Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/50

 36 A. K. EOGEES : thought. Accordingly the Absolute is, for us, unknowable. What we do know is not outside the Absolute, but it is inadequate to express its real nature. It is true that one concept may be more adequate than another, and philosophy is bound to give each its relative order of importance. But when we have reached our highest category, we are not, as Hegel thought, in the presence of reality in its own proper nature ; the final synthesis still lies beyond. Mr. Bradley is thus at one with the neo-Hegelian in representing the Absolute as a single experience within which all existence whatsoever is included ; l he differs in holding that the self, or self-conscious thought, is not a final statement of this Absolute. The world is no longer a rounded intellectual system, such as we actually know, at least in its main outlines, with some degree of completeness, and appended to which there are a number of incomplete reproductions in the form of human lives. It is, indeed, extremely difficult to add on these latter to a world already complete in terms of scientific generalisations, and avoid the appearance of a number of selves as our ultimate, instead of a single self. If the individual is really to be put inside the Absolute, he will naturally be conceived, not as a repro- duction of God's life complete intellectually without him, but as one of the constituent elements of this life, part of the stuff out of which it is made, as a sensation enters into and helps to constitute a conscious state of our own. But in this case, we may as well abandon at once the contention that, for our knowledge, the world is intelligible. By work- ing up the material of our ow T n lives, our sensations, desires, etc., into new and strange products in the life of God where they have their real truth, we are destroying our knowledge both of ourselves and God ; we neither know the product, nor the fate of the constituent parts within that product. Now in so far as Mr. Bradley is engaged in criticising the Hegelian theory of thought as the ultimate unity, I am in accord with him, at least in his results. But in trying to discover something higher than thought, and inclusive of it, there are two roads which it is possible to follow. We may take this " something higher" as a static something, in which the irreconcilable facts of thought, feeling, will are mixed together to give a product which is unlike any of them, and which our experience gives us no means of grasp- ing ; or we may ask whether this ultimate concept is not revealed in experience 'even as it exists for us. In other 1 Appearance and Reality, p. 146.