Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/570

Rh

The Absolute therefore must not merely be A, but experience itself, as possessing the character of A. It is, for instance, “above relations.” If this is a fact, and if this statement is true of the Absolute, then the Absolute must experience that it is above relations. For Mr. Bradley’s definition of Reality requires this consequence. The Absolute of Mr. Bradley must not, like the mystical Absolute, merely ignore the relations as illusion. It must experience their “transformation” as a fact, — and as its own fact. Or, again, the Absolute is that in which thought has been “taken up” and “transformed,” so that it is no longer “mere thought.” Well, this too is to be a fact. In consequence of Mr. Bradley’s definition of what he means by the word “real,” this fact must take its place amongst the totality of fact that is in its wholeness experienced. The Absolute, then, experiences itself as the absorber and transmuter of thought. Or, yet again, the Absolute is so much above “personality” that Mr. Bradley (p. 532) finds “intellectually dishonest” “most of those” who insist upon regarding the Absolute as personal. Well, this transcendence of personality is a fact. But “Reality must be one experience; and to doubt this conclusion is impossible.” “Show me your idea of an Other, not a part of experience, and I will show you at once that it is, throughout and wholly, nothing else at all.” Hence, the fact that the Absolute transcends personality is a fact that the Absolute itself experiences as its own fact, and is “nothing else at all” except such a fact.

As we have before learned, the category of the Self is far too base, in Mr. Bradley’s opinion, to be Reality, and must be mere appearance. The Absolute, then, is above the Self, and above any form of mere selfhood. The fact that it is thus above selfhood is something “not other than experience”; but is wholly experience, and is the Absolute Experience itself. In fine, then, the Absolute, in Mr. Bradley’s view, knows itself so well, — experiences so fully its own nature, — that it sees itself to be no Self, but to be a self-absorber, “self-pervading” to be sure (p. 552), and “self-existent,” but aware