Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/569

550 rience. It must include and must harmonize every possible fragment of appearance” (op. cit., p. 548). “Reality is one experience, self-pervading, and superior to mere relations” (p. 552). Now that Reality, while a “system,” is to be viewed as experience, this assertion is due to Mr. Bradley's definition of what it is to be real. “I mean that to be real is to be indissolubly one with sentience. It is to be something which comes as a feature and aspect within one whole of feeling, something which, except as an integral aspect of such sentience, has no meaning at all” (p. 146). “You cannot find fact unless in unity with sentience, and one cannot in the end be divided from the other, either actually or in idea.”

Now this account of the Absolute must of course be taken literally. It is not a speech about an Unknowable. It is, indeed, not an effort to tell how the unity is accomplished in detail. But it is a general, and by hypothesis a true account, of what the final unity must accomplish. We have therefore a right to observe that Mr. Bradley’s Absolute, however much above our poor relational way of thinking its unity may be, really has two aspects that, although inseparable, are still distinguishable. The varieties of the world are somehow “absorbed,” or “rearranged,” in the unity of the Absolute Experience. This is one aspect. But the other aspect is that, since this absorption itself is real, — is a fact, — and since to be real is to be one with sentience, the fact that the absorption occurs, that the One and the Many are harmonized, and that the Absolute is what it is, is also a fact presented within the sentient experience of the Absolute. It is not, then, that the rivers of Appearance merely flow into the silent sea of Reality, and are there lost. No; this sentient Absolute, by hypothesis, feels, experiences, is aware, that it thus absorbs its differences. In general, whatever the Absolute is, its experience must make manifest to itself. For either this is true, or else Mr. Bradley’s definition of Reality is meaningless. Let A be any character of the Absolute. Then the fact that A is a character of the Absolute, as such, and not of the mere appearances, is also a genuine fact. As such, it is a fact experienced.