Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/507

488 diversity. But your offered conjunctions, on the other side, are for it no connections or ways of union. They are themselves merely other external things to be connected.” It is, then, “idle from the outside to say to thought, ’Well, unite, but do not identify.’ How can thought unite except so far as in itself it has a mode of union? To unite without an internal ground of connection and distinction, is to strive to bring together barely in the same point, and that is self-contradiction.” Things, then, “are not contradictory because they are diverse,” but “just in so far as they appear as bare conjunctions.” Therefore it is that a mere together, “in space or time, is for thought unsatisfactory and, in the end, impossible.” But, on the other hand, every such untrue view must be transcended, and the Real is not self-contradictory, despite its diversities, since their real unity is, in the Absolute, present.

If one now asks what then “would satisfy the intellect, supposing it could be got” (p. 568), Mr. Bradley points out that if the ground of unity is “external to the elements into which the conjunction must be analyzed,” then the ground “becomes for the intellect a fresh element, and in itself calls for synthesis in afresh point of unity.” “But hereon,” he continues, “because in the intellect no intrinsic connections were found, ensues the infinite process.” This being the problem “The remedy might be here. If the diversities were complementary aspects of a process of connection and distinction, the process not being external to the elements, or, again, a foreign compulsion of the intellect, but itself the intellect’s own proprius motus, the case would be altered. Each aspect would of itself be a transition to the other aspect, a transition intrinsic and natural at once to itself, and to the intellect. And the Whole would be a self-evident analysis and synthesis of the intellect itself by itself. Synthesis here has ceased to be mere synthesis, and has become self-completion; and analysis, no longer mere analysis, is self-explication. And the question how or why the many are one and the one is many here loses its meaning. There is no why or how beside the self-evident process, and towards its own differ-