Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/559

540 assertion, or truth on the part of f, and of actual expression of the truth of this assertion by the very existence of F. Therefore, the relation between F and f is supposed to be a real fact. Since, by hypothesis, it is independent of the mere existence of F and of f, or since, if you please, F, by hypothesis, might have been real without f, and f, if false, might have existed, as a mere opinion, in the absence of any F, the relation which we have expressed by + has its own place in Being, and is a third and, by the realistic hypothesis, a separate fact; so that now U contains at least three facts, all different from one another.

Hereupon, of course, Mr. Bradley’s now familiar form of argument enters with its full rights. Unquestionably a world with three facts in it, — facts such that, by definition, either f or F might have existed wholly alone, and apart from the third fact, is a world where legitimate questions can be raised about the ties that bind the third fact to the other two. These ties are themselves facts. The + is linked to f and to F, and the “endless fission” unquestionably “breaks out.” The relation itself is seen entering into what seem new relations. The reason why this fission breaks out is now more obvious to us. It lies not in the impotence of our intellect, impotent as our poor human wits no doubt are, but in the self-representative character of any relational system. In our realistic world the system is such that, to any object, there corresponds, as another object (belonging to the same system), the relation between this first object and the rest of the universe. Or, in general, if in the world there is an object, F, then there is that relation, R, whereby F is linked to the rest of the world. But to R, as itself an object, there therefore corresponds, at the very least, R’, its own relation to the rest of the world; and the whole system F + R + R’ is as self-representative, and therefore as endless, as the number-system, and for precisely the same reason: viz., because it images, and, by hypothesis, expresses, in the abstract form of a supposed “independent Being,” the very process of the Self which undertakes to say, “F exists.”