Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/19

 CONTRADICTION AND REALITY. 5 Negation, he holds, is incidental, and in the progress towards perfection tends to disappear. Even self-completion is only in the finite categories. In perfection, therefore, as I con- strue the implication of his conception, both would disappear altogether. Not that Dr. McTaggart is careless of the con- sideration that Reality must include and do justice to every- thing. But some things, as I read him, may be absorbed without leaving a trace, and negation is one of them. This is not unconnected with his view of the importance of pleasure. The view here submitted may give its bearings as I said by referring to Dr. McTaggart's account of the matter. Logical Contradiction, I admit, is a vanishing element, belongs to the sphere of the finite, and minimises itself in the higher types of experience as the character of finiteness approaches a minimum. With negativity, or with negation, the case seems to be different. This belongs to the fundamental structure of everything that is real. It is not a disappearing quantity in the progress of experience. And for this reason, that it does not, like Logical Contradic- tion, depend on inadequacy. So long as there is no science, and the world baffles and contradicts the mind of the savage at every turn, there can be no such sense of a reality not- ourselves beyond and over against the mind as there is in the days of Newton or of Darwin. The negation is corre- lative to the affirmation. The important question about negation always is, not, how much meaning can be conjured out of mere denial, but why, in the most highly developed experience, negation bears an equal part. And the answer, as I read it, is fundamental to the nature of Reality. Affirmation and negation may even become co-equal and interchangeable in content, but a real whole must always bona fide hold them both together. This, therefore, it is submitted, is the spirit of difference which survives even in a resolved contradiction, and where we possess what is most real and thinkable. Everything contributes to the whole, and the failure, which made the contradiction, no doubt depended upon the distinctness of the two sides, which survives in and tends to perfect the completed union. But it appears to me that we are running away from the problem if we treat the mere fact of failure as something which, surviving as such, qualifies the successful union. The qualification, whatever it is, can surely count and work only as it survives within the completed whole, and it is in the character of this whole itself that we have to find the experience of negativity, which is not, according to the view here insisted on, a note of imperfection, but is a