Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 4.djvu/348

 contradictory for thought, and this because thought is essentially analytical, seeking to break up any given unity into a diversity which is then predicated of the unity. It is thus impossible in our experience that we should ever attain to or be able to conceive a unity without diversity, and the result of Mr Bradley’s theory only furnishes a proof of this. For when he seems to make any positive statements about the real, they are inevitably open to the same charge which he brings against all other views, — that they involve the contradiction of the one in many, which we can neither avoid nor accept. ‘Harmony’ and ‘Experience’ are his favourite terms for designating the Absolute; but within a harmony variety is necessary, otherwise it would not be a harmony. It is true the unity is the higher element and the true aspect of a harmony, but for it to be felt and exist the variety must be felt and exist. Similarly, ‘experience’ is either a meaningless term, or involves distinction, relation, and all the other ‘appearances’ within itself Even granting the possibility of an experience representing a unity above all our finite forms of experience, just as feeling in some shape represents a unity below them, still the Absolute can evidently not be this experience; An experience, as we know it, does not exist independently, hanging in the air, but is usually thought to belong to a subject. We regard our experience as distinguishing us, for better or worse, from all other individuals, — as forming an absolute gulf of separation between us. Similarly one would think that the Absolute Experience must at least belong to a subject, in which case we should have the distinction of the Absolute and its Experience, the same as that of Substance and Quality, which is the basis of the criticism of appearance. The fact that this experience is to be timeless is apt to veil the difficulty, and seems to give us a unity absolutely without difference, analogous to those cases of intense feeling in our own lives, when we seem to be wholly absorbed in the feeling, our individuality passing from us to it. But this after all is only seeming ; we are never even wholly absorbed, and as the state passes away we see that it was only an element in our lives, — one of our feelings. A timeless experience is for us a contradiction in terms, we can apply no meaning to the phrase; even if we supposed the life of the Absolute to consist in a higher experience we should be compelled to the notion of pulsations within this experience. In any case however the Absolute and its Experience stand over against one another as substance and quality; we cannot identify them, and the contradiction remains unsolved, because it is one necessary to our thought of the real.

The difficulty is still more obvious if we take Mr Bradley’s