or defined what the unity in question can be. He denies, namely, that the relational system offered to us so far by the qualities supposed to be inherent in the one thing, or to be related to one another, contains, or can be made to contain, any principle adequate to accomplish the required task, or to “justify the arrangement” that we try to make in conceiving the thing and its qualities as in relational unity.
The defect in all these accounts of the nature of the thing is not due, according to Mr. Bradley's view, to any accidental faults of definition. The defect depends upon a dilemma that first fully comes to light when the problem about relations and qualities is considered for itself, and apart from the special issue about the thing. The task of expounding this dilemma Mr. Bradley undertakes in Chapter III of his first book. Here his thesis is (p. 25), that “The arrangement of given facts into relations and qualities may be necessary in practice, but it is theoretically unintelligible.”
The true reason why the concept of the thing involved the foregoing paradoxes is now to become more obvious. It is set forth in three successive theses. First (p. 26): “Qualities are nothing without relations.” For qualities are different from one another. “Their plurality depends on relation, and without that relation they are not distinct”(p. 28). Even were qualities conceived as in themselves wholly separated from one another, and only for us related, still (p. 29) “Any separateness implies separation, and so relation, and is therefore, when made absolute, a self-discrepancy.” “If there is any difference, then that implies a relation.” Mr. Bradley enforces this assertion by a reference, made with characteristic skill, to the paradoxes of the Herbartian metaphysic of the einfache Qualitäten and the zufällige Ansichten (p. 30).
But if it is impossible to conceive qualities without relations, it is equally unintelligible to take qualities together with relations. For the qualities cannot be resolved into the relations. And, if taken with the relations, they “must be, and must also be related”(p. 31). But now afresh arises the problem as to how, in this instance, the variety involved in the also is reducible to the unity which each quality must by itself possess. For a quality, A, is made what it is both by its relations (since, as we have seen, these are essential to its being as a quality), and by something else, namely, by its own inner character. A has thus two aspects, both of which can be predicated of it. Yet “without the use of a relation it is impossible to predicate this variety of A,” just as it was impossible, except by the use of a relation, to predicate the various qualities of one thing. We have therefore to say that, within A, both its own inner character, as a quality, and its relatedness to other facts, are themselves, as varieties, facts; but such facts as constitute the being of A, so that they are united by a new relation, namely, by the very relation which makes them constitutive of A. Thus, however, “we are led by a principle of fission which conducts us to no end.” “The quality must exchange its unity for an internal relation.” This diversity “demands a new relation, and so on without limit.”
For similar reasons, a relation without terms being “mere verbiage” (p. 32), it follows that since the terms imply qualities, relation without qualities is nothing. But, on the other hand, if the relation, stands related to the qualities, if it is anything to them, “we shall now require a new connecting relation.” But hereupon an endless process of the same kind as before is set up (p. 33). “The links are united by a link, and this bond of union is a link which has also two ends; and these require each a fresh link to connect them with the old.”
The importance for Mr. Bradley of the negative result thus reached lies in the great generality of the conceptions here in question, and in the consequent range covered by these fundamental considerations. “The conclusion,” says Mr. Bradley, “to which I am brought, is that a relational way of thought—any one that moves by the machinery of terms and relations—must give appearance and not truth. It is a makeshift, a device, a mere practical compromise, most necessary, but in the end most indefensible. We have to take reality as many, and to take it as one, and to avoid contradiction. We want to divide it, or to take it, when we please, as indivisible; to go as far as we desire in either of these directions, and to stop when that suits us… . But when these inconsistencies are forced together … the result is an open and staring inconsistency.”
In the subsequent chapters of Mr. Bradley's first book, he himself sees, in a great measure, merely an application of the general principle just enunciated to such special problems as are exemplified by Space, by Time, by Causation, by Activity, and by the Self. For all these metaphysical conceptions are defined in terms of a “relational way” of thinking, and involve the problem of the One and the Many. To be sure, the discussion of the Self, in Chapters IX and X, brings the problem into decidedly new and important forms, but does not, in Mr. Bradley's opinion, furnish any acceptable ground for its positive solution. “We have found,” he says, “puzzles in reality, besetting every way in which we have taken it.” The solution of these puzzles, if ever discovered, must be “a view not obnoxious to these mortal attacks, and combining differences in one so as to turn the edge of criticism ”(p. 114). The mere appeal, however, to the fact of self-consciousness, does not furnish this needed explicit harmony of unity and variety. The Self does, indeed, unite diversity and unity in a profoundly important way; but the mere fact that this is somehow done does not show us how it is done.
