Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/59

 THE ABSOLUTE AS UNKNOWABLE. 45 the whole gain which Hegel has been the means of winning for philosophy. If Hegel's work is of any value, it is by reason of his finding the very core and centre of reality in the intelligible relations which are to be found, first in the physical world, and, at a higher level, in the social life of man. Eeality thus becomes, not a something we know not what, out of all relation to our practical concerns, but it is thoroughly and genuinely knowable. Now to take all known realities as mere ingredients of a larger whole of experience, in which they are transformed and swallowed up, is to abandon this for what not even the doctrine of degrees of reality can prevent our having to call, again, an unknowable. It is one thing to say that some fact of my experience, my sin or suffering, which in my ignorance I call a blot upon the universe, does really have a place to fill, which we could understand if we could see the universe in its entirety ; it is another to say that it does this by being transformed in a more inclusive state of consciousness. The first statement I should quite agree with ; but I should insist that a conscious fact, in order to fill this place in a larger whole, far from being changed for knowledge, must be precisely itself. My suffering, as a fact of experience, is not changed by performing a service in the life of the whole ; when I know the use which it serves I know more about it, but it is still just this same experience which I knew before, whose meaning is enlarged. There is a difference between a fact in the external world, and a fact of immediate experience, which Mr. Bradley ignores. A supposed fact may, it is true, be wholly altered by added know- ledge, but this is possible only because the fact was not really what at first we supposed it to be, but was something quite different. This can be the case when we approach the fact indirectly, through the medium of knowledge, which may at any time be false or inadequate. But an experience is just what it is in experience, and nothing else. It can have new light thrown upon it, not, if we keep to the natural view, by being transformed in a larger consciousness simultaneous with it, but by entering into a continuous stream of consciousness, and so being related to a purpose. Each conscious act is itself alone; the added meaning which we afterwards dis- cover concerns the part which it plays in the rational whole of action. In our own life, it can get its explanation by reference to the future course of our life history, though it 'still remains the sole and real fact at this particular point in the temporal series. Afterwards we come to interpret it differently, but this new experience does not flow together with the old ; the two keep temporally quite distinct, and