Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/511

492 Appearances that seem external to thought. The intellect fails. Why? “Because it cannot do without differences, but, on the other hand, it cannot make them” (p. 562). But can Mr. Bradley wholly mean this assertion that the intellect cannot make differences? In the chapters upon the Thing, and upon the other objects presented, as from without, to the intellect, we are indeed shown, when Mr. Bradley’s argument is once accepted, that thought does not make, and does decline to receive ready made, the differences offered as real by these external objects, so long as they are taken in their abstraction.

But how is it possible for thought to discover the very fact that it cannot make, and that it declines to receive, certain differences, without itself making, of its own motion, certain other differences, whose internal unity it knows just in so far as it makes them? For when thought sets out to solve a problem, it has a purpose. This is its own purpose, and is, also, in so far an unity, not furnished as from without, but, in the course of the thinking process, developed as from within. When, after struggling to solve its problem, and to fulfil its purpose, thought finds itself in the presence of a puzzle that is so far ultimate, what, according to Mr. Bradley, does it see as the essence of this puzzle? It sees that a given hypothesis as to the unity of A and B (where A and B are the supposed “external” diversities, but where the hypothesis itself has been reflectively developed into its consequences through the inner movement of thought), — that this hypothesis, I say, either leads to various consequences which directly contradict one another, or else, by an internal and logical necessity, leads to an “infinite process,” — in other words, to an infinite variety of consequences. In either case, in addition to what thought so far finds puzzling about A and B, thought further sees a diversity, and a diversity that is now not the presented “conjunction” of A and B, but a necessary diversity constructively developed by thought's own movement. Thought learns that its own purpose developes this variety. For the hypothesis about A and B (viz., that they are “in relation” or are “substantive and adjective,” or whatever else the hypothe-