Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/503

 THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE. 487 what holds of judgment in general holds in particular of the primary judgment which separates between subject and object and gives knowledge the form it wears to the ordinary con- sciousness of the attempt to comprehend by means of finite predicates the nature of a being which is essentially infinite and incomprehensible. It is impossible to suppose that Mr. Bradley intends to deny this, which one would have thought is an axiom of modern idealism. Yet, in arguing that the form of knowledge is incompatible with ultimate reality, he seems to proceed throughout upon the assumption that tbe unity which the ideal of knowledge requires is one which is incompatible with the difference of subject and object. One consequence of this is that he tends to represent the differ- ences as something comparatively accidental and irrelevant. They are a " disease " which breaks out in the object of knowledge, and has, as he tells us, to be healed homoeopathi- cally. 1 Or again they are a " dissection " ; 2 they give us the anatomy of the thing but never the living thing itself. The life of the object falls on the side of the unity. In all this we are tempted to ask whether Mr. Bradley has not been carried away by his own metaphor, and whether if we changed the metaphor we might not arrive at a precisely opposite conclusion. Let the differences be the living functions of the organism instead of dead sections of it, and what becomes of the unity? In this case the "life " falls on the side of the predicates and leaves us only the stillness of death as the unity out of which they come and to which they return. This, indeed, as we shall see, is very much the conclusion at which Mr. McTaggart, approaching the question from the side of the differences, actually arrives when he finds in the " this " of the thing a mere dead centre which is left on our hands when we abstract from the predicates which give life and individuality to the object as an element in our knowledge. I do not propose to dwell further on Mr. Bradley's argu- ment, but refer the reader to Prof. Seth's treatment of it (op. cit.}, with which I find myself in substantial agreement. I quote his conclusion as my own: "Dissatisfaction with the form of knowledge as such seems to me I must confess chimerical ; and I am sure that the repudiation of it leads not to any higher unity but to the pit of undifferentiated substance out of which Hegel dug philosophy ". It will be more profitable if, approaching the question from the side of differentiation, I try to show from a point of view 1 Studies in Hegelian Dialectic, 198, p. 166. 2 Ibid., p. 167.