Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/51

 THE ABSOLUTE AS UNKNOWABLE. 37 words, we may consider whether these various factors may not find their explanation, not by being mixed together and changed in the operation, but by each retaining its proper character, and being given a place as one phase of a unitary process to which it is functionally related ; and in this case the whole process within which these various phases appear would furnish our clue to the ultimate nature of reality, not thought, or feeling, or will, by itself, or combined with some- thing else to form a new product. This latter is the conclusion I shall wish to suggest : the highest conception is experience as an activity, within which thought plays a particular part, to be determined more exactly by psychology ; and it is therefore from experience in this aspect, as active, that we are to get our notion of reality as a whole. Now the monistic postulate, in the first place, on which Mr. Bradley builds, I think is open to question. Because the world is a unity, it does not follow that it must be the unity of a single inclusive experience, or whole of feeling. There is a positive difficulty in the way of this which I do not think Mr. Bradley sufficiently recognises. A psychical fact is not something that, as a matter of direct experience, can be worked up into all sorts of new combinations, and still retain its nature unchanged ; and accordingly the facts of experi- ence as we feel them, in their apparent limitation, must either be denied altogether, even as appearance and this is what we do practically when we say that our experience exists in reality, only in a wholly different form l or else they must be taken as only known in the Absolute experience, and as falling in existence outside this. I think it is possible to say something for this latter conception of knowledge, the conception that knowledge always implies the separate factual existence of the reality known, distinct from the experience of knowing, and that it is not merely the ideal extension of a fact immediately present in feeling. And all that I wish to point out here is, that if this could be estab- lished, there would no longer be any impossibility that thought should know reality as it is. Thought, says Mr. Bradley, 1 We overlook the incompatibility of the existence both of reality, and of an appearance differing from the reality, because we have in mind implicitly the more usual conception of a reality distinct from our ex- perience, which, of course, may be in itself very different from our subjective notion of it. There is no difficulty about this, because the appearance is made a second subjective fact existing alongside the real fact. But when we deny this separation, and make appearance and reality the very same bit of existence, I confess my entire inability to understand how any appearance distinct from the real appearance, i.e., the reality, still remains.