Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/49

 III. THE ABSOLUTE AS UNKNOWABLE. BY A. K. KOGEES. IN the somewhat widespread revolt against the neo-Hegehan identification of reality with thought, or knowledge, there are evidently two courses which it is possible for one who sympathises in a general way with the Hegelian conten- tion to adopt. He may attempt, on the one hand, to find some other form of experience actually open to us which is more adequate to the demands upon it than thought is, or, on the other hand, he may conclude that there is no such known form of experience within our reach, and may have recourse to a hypothetical synthesis, whose existence we are forced to postulate, but whose nature is entirely unknown. I wish in the present paper to consider certain aspects of this latter alternative in the form in which it is represented by Mr. Bradley. Mr. Bradley's chief objections to Hegelianism are two in number. In the first place, life is more than thought, if we mean by thought what other people mean ; and if we mean something different from other people, and do not define ourselves, we are talking in the air. Life is feeling and will, as well as thought, and so these also must come within the Absolute. In the second place, thought does not in itself supply an intelligible unity. It proceeds by way of relations, and this can never give us a unity which we really under- stand. Of course there is a certain de facto unity ; things are somehow brought together in thought. But the mere fact that we can think of an object does not of itself make the object intelligible ; and so long as, starting from a given point, we simply find the connexion of something else with it, as we do in relational thinking, we fall short of an answer to the real problem of philosophy, as to how this connexion exists. 1 Thought points in the direction of a unity, but never reaches it ; if it did reach it, it would cease to be 1 MIND, vol. v., p. 472.