Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/58

 44 A. K. ROGERS : even cork -making enters into the meaning of the cork tree as an objective l fact ; it is only when we promote this to the place of first importance that we run the risk of being absurd. With this explanation, I do not think that Mr. Bradley's strictures as regards the self are any longer fatal. It is quite true that I can never in a single pulse of thought exhaust all the contents of my own life ; I cannot exhaust all that is immediately present in the background of feeling, even, to say nothing of my past and future experience. But this is to make self-consciousness consist simply in thinking about oneself, in the purely intellectual enumeration of a given con- tent. Such an act of thought might perhaps cover the whole ground in the end, but it would undeniably require time, and at no single moment would the whole be present. But if we find the principle of self-consciousness in an active pro- cess which includes duration, this objection is overcome. In so far as the elements of consciousness are related to an overruling end, they can be eternally present in a sense which is not possible in the case of a mere thought enumeration. As having a relation to the process as a whole, which needs to be taken account of in each successive step, they are, in their influence, still consciously present, even when in another sense they are passed and left behind ; whereas they have no such continued existence if they are only thought of in the form of a list. It is true that my life, as mine, shows no such absolutely inclusive unity, but no one supposes that human experience is capable of standing without any change whatever for ultimate existence. My life is a gradual develop- ment, in which, by means of various partial and disconnected experiences, I come to know reality which exists before it reveals its meaning to me ; and so it cannot adequately represent a life which is eternally self-conscious. But if the principle of self-consciousness is present even in these partial experiences, I do not see why it is not possible, on the basis of what we actually know, to conceive a whole of experience in which all elements are present in their relation to an inclusive purpose, and to do this without any self-contradictions. Mr. Bradley's criticism of Hegelianism is, it is unneces- sary to say, exceedingly acute, and I believe that up to a certain point it is conclusive. But in the conception which he would substitute for Hegel's he loses, I am persuaded, 1 The objectivity of a thing of course includes, in any ultimate state- ment, its social relations.