Despite this elaborate exposition of the apparent hopelessness of the problem as to the One and the Many, Mr. Bradley's own theory of the Absolute, proposed in his second book, turns upon asserting that in Reality unity and diversity are positively reconciled, and reconciled, moreover, not by a simple abolition of either of the apparently opposed principles, but in a way that leaves to each its place. For first (p. 140), “Reality is one in this sense that it has a positive nature exclusive of discord… . Its diversity can be diverse only so far as not to clash.” Yet, on the other hand, “Appearance must belong to reality, and it must, therefore, be concordant and other than it seems. The bewildering mass of phenomenal diversity must hence somehow be at unity and self-consistent; for it cannot be elsewhere than in reality, and reality excludes discord. Or, again, we may put it so: The real is individual. It is one in the sense that its positive character embraces all differences in an inclusive harmony.” Further, “To be real … must be to fall within sentience”(p. 144). Or, again, to be real (p. 146) is “to be something which comes as a feature and aspect within one whole of feeling, something which, except as an integral element of such sentience, has no meaning at all.” In consequence, “The Absolute is one system,” and “its contents are … sentient experience.” “It will hence be a single and all-inclusive experience, which embraces every partial diversity in concord”(p. 147). It follows that, in the Absolute, none of the diversities which, are to us so perplexing, and which, as exemplified by the cases of thing, quality, relation, Self, and the rest of the appearances, are so contradictory in their seeming, are wholly lost. For the Absolute, on the contrary, these diversities are all preserved; only they are “transmuted” into a whole, which is, in ways of which we have only a most imperfect knowledge, internally harmonious. As to the hints that we possess, regarding the nature of the Absolute, they are summarized as follows: “Immediate presentation”(p. 159) gives us the experience of a “whole” which “contains diversity,” but which is, nevertheless, “not parted by relations.” On the other hand, “relational form,” where known to us, points “everywhere to an unity,”—“a substantial totality, beyond relations and above them, a whole endeavoring without success to realize itself in their detail” (p. 160). Such facts and considerations give us “not an experience, but an abstract idea” of a “unity which transcends and yet contains every manifold appearance.” “We can form the general idea of an absolute experience in which phenomenal distinctions are merged, a whole becomes immediate at a higher stage without losing any richness.” But meanwhile we have “a complete inability to understand this concrete unity in detail.”
The ground of this, our inability, is the one already illustrated, namely, the necessary incapacity of a “relational way of thinking” to give us anything definite except Appearance, or to harmonize the One and the Many in concrete fashion, or to free our explicit accounts of the unity from the contradictions and infinite processes heretofore illustrated. A more precise exposition of the general defects of thought in question, Bradley undertakes to furnish in his fifteenth chapter, under the title Thought and Reality. Here the nature of relational thought, its inevitable sundering of the what and the that, and its inevitably infinite process in trying to unite them again, are two topics discussed, with the result, as Mr. Bradley states the case, that “Thought desires a consummation in which it is lost,” as “the river” runs “into the sea,” and “the self” loses itself “in love.” For every act of thought, in affirming its predicate of the subject, though all the while knowing that the quality or adjective is not the existent, explicitly faces its own Other, namely, precisely its object, the existent of which it thinks, the subject to which it applies its predicates. This existent, by virtue of its “sensuous infinitude,” or vaguely endless wealth of presented features, always defies our efforts exhaustively to define it in ideal terms (p. 176); and, by virtue of its “immediacy”(p. 177), possesses “the character of a single self-subsistent being,”—a character apparently inconsistent with the “sensuous infinitude.” Our thought, however, endeavoring to characterize this Other, seeks to make ideally explicit how, despite its endless wealth of presented features, it can be still a single individual,—a system of variety in unity. Attempting this task, thought is obliged to use the “relational form” in characterizing the subject; and this at once makes impossible the expression, in ideal terms, of either the self-dependence or the immediacy which the subject claims (p. 178). For, analyzing the subject, in order to define its wealth of content, thought, in the fashion before illustrated in the case of things, qualities, etc., is led to an infinite process, since every relation defined requires new relations to make it comprehensible. Both the internal and the external relations of the subject and of its contents, accordingly prove to be inexhaustible. Never, then, is thought's ideal system of predicates adequate to the subject. The “sensuous infinitude” or undefined wealth that the subject at first presents, turns, while we think, into the explicitly infinite series of relational predicates. Moreover, even were thought's system ever completed, “that system would not be the subject.” For if it were, “it would wholly lose the relational form.”
