Page:The Idealistic Reaction Against Science (1914).djvu/133

 permanence, is something the reality of whose existence is beyond our power of thought. Moreover, even if we admit that it is possible to think of it as a limited concept, it will still be incomprehensible how such perfect identity can give birth to the illusion of multiplicity, or an inviolable law of permanence to the phantasmagoria of a world in process of evolution.

It is useless to say that change is illusory, since we still have to explain how the illusion arises, because, even if it be nothing else, it is a psychical fact which we experience directly, and whose existence is consequently undeniable. Our thought refuses to admit that if the law of things is a perfect identity the manifold content of consciousness with its unceasing transformations can be derived therefrom without the imperturbable inflexibility of being undergoing any change. Either it is unrelated to phenomenal occurrences and abstract, lifeless unity remains immovable to all eternity in its ataraxy, in which case it is a caput mortuum with which the world of phenomena can readily dispense; or it must be the adequate reason of the constant renewal of consciousness and experience, in which case it cannot preserve its fixity of quietism. But, Bradley would urge, even the change of finite consciousness in time is illusory in so far as it assumes the separation of fact from idea, the that from the what. What authority have we, then, for forming such an opinion of it? The principle of contradiction is only of value as the law governing the judgment, and implies the distinction between two concepts standing in a definite relation to each other, that is to say, they must be such that one excludes the other; now, according to Bradley, judgment and the distinction between conceptual terms are appearances relative to our finite point of view; hence even the principle of contradiction can be but a law of appearances, an illusory law; how can it, then, be set up as a criterion of absolute reality? Who can guarantee that this law is applicable to absolute reality, and is not rather an error of perspective like