Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/568

Rh thought’s own work. Thought is, so far, a system which represents to itself its own nature, — as a nature doomed to failure. If you try to express this recognition, however, not as thought's work, but as a direct revelation, in a merely immediate experience, of a final fact, you at once rediscover that this fact is final only if it is known, as in contrast to the failure of thought. The failure of thought must, therefore, once more be known to thought. But such self-knowledge on thought’s part can only be won through the ineffable experience; and so you proceed back and forth without end. The reason for this particular endless chain is that mysticism turns upon a process whereby something, namely, thought, is to represent to itself its own negation and defeat. The consequence is a self-representative system of failure, in which every new attempt, based upon the failure of the former attempts to win the truth, itself involves the process of transcending the former failure by means of the very principle whose failure is to be observed.

And now, at last, let us ask, Does Mr. Bradley’s Absolute escape the common fate of all of our conceptions of Being? Is Mr. Bradley’s Absolute alone exempt from being a self-representative system of the type here in question?

I am obliged to answer this question in the negative. Mr. Bradley’s account of the Absolute often comes near to the use of mystical formulations, but Mr. Bradley is of course no mystic; and nobody knows better than he the self-contradictions inherent in the effort to view the real as a simple unity, without real internal multiplicity. As we have seen, Mr. Bradley’s Absolute is One, and yet does possess, as its own, all the manifoldness of the world of Appearance. The central difficulty of metaphysics, for Mr. Bradley, lies in the fact that we do not know how, in the Absolute, the One and the Many are reconciled. But that they both are in the Real is certain. Reality is explicitly called by Mr. Bradley a System. “We insist that all Reality must keep a certain character. The whole of its contents must be experience; they must come together into one system, and this unity itself must be expe-