The result is that thinking “desires to possess,” as its end and goal, a character of “immediate, self-dependent, all-inclusive individuality”(p. 179), while “individuality cannot be gained while we are confined to relations.” Thought, however, although not possessing the features of reality here in question, can recognize them as its own Other, can “desire them”(p. 180) “because its content has them already in an incomplete form. And in desire for the completion of what none has there is no contradiction.” “But, on the other hand (p. 181), such a completion would prove destructive; such an end would emphatically make an end of mere thought. It would bring the ideal content into a form which would be reality itself, and where mere truth and mere thought would certainly perish.” “It is this completion of thought beyond thought which remains forever an Other.” “Thought can understand that, to reach its goal, it must get beyond relations. Yet in its nature it can find no other working means of progress.”
Hence, “our Absolute,” once more, will include the differences of thought and reality, of “what” and “that.” “The self-consciousness of the part, its consciousness of itself even in opposition to the whole,—all will be contained within the one absorbing experience. For this will embrace all self-consciousness harmonized, though, as such, transmuted and suppressed.” But Mr. Bradley still insists that “we cannot possibly construe such an experience to ourselves.”
Mr. Bradley's critics have very commonly expressed their disapproval of the extremely delicate position in which, by this theory, our finite thinking is left. We are obliged to define the Heal as a system wherein unity and diversity are harmonized. We are to conceive this reality as a “sentient experience.” And in the Absolute Experience, nothing of our finite variety is to be wholly lost, but all is to be “transmuted.” Yet every instance, selected from our own human experience, where, through a process of thinking, or a type of mediated consciousness, we men seem to have won any sort of explicit synthesis and harmony of the One and the Many, is sternly rejected by Mr. Bradley, as furnishing no satisfactory guide to the final knowledge of the way in which, in the Absolute, unity and manifoldness are united. The critics have, accordingly, been sometimes disposed to accuse Mr. Bradley of seeking, in his Absolute, for bare identity without diversity; and sometimes tempted, on the other hand, to ask, complainingly, what sort of harmony would satisfy him, and why he supposes that any harmony of the One and the Many is attainable at all, even for the Absolute, when he himself rejects, as mere appearance, every proffered means, whereby harmony is to be defined.
In answer, Mr. Bradley has been led, in his second edition, to discuss, in an appendix, the problem of “Contradiction and the Contrary,” with special reference to its bearing upon the matter here at issue. The relation of the theory of the contrary to the problem of the relation of unity and diversity appears in the fundamental thesis of the discussion in question.2 This thesis is as follows (p. 562): “A thing cannot, without an internal distinction, be (or do) two different things; and differences cannot belong to the same thing, in the same point, unless in that point there is diversity. The appearance of such union may be fact, but is for thought a contradiction.” In expounding this statement of the principle of contradiction, Mr. Bradley first explains that the thesis “does not demand mere sameness,” which to thought “would be nothing.” A mere tautology “is not a truth in any way, in any sense, or at all.” The Law of Contradiction, then, does not forbid diversity. If it did, “it would forbid thinking altogether.” But the difficulty of the situation arises from the fact that, “Thought cannot do without differences; but, on the other hand, it cannot make them. And, as it cannot make them, so it cannot receive them from the outside, and ready-made.”Thought demands a reason and ground for diversity. It can neither pass from A to B without a reason, nor accept as final the fact that, external to thought's process, A and B are found conjoined. If thought finds a diversity, it demands that this be “brought to unity”(p. 562). And so, if the mere fact of the conjunction of A and B appears, then thought must “either make or accept an arrangement which to it is wanton and without reason,—or, having no reason for anything else, attempt, against reason, to identify them simply”(p. 563). Nor can one meet this difficulty by merely asserting that there are certain ultimate complexes, given in experience, such that in them unity and variety are presented as obviously conjoined, while thought is to explain the “detail of the world” in terms of these fundamental complexes. No such “bare conjunction” is or possibly can be given; for when we find any kind of unity in diversity, that is, when we find diversities conjoined, we always also find a “background”(p. 564) which is a “condition of the conjunction's existence” so that “the conjunction is not bare, but dependent,” and is presented to the intellect as “a connection, the bond of which is at present unknown.” “The intellect, therefore, while rejecting whatever is alien to itself, if offered as Absolute, can accept the inconsistent if taken as subject to conditions.”
Meanwhile, the “mere conjunction,” if taken as such, is “for thought contradictory” (p. 565). For as soon as thought makes the conjunction its object, thought must “hold in unity” the elements of the conjunction. But finding these elements diverse, thought “can of itself supply no internal bond by which to hold them together, nor has it any internal diversity by which to maintain them apart.” If one replies that the elements are offered to thought “together and in conjunction,” Mr. Bradley retorts that the question is “how thought can think what is offered.” If thought were itself possessed of conjoining principles, of “a ’together“ a ’between,“ and an ’all at once,“” as its own internal principle, it could use them to explain the conjunction offered. But, as a fact (p. 566), “Thought cannot accept tautology, and yet demands unity in diversity. But your offered conjunctions, on the other side, are for it no connections or ways of union. They are themselves merely other external things to be connected.” It is, then, “idle from the outside to say to thought, ’Well, unite, but do not identify.“ How can thought unite except so far as in itself it has a mode of union? To unite without an internal ground of connection and distinction, is to strive to bring together barely in the same point, and that is self-contradiction.” Things, then, “are not contradictory because they are diverse,” but “just in so far as they appear as bare conjunctions.” Therefore it is that a mere together, “in space or time, is for thought unsatisfactory and, in the end, impossible.” But, on the other hand, every such untrue view must be transcended, and the Real is not self-contradictory, despite its diversities, since their real unity is, in the Absolute, present. If one now asks what then “would satisfy the intellect, supposing it could be got”(p. 568), Mr. Bradley points out that if the ground of unity is “external to the elements into which the conjunction must be analyzed,” then the ground “becomes for the intellect a fresh element, and in itself calls for synthesis in afresh point of unity.” “But hereon,” he continues, “because in the intellect no intrinsic connections were found, ensues the infinite process.” This being the problem “The remedy might be here. If the diversities were complementary aspects of a process of connection and distinction, the process not being external to the elements, or, again, a foreign compulsion of the intellect, but itself the intellect's own proprius motus, the case would be altered. Each aspect would of itself be a transition to the other aspect, a transition intrinsic and natural at once to itself, and to the intellect. And the Whole would be a self-evident analysis and synthesis of the intellect itself by itself. Synthesis here has ceased to be mere synthesis, and has become self-completion; and analysis, no longer mere analysis, is self-explication. And the question how or why the many are one and the one is many here loses its meaning. There is no why or how beside the self-evident process, and towards its own differences this whole is at once their how and their why, their being, substance, and system, their reason, ground, and principle of diversity and unity” (id). Here, Mr. Bradley insists, the Law of Contradiction “has nothing to condemn.” Such an union or “identity of opposites” would not conflict with the Law of Contradiction, but would rather fulfil the law. If “all that we find were in the end such a self-evident and complete whole,” the end of the intellect, and so of philosophy, would have been won. But Mr. Bradley is (p. 569) “unable to verify a solution of this kind.” Hence, as he says, “Against my intellectual world the Law of Contradiction has claims nowhere satisfied in full.” Therefore “they are met in and by a whole beyond the mere intellect.” It is, however, no “abstract identity” that thus satisfies the demands of the intellect. “On the other hand, I cannot say that to me any principle or principles of diversity in unity are self-evident.” In consequence, while “self-existence and self-identity are to be found,” they are to be looked for neither in “bare identity,” nor in a relapse into a “stage before thinking begins,” but in “a whole beyond thought, a whole to which thought points and in which, it is included.” Diversities exist. Therefore (p. 570) “they must somehow be true and real.” “Hence, they must be true and real in such a way that from A or B the intellect can pass to its further qualification without an external denomination of either. But this means that A and B are united, each from its own nature, in a whole which is the nature of both alike.” It is the failure of the intellect to define this whole positively and in detail, which is expressed in all the contradictions of the theory of appearance.
