Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/495

476 can permanently evade. The doctrine that the conception of the actually infinite multitude is a self-contradictory conception is a familiar thesis ever since Aristotle. If this thesis is correct, as Mr. Bradley himself assumes, then Mr. Bradley’s results, as regards the limitations of our human knowledge of the Absolute, appear to be inevitable, and the effort of these present lectures to define the essential relations of the world and the individual must fail. On the other hand, however, if, as I believe, the very doctrine of the true nature of Individual Being, which these lectures defend, enables us, for the first time perhaps in the history of the discussion of the Infinite, to give a precise statement of the sense in which an Infinite Multitude can, without contradiction, be viewed as determinately real, — then a discussion of Mr. Bradley’s position, and of the whole problem of the One, the Many, and the Infinite, will prove an important supplement to our Theory of Being, and an essential basis for the vindication of our human knowledge of the general constitution of Reality. And so I must feel that, if the present task is extended and technical, the goal is nothing less than the defence of what I take to be a true theory of the whole meaning of life.

And so I am now minded to undertake the task of vindicating the concept of the actual Infinite against the charge of self-contradiction. I am minded, also, to attempt the closely related task of defending the concept of the Self against a like charge. In the same connection I shall undertake to show something of the true relations of the One and the Many in the real world. And in the course of this enterprise I shall found the positive discussion upon a criticism of Mr. Bradley’s position.

But now, at this point, let any weary reader whom my lectures may have already disheartened, but who nevertheless may kindly have proceeded so far, turn finally back. When you enter the realm of Mr. Bradley’s Absolute, it is much as it is at the close of Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, after the ship that carries away the lady has sunk below the horizon, and after the tide has just covered the rock where