Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/496

Rh the desolate lover had been watching. “There was nothing,” says the poet, in his last words, “there was nothing now visible but the sea.” As for me, I love the sea, and am minded to find in it life, and individuality, and explicit law. And I go upon that quest. Whoever is not weary, and is not yet disheartened, and is fond of metaphysical technicality, is welcome to join the quest. But in the sea there are also, as Victor Hugo explained to us, very strange monsters. And Mr. Bradley, too, in his book, has had much to say of the “monsters,” philosophic and psychological, that the realm of Appearance contains, even in the immediate neighborhood of the Absolute. We shall meet some such reputed “monsters” in the course of this discussion. Let him who fears such trouble also turn back.

In this essay, I shall first try to state Mr. Bradley’s theses as to the problem of the One and the Many. Then I shall try to show how he himself seems to suggest a way by which, if we follow that way far enough, something may be done to solve what he leaves apparently hopeless. And, finally, I shall proceed upon the way thus opened until we have found whither it leads. We shall find it inevitably leading to the conception of the actually Infinite. We shall examine the known difficulties of that conception, and shall at last solve them by means of our own conception of the nature of determinateness and Individuality.

The general doctrine of the Absolute which Mr. Bradley maintains is the result of a critical analysis of a number of metaphysical conceptions which he opposes. Mr. Bradley’s work is divided into two books. The first book, entitled Appearance, has a mainly negative result. Beginning with the examination of the traditional distinction between primary and secondary qualities, Mr. Bradley shows that this distinction is incapable of furnishing a consistent account of the relation of the phenomenal to the real. The problem of inherence,