Page:Philosophical Review Volume 31.djvu/274

262 reality must be experience. But difficulties swarm about this idea. Our keenest dialecticians have wrestled in vain to save reality in experience as something articulate and knowable. One after another of the thought-born elements have been eliminated as involving contradictions, until all relations, all distinctions have had to go. In identifying this reality with mere sentiency, one makes it as completely a blank as the realist's independent entity. And yet if we admit that by thinking about this so-called experience, we can learn what it actually is as real, we commit ourselves without reserve to the scientific conception of reality as system. This amounts to philosophical suicide. Hence the strange vacillations in the writings of so keen a thinker as Mr. F. H. Bradley when he faces this outcome. Reality must, yet cannot, be system. Relations are indispensable in the absolutely real, yet can be tolerated only as transmuted into something else. Distinctions hold in this Absolute, but not as distinctions. The ultimate Reality is thus super-relational, super-moral, infinitely various but without articulations, affected by all the changes in finite experience, yet itself unchanged; neither good nor bad, while at the same time in an ineffable sense a personality and altogether good. It is well known how Mr. Bradley escapes these difficulties at critical points by introducing the phrase "as such." But relations as such and the good as such and personality as such have no existence for anybody sufficiently developed to follow Mr. Bradley in his subtle reasoning. It has also been repeatedly pointed out that the contradictions found in experience as owned and articulated appear just as formidable in mere sentiency when that is made to mean anything. The essential difficulty in the line of thought we are criticizing is that, in spite of itself, it does not in principle transcend the abstractly scientific. Hence it can reach the real only by denying itself. When it calls reality 'experience,' it simply goes back to the beginning for a fresh start. Evidently unless a new direction is taken, the same outcome will be inevitable; reality will vanish into process without any residuum of being. The task is to find in the external world a real that is not a mere intellectual construct nor yet mere sentiency, not an independent thing-by-itself nor a given