F. H. Bradley

“ And if any one seeks to turn against my own doctrine the argument which I have stated above, let me at least remind him of one great difference. For me every kind of process between the Many is a state of the Whole in and through which the Many subsist. The process of the Many, and the total being of the Many themselves, are mere aspects of the one Reality which moves and knows itself within them, and apart from which all things and their changes and every knower and every known is all absolutely nothing. ”

“ In his soul is a triumphant process of ideal expansion passing over unbrokenly into actual fruition, the negative perception of the ground as “not run over” serving only as the vanishing condition of a sense of activity with no cloud or check of failure. This is what I meant by an idea which is not explicit, nor, except that the name is perhaps a bad one, do I see anything in it deserving censure. I should perhaps have done better to have used no name at all. But the distinction itself, I must repeat, is throughout every aspect of mind of vital importance. ”

“ Nor do I understand what in the end Professor Watson thinks about the ultimate truth of succession and change. The view of Reality as one self-consciousness realizing itself in many self-consciousnesses does not, so far as Professor Watson has stated it, appear to my mind to contain any answer whatever to this question. The many selves seem (we know) to themselves to be a succession of events, past, present and future. By a succession I do not of course mean a mere succession, but still I mean a succession. ”

“ We can directly use the intellect pure, I believe, but indirectly the intellect I am sure is not pure, nor does any mere intellect exist. A merely intellectual harmony is an abstraction, and it is a legitimate abstraction, but if the harmony were merely intellectual it would be nothing at all. And, by