Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/573

554 mentary fact can be called rational. And hereby we have indeed found a sense in which the “endless fission” of Mr. Bradley’s analysis expresses not mere Appearance but Being. Here is a law not only of Thought but also of Reality. Here is the true union of the One and the Many. Here is a multiplicity that is not “absorbed” or “transmuted,” but retained by the Absolute. And it is a multiplicity of Individual facts that are still One in the Absolute.

Despite all the foregoing considerations, however, we have still to face the objection that, even if these constructions be regarded as self-evident products of Thought, they, nevertheless, simply cannot be genuinely true of the final nature of Reality and must somehow be fallacious. For, from Mr. Bradley’s side, it would be maintained that however inevitable the seeming of these endless processes, they become self-contradictory precisely when you take them to be real and yet endless. For who knows not the Aristotelian arguments, so often repeated in later thought, against the actual Infinite? Is not the complete Infinite the very type of a logical “monster?” Is not the very conception a self-contradiction? If thought, then, has to conceive Reality as infinite, so much the worse, one may say, for thought. The Real, whatever its appearance, cannot in itself be endless.

It is necessary to consider such arguments by themselves, for the moment, and apart from the foregoing considerations. Let us, then, briefly develope some of these often repeated reasons on account of which so many assert that Reality cannot be an infinite system at all.