Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/571

552 of itself, in the end, as something in which there is no real Self to be aware of. Or, in other words, the Absolute is really aware of itself as being not Reality, but Appearance, just in so far as it is a Self. Meanwhile, of course, this Absolute experiences, also, the fact that it is an “individual”; that it is a “system”; that it “holds all content in an individual experience”; that “no feeling or thought of any kind can fall outside its limits” (p. 147); that it “stands above and not below its internal distinctions” (p. 533); that “it is not the indifference, but the concrete identity of all extremes.” For all these statements are said by Mr. Bradley, in various places, to be accounts of what the Absolute really is. But if the Absolute is all these things, it can be so only in case it experiences itself as the possessor of these characters. Yet all the concrete self-possession of the Absolute remains something above Self; and apparently the Absolute thus knows itself to be, as a Self, quite out of its own sight!

Now in vain does one endeavor to assert all this, and yet to add that we know not how, in detail, all this can be true of the Absolute. We know, at all events, that apart from what is flatly self-contradictory in the foregoing expressions, Mr. Bradley’s Absolute is a self-representative system, which views itself as the possessor of what, through all the unity, remains still in one aspect another than itself, namely, the whole world of Appearance. And we know, therefore, that the Absolute, despite all Mr. Bradley’s objections to the Self, escapes from selfhood and from all that selfhood implies, or even transcends selfhood, only by remaining to the end a Self. In other words, it really escapes from selfhood in no genuine fashion whatever. For it can escape from selfhood only by experiencing, as its own, this, its own escape. This consequence is clear. Whatever is in the Absolute is experienced doubly. Namely, what is there is experienced, and that this content is experienced by the Absolute itself, — this final fact is also experienced. Hence, the whole Absolute must be infinite in precisely Dedekind’s positive sense of the term. Mr. Bradley’s Absolute is a Kette in the same sense as every other