Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/504

Rh and goal, a character of “immediate, self-dependent, all-inclusive individuality” (p. 179), while “individuality cannot be gained while we are confined to relations.” Thought, however, although not possessing the features of reality here in question, can recognize them as its own Other, can “desire them” (p. 180) “because its content has them already in an incomplete form. And in desire for the completion of what none has there is no contradiction.” “But, on the other hand (p. 181), such a completion would prove destructive; such an end would emphatically make an end of mere thought. It would bring the ideal content into a form which would be reality itself, and where mere truth and mere thought would certainly perish.” “It is this completion of thought beyond thought which remains forever an Other.” “Thought can understand that, to reach its goal, it must get beyond relations. Yet in its nature it can find no other working means of progress.”

Hence, “our Absolute,” once more, will include the differences of thought and reality, of “what” and “that.” “The self-consciousness of the part, its consciousness of itself even in opposition to the whole, — all will be contained within the one absorbing experience. For this will embrace all self-consciousness harmonized, though, as such, transmuted and suppressed.” But Mr. Bradley still insists that “we cannot possibly construe such an experience to ourselves.”

Mr. Bradley’s critics have very commonly expressed their disapproval of the extremely delicate position in which, by this theory, our finite thinking is left. We are obliged to define the Real as a system wherein unity and diversity are harmonized. We are to conceive this reality as a “sentient experience.” And in the Absolute Experience, nothing of our finite variety is to be wholly lost, but all is to be “transmuted.” Yet every instance, selected from our own human