Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/52

 38 A. K. EOGEES : always involves a separation of the what and the that. We get reality in feeling, but it is never the whole of reality; there are always broken edges from which lines of connexion lead us continually beyond. Thought is the endeavour to complete this partial reality given to us in feeling. It com- pletes it, however, only by the application of ideas, and these are always meaning divorced from existence. The very essence of thought is thus its ideal character. Accordingly, while it can never be satisfied until idea and existence, the what and the that, are recombined, it also is impossible that it should reach its goal, since if it did so it would cease thereby to be thought, and become something quite different. 1 But this, it seems to me, is essentially the old demand that thought, in order to know reality, should actually be that reality. If the reality known must come bodily within the experience of knowing, then of course so long as we are thinking we cannot escape from mere thought. But if we can know, not simply that something exists, but something as it exists, beyond our act of knowing it, there is no reason why this might not be an experience whose nature was the nature of ultimate existence. It simply is a question now as to whether we actually have a form of ex- perience open to us which is capable of standing the tests. Let us suppose that there is such a form of experience in our own lives, in which the objections to the relational aspect of thought are overcome ; and that we can afterwards think of, or know, this. The thinking does not cease to be relational, of course, but the reality thought of does ; and accordingly we cannot bring up the process by which we think it to prove that reality itself is still relational. Now the possibility of this rests, as I have said, on the supposition that the reality of which the idea is asserted is not, as Mr. Bradley would have it, an unknown synthesis, which is revealed to us by the actual presence of one section of it in our moment- ary feeling, 2 but rather a fact into which this feeling is not, in most cases, intended to enter at all. There is such a momentary feeling, and it reveals to us reality ; it forms the medium, that is, through which our knowledge of reality is attained : but it is a medium which we entirely ignore, so far as the meaning, or reference, of the judgment is con- cerned. When I start to judge about an apple, my sensation is, indeed, involved, but I do not intend to say anything whatever about my sensation, or about reality as including 1 Appearance and Reality, pp. 163 ff. 2 Ibid., p. 253 et al