Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/545

 RICHARD B. HALDANE, The Pathway to Reality. 531 solutely ignored and annihilated. The drift of his line of thinking, if it were logically followed out, would be to make morality a mere appearance or something less than that. It is possible to contend with Mr. Bradley and Mr. Taylor that moral distinctions (though they are from an ultimate metaphysical point of view mere appear- ance) should still retain for the man the validity which they have lost for the philosopher. But this is not the orthodox Hegelianism of which Mr. Haldane professes to be the prophet the Hegelianism that is to justify the common moral and religious beliefs of man- kind. And neither Mr. Bradley nor Mr. Taylor has gone nearly the lengths of Mr. Haldane in extinguishing the reality of the individual, and consequently the at least relative validity of that ethical point of view which presupposes his reality. Mr. Bradley once wrote a powerful article on the " alleged use- lessness of the soul ". I would respectfully commend it to Mr. Haldane's consideration. He has of course no sympathy with the crude materialism against the implications of which that article is directed ; but I venture to suggest that he virtually comes round by another route to the very same view of the Universe against which his own book is intended as a protest. If the point of view from which the Universe is regarded as made up of individual souls is not the ultimate point of view, it is the point of view which interests us as men. And after all, even if we admitted the point of view from which individuals are only " differentiations " of the Absolute, is there any real meaning or purpose in talking about the Unity as 'real' and the differentiations as mere "appearance"? The dif- ferentiation is as much a fact, and a far more important fact, than the Unity. If space would allow, I should like to transcribe some few pages of Dr. McTaggart's Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, but I must forbear. I observe by the way that Mr. Haldane has nowhere alluded to the most powerful criticism which his position has recently received from within the Hegelian camp at the hands of Dr. McTaggart. Mr. Haldane like other Hegelians (though he is exceptionally courteous) exhorts "our would-be philosophers" to the study of Hegel, and is evidently disposed to attribute all dissent from his dogmas to neglect of that study or incapacity for profiting by it. Dr. McTaggart is a critic against whom neither disqualification can well be alleged. I hope he will some day do battle with him. It might be supposed that if Mr. Haldane is inclined to make little of the individual consciousness, he would be proportionately clear about the self -consciousness of the Absolute, or (since, perhaps happily, the term " Absolute " is seldom or never used) the " Ulti- mate Keality ". It is, indeed, pretty clear that he does think of the Ultimate Eeality or God as a consciousness which is or includes more than the consciousness or experience of what (however " abstractly ") we are compelled to talk about as individual persons. He is even prepared to attribute to him Personality (p. 131). But at other times we meet with passages which leave it doubtful