Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/188

 174 F. H. BRADLEY: awareness at once of both activity and passivity ; but to take the two always here in the same sense and as exactly cor- relative might involve us in confusion and in serious diffi- culty. The practical attitude, we saw, involves in itself the attitude of theory, and without the perception of an object no will is possible. Now as receptive of such a not-self I have a sense of passivity, and we may regard this sense as in some degree present in will. But in will to take this perceived passivity together with our perceived agency as at one and the same level of meaning, would not be defensible. It would be a mistake which might lead us to dangerous results. Before I pass from this subject I must return to a final difficulty. " It is impossible," I may be told, " anywhere to understand activity in a lower sense, for activity and passivity are inseparable from agency both in fact and in idea. The distinction of self from not-self depends on the full practical relation, and apart from this relation there is neither in idea nor in time the possibility of an experience of anything lower." This is an objection which obviously goes too far to be discussed in these pages, but I can at once make a reply which I consider to be here sufficient. The reader is at liberty to assume here for the sake of argument that our experienced distinction of self from not-self comes into existence with and in the experience of agency and will. I could not myself admit that before this distinction there is no experience at all. But for the sake of argument I will admit that the practical relation, with its experience of agency, is the beginning of that consciousness which dis- tinguishes not-self from self. Such an admission, I would however add, agrees perfectly with our doctrine. The prac- tical relation still maintains that character on which we have insisted, and it involves always the self-realising idea of a change. On the other hand we find in fact a lower percep- tion of activity and passivity, just as in fact we still must find our theoretical experience and attitude. And such a consequence need entail no confusion or discrepancy. The practical relation, together with experienced agency, will be there fromthe first, and will remain the condition of our experience of any relation between self and not-self. But lower experiences of that relation may none the less actually be present. They will be present either as degraded forms of the practical relation, where one or more of its aspects have vanished in fact ; or they will exist within the practical relation as dependent and subordinate features of that in- clusive whole. In the latter case they will be abstractions on