Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/510

Rh of connection and distinction,” the process being no “foreign compulsion of the intellect, but itself the intellect’s own proprius motus. . . a self-evident analysis and synthesis of the intellect itself by itself.” He fails to find, as he looks through the World of Appearance, any case of the sort such as is sufficient to furnish any self-evident “principle or principles of diversity in unity.” Now we here desire to make a beginning in meeting his demand. We ask whether he has wholly taken account of the case that lies nearest of all to him in his research. This case is directly furnished by the intellect. Now the intellect may indeed not be all Reality. Thought may indeed, in the end, have to look “beyond itself” for its own “Other.” Yet Reality owns the intellect, too, along with the other Appearances. By Mr. Bradley’s hypothesis, Appearance is der Gottheit lebendiges Kleid, if by Gottheit we mean, for the moment, his Absolute. We have a right to use any rag torn by our own imperfect knowledge from this garment, to give us, if so may be, a hint of the weaving of the whole. The hint may prove poor. But only the trial can tell. And so, why not see how it is that the intellect, powerless though it be to make explicit the union of unity and diversity in the cases where experience furnishes from without “conjunctions” and their “background,” still manages to unite unity and diversity in its own internal processes? Might not this throw some light upon even our ultimate problem?

For the intellect, after all, has indeed its proprius motus. If it had not, how should we be thinking? And who has more often considered the proprius motus of the intellect, who has more frequently insisted that “thought involves analysis and synthesis,” than Mr. Bradley himself? Now the intellect, as Mr. Bradley observes, is discontent with its presented “external” object, the “conjunction” in space or in time, because of the uncomprehended unity in diversity of this presented object. The intellect seeks to define the ground of this unity, in case of the Thing, or of the world of Qualities and Relations, or of Space, or of Time, or in case of any of the other