Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/500

Rh makes them constitutive of A. Thus, however, “we are led by a principle of fission which conducts us to no end.” “The quality must exchange its unity for an internal relation.” This diversity “demands a new relation, and so on without limit.”

For similar reasons, a relation without terms being “mere verbiage” (p. 32), it follows that since the terms imply qualities, relation without qualities is nothing. But, on the other hand, if the relation stands related to the qualities, if it is anything to them, “we shall now require a new connecting relation.” But hereupon an endless process of the same kind as before is set up (p. 33). “The links are united by a link, and this bond of union is a link which has also two ends; and these require each a fresh link to connect them with the old.”

The importance for Mr. Bradley of the negative result thus reached lies in the great generality of the conceptions here in question, and in the consequent range covered by these fundamental considerations. “The conclusion,” says Mr. Bradley, “to which I am brought, is that a relational way of thought — any one that moves by the machinery of terms and relations — must give appearance and not truth. It is a make-shift, a device, a mere practical compromise, most necessary, but in the end most indefensible. We have to take reality as many, and to take it as one, and to avoid contradiction. We want to divide it, or to take it, when we please, as indivisible; to go as far as we desire in either of these directions, and to stop when that suits us. . . . But when these inconsistencies are forced together. . . the result is an open and staring inconsistency.”

In the subsequent chapters of Mr. Bradley’s first book, he himself sees, in a great measure, merely an application of the general principle just enunciated to such special problems as are exemplified by Space, by Time, by Causation, by Activity, and by the Self. For all these metaphysical conceptions are defined in terms of a “relational way” of thinking, and involve the problem of the One and the Many. To be sure, the discussion of the Self, in Chapters IX and X, brings the problem