Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/508

Rh ences this whole is at once their how and their why, their being, substance, and system, their reason, ground, and principle of diversity and unity” (id). Here, Mr. Bradley insists, the Law of Contradiction “has nothing to condemn.” Such an union or “identity of opposites” would not conflict with the Law of Contradiction, but would rather fulfil the law. If “all that we find were in the end such a self-evident and complete whole,” the end of the intellect, and so of philosophy, would have been won. But Mr. Bradley is (p. 569) “unable to verify a solution of this kind.” Hence, as he says, “Against my intellectual world the Law of Contradiction has claims nowhere satisfied in full.” Therefore “they are met in and by a whole beyond the mere intellect.” It is, however, no “abstract identity” that thus satisfies the demands of the intellect. “On the other hand, I cannot say that to me any principle or principles of diversity in unity are self-evident.” In consequence, while “self-existence and self-identity are to be found,” they are to be looked for neither in “bare identity,” nor in a relapse into a “stage before thinking begins,” but in “a whole beyond thought, a whole to which thought points and in which it is included.” Diversities exist. Therefore (p. 570) “they must somehow be true and real.” “Hence, they must be true and real in such a way that from A or B the intellect can pass to its further qualification without an external denomination of either. But this means that A and B are united, each from its own nature, in a whole which is the nature of both alike.” It is the failure of the intellect to define this whole positively and in detail, which is expressed in all the contradictions of the theory of appearance.

So far, then, for a summary of Mr. Bradley’s general view regarding the mystery of unity in variety, and so much for the reasons which have led him, on the one hand, to maintain that real identity is never “simple,” or abstract, but involves