Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/494

Rh about the Absolute you try to show how the One and the Many are brought into unity, and how the Many develope out of the One, you find that, in attempting to define the Many at all, you have defined an actually infinite number. But an actually infinite multitude, according to Mr. Bradley, is a self-contradictory conception. The problem thus stated is an ancient phase of the general problem as to unity and plurality.

From the very outset of the philosophical study of the diversities of the universe, it has been noticed, that in many cases, where common sense is content to enumerate two, or three, or some other limited number of aspects or constituents of a supposed object, closer analysis shows that the variety contained in this object, if really existent at all, must be boundless, so that the dilemma: “Either no true variety of the supposed type is real, or else this variety involves an infinity of aspects,” has often been used as a critical test, to discredit some commonly received view as to the unity and variety of the universe or of some supposed portion thereof. Mr. Bradley has not been wanting in his appeal to this type of critical argument. But to give this argument its due weight, when it comes as a device for discrediting all efforts to define the nature of Individuals, requires one to attack the whole question of the actual Infinite, a question that recent discussions of the Philosophy of Mathematics have set in a decidedly new light, but that these discussions have also made more technical than ever. If I am to be just to this matter, I must therefore needs wander far afield. Nobody, I fear, except a decidedly technical reader, will care to follow. I have, therefore, hesitated long before venturing seriously to entertain the plan of saying, either here or elsewhere, anything about what seems to me the true, and, as I believe, the highly positive implication, of Mr. Bradley’s apparently most destructive arguments concerning Individual Being and concerning the meaning of the world of Appearance.

Yet the problem of the reality of infinite variety and multiplicity, — a problem thus made so prominent by Mr. Bradley’s whole method of procedure, — is one that no metaphysician