Page:Essays on Truth and Reality (1914).djvu/297

278 nature of this process? Prof. Royce contends that all that you start with is not a one in many, nor even a mere many, but simply an object. This is all that there is, and then pure thought (I understand) supervenes and produces the result. Here I join issue. I can no more accept Prof. Royce's doctrine than I can accept what is often understood as the process of Hegel's dialectic. I do not believe in any operation which falls out of the blue upon a mere object. On the contrary I maintain that with an object you have, and you must have, a felt self. And I urge that this felt self is a one in many and many in one, which for the intellect remains incomprehensible, and which therefore for the intellect depends on an unknown condition. Hence you really start with a felt subject (S) which is complex, and which contains in itself the object (O), which is both felt in it and opposed to it. Whether we ever in fact have an O which is single, I need not stop to discuss. In any case your experience at the start is complex, and you have a demand on the part of this experience to make the object adequate to the whole subject, and to carry out the subject into the object. This is the basis and this is the impulse which (I contend) sets up the process of reflection. And the process cannot end, because to make O=S would destroy in principle the whole experience. To come to an end the process must simply cease, or else lapse back, or else be taken up into something higher.

Thus the series of reflection is generated by and through the unity of immediate experience. And this unity is a one in many and a many in one which for thought is not intelligible or unconditional. It is this totality which for ever demands an expression which is unattainable within our relational experience, or within any experience for which the object is against the subject in some way which we are unable to understand. The principle of the process therefore does not reside in pure thought, but on the contrary must be said to imply a mere conjunction. And any process other than the above to my mind is even impossible. There is for me no such thing as a mere object or mere objects, nor any process of reflection which falls down from nowhere.

(b) Prof. Royce insists that both process and product are self-consistent and free from all contradiction. If what I have already urged is correct, no such claim can be admitted. An