Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 4.djvu/52

 casting off the shackles, or denying the sufficiency, of the systems of abstract truth which the ingenuity of the past has propounded.

Nevertheless I incline to think that it is possible to steer the human reason safely through between the Scylla of Scepticism and the Charybdis of an Idea absolutely irreconcilable with experience. But to do so it is imperative to define exactly the part played by abstraction in a philosophic account of the world.

Evidently, in the first place, it does not follow that because all truth in the narrower sense (v. note p. 38) is abstract, because all philosophy must be couched in abstract terms, therefore the whole truth about the universe in the wider sense, i.e. the ultimate account that can be given of it, can be compressed into a single abstract formula, and that the scheme of things is nothing more than, e.g., the self-development of the Absolute Idea. To draw this inference would be to confuse the thought-symbol, which is, and must be, the instrument of thought, with that which the symbol expresses, often only very imperfectly, viz. the reality which is “known” only in experience and can never be evoked by the incantations of any abstract formula. If we avoid this confusion, we shall no longer be prone to think that we have disposed of the thing symbolized when we have brought home imperfection and contradiction to the formulas whereby we seek to express it — an accusation which, I fear, might frequently be made good against the destructive part of Mr Bradley’s “Appearance and Reality” — to suppose e.g. that Time and Change cannot really be characteristic of the universe, because our thought, in attempting to represent them by abstract symbols, often contradicts itself For evidently the contradiction may result as well from the inadequacy of our symbols to express realities of whose existence we are directly assured by other factors in experience, and which consequently are data rather than problems for thought, as from the ‘merely apparent’ character of their reality, and the moral to be drawn may only be the old one, that it is the function of thought to mediate and not to create. If so, our proper attitude will be this, that while we shall not hesitate to represent the facts of experience by conceptual symbols, we shall always be on our guard against their misrepresenting them, and ever alive to the necessity of interpreting our symbols by a reference to reality. In this manner I conceive that it would be possible to utilize the terms of abstract metaphysics, whenever they seemed to yield useful formulas, without erecting them into fetishes and giving them the entire mastery over our reason. From the tyranny of abstractions there would thus always be an appeal to