Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/296

 284 WILLIAM JAMES : a dog-in-the-manger, in truth, which, having no rights of its own, can find nothing else to do than to keep its betters out of theirs. There are two points involved here : first the claim that certain things have rights that are absolute, ubiquitous and all pervasive, and in regard to which nothing else can possibly exist in its own right ; and second that anything that denies this assertion is pure negativity with no positive context whatsoever. Take the latter point first. Is it true that what is negative in one way is thereby convicted of incapacity to be positive in any other way ? The word " Fact " is like the word " Accident," like the word " Absolute " itself. They all have their negative con- notation. In truth their whole connotation is negative and re- lative. All it says is that, whatever the thing may be that is denoted by the words, other things do not control it. Where fact, where accident is, they must be silent, it alone can speak. But that does not prevent its speaking as loudly as you please, in its own tongue. It may have an inward life, self-transparent and active in the maximum degree. An indeterminate future volition on my part, for example, would be a strict accident as far as my present self is concerned. But that could not prevent it, in the moment in which it occurred, from being possibly the most in- tensely living and luminous experience I ever had. Its quality of being a brute fact ab extra says nothing whatever as to its in- wardness. It simply says to outsiders : ' Hands off ! ' And this brings us back to the first point of the Absolutist indictment of Fact. Is that point really anything more than a fantastic dislike to letting anything say ' Hands off ' ? What else explains the contempt the Absolutist authors exhibit for a free- dom defined simply on its " negative " side, as freedom " from," &c. '? What else prompts them to deride such freedom ? But, dislike for dislike, who shall decide ? Why is not their dislike at having me " from " them, entirely on a par with mine at having them " through " me? I know very well that in talking of dislikes to those who never mention them, I am doing a very coarse thing, and making a sort of intellectual Orson of myself. But, for the life of me, I cannot help it, because I feel sure that likes and dislikes must be among the ultimate factors of their philosophy as well as of mine. Would they but admit it ! How sweetly we then could hold converse together ! There is something finite about us both, as we now stand. We do not know the Absolute Whole yet. Part of it is still negative to us. Among the whats of it still stalks a mob of opaque thats, without which we cannot think. But just as I admit that this is all possibly provisional, that even the An- selmian proof may come out all right, and creation may be a rational system through-and-through, why might they not also admit that it may all be otherwise, and that the shadow, the opacity, the negativity, the " from "-ness, the plurality that is ultimate, may never be wholly driven from the scene. We should