Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/502

Rh has no meaning at all.” In consequence, “The Absolute is one system,” and “its contents are. . . sentient experience.” “It will hence be a single and all-inclusive experience, which embraces every partial diversity in concord” (p. 147). It follows that, in the Absolute, none of the diversities which are to us so perplexing, and which, as exemplified by the cases of thing, quality, relation, Self, and the rest of the appearances, are so contradictory in their seeming, are wholly lost. For the Absolute, on the contrary, these diversities are all preserved; only they are “transmuted” into a whole, which is, in ways of which we have only a most imperfect knowledge, internally harmonious. As to the hints that we possess, regarding the nature of the Absolute, they are summarized as follows: “Immediate presentation” (p. 159) gives us the experience of a “whole” which “contains diversity,” but which is, nevertheless, “not parted by relations.” On the other hand, “relational form,” where known to us, points “everywhere to an unity,” — “a substantial totality, beyond relations and above them, a whole endeavoring without success to realize itself in their detail” (p. 160). Such facts and considerations give us “not an experience, but an abstract idea” of a “unity which transcends and yet contains every manifold appearance.” “We can form the general idea of an absolute experience in which phenomenal distinctions are merged, a whole becomes immediate at a higher stage without losing any richness.” But meanwhile we have “a complete inability to understand this concrete unity in detail.”

The ground of this, our inability, is the one already illustrated, namely, the necessary incapacity of a “relational way of thinking” to give us anything definite except Appearance, or to harmonize the One and the Many in concrete fashion, or to free our explicit accounts of the unity from the contradictions and infinite processes heretofore illustrated. A more precise exposition of the general defects of thought in question, Bradley undertakes to furnish in his fifteenth chapter, under the title Thought and Reality. Here the nature of relational thought, its inevitable sundering of the what and the