Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/320

 306 BERNABD BOSANQUET I tween them. And this a comparison with perfection, where all good is present in fulness but in shapes wholly different from those we know, can never tell us. The attempt to demonstrate it leads to sophistry. We insist that the element, which happens to interest us most, forms a link between a certain action and perfection. And we neglect the fact that other elements, absent in this action, are present in others which we happen to dislike. 1. If the means of guidance is to be such an abstract comparison as Mr. McTaggart suggests, I think his con- clusion follows. It is impossible, as Plato points out, to go without intermediate steps from the most abstract universal to the most concrete particular. The attempt to do so in- volves Eristic, i.e., either the refusal to ascribe predicates, or the assertion that one predicate is as true as another. This is what Mr. McTaggart imputes to the Perfectionist views. But as constantly happens in philosophical discussions, Perfectionists would retort the accusation, and say that the intermediate steps are needlessly cut away and Eristic introduced by the operation of his theory. The whole issue turns on the refusal to recognise our imperfect experience as a stage in which the idea of per- fection is active, relatively to the capacities of that stage. By recognising this idea only in the abstract shape which presents itself as the result of metaphysic, and failing to insist that this abstract shape is imperfect until charged with the life and power of all reality, the idea of Perfection is made a particular instead of a universal. It becomes a hard atom, which takes up an attitude of exclusion to the world whose core it should be. Thus the attempt to obtain moral guidance from it takes the shape of a comparison with it, and becomes parallel to an attempt to obtain scientific knowledge from inspecting the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. In each case we have taken the principle apart from the stages in which its nature is revealed, and have thus incapacitated ourselves for seeing it embodied, though imperfectly, at every stage of our experience. Our answer then to the argument drawn from the ab- stractness of our idea of perfection, by which it fails to show how it includes our reality, would be that in looking for moral guidance we begin at the other end. It may be true I at least am not disputing it that the central workings of our thought, which experience cannot undo, compel us to a result which may be stated in the abstract as Mr. McTaggart's view of Hegel's Absolute is stated. But the inevitable abstractness of this result, where experience fails