Page:Essays on Truth and Reality (1914).djvu/298

IX immediate totality, unless you allow and include an unknown condition, cannot without inconsistency be formulated in thought. If the one is not one of the many, it seems to be nothing, and if it is one of the many, there is no one left in which the many can be. There is therefore either an unknown condition or else a self-contradiction. So again with the whole and its parts. So again with the class and its members, a matter to which later in this Note I shall return. We have a difference which cannot be, and yet must be, and we have to choose between a self-contradiction and the admission of an unintelligible condition. So again with subject and object. These have got to be different, or what are they? On the other side the difference of the object excludes perfect satisfaction. The end is not reached except for a passing moment. The object therefore both must remain, and yet cannot remain, over against the subject. There is a 'beyond', to be for ever asserted and denied. The formula is Realize the subject as object beyond any object, and surely such a formula is not self-consistent. For myself I urge that there is here an unknown condition and that so the contradiction is avoided. But how Prof. Royce can avoid it I am unable to say.

Hence the principle which generates the series carries within itself a difference and a negation, which it at once asserts and denies. To Prof. Royce, on the other hand, the principle is wholly positive (p. 510) ; but how that can be I fail to perceive. The illustration, again, advanced by Prof. Royce (pp. 503 foll.) appears to myself to contain an obvious and glaring fallacy (cf. Prof. Taylor's Elements of Metaphysics, p. 150). The idea of a copy which has not an existence different from, and so far negative of, its original, remains to me meaningless. If you take away the idea of another existence, another and a different medium and fact, you for my mind abolish the essential element of copying and representation. And yet, according to Prof. Royce, the coming into existence of the copy is not to alter the fact. And, while I hesitate to attribute to Prof. Royce such an open inconsistency, I have been unable in any other way to interpret his teaching. I must end therefore by submitting that both principle and product are self-contradictory in essence. And I have already urged that the process is not unconditional and 'pure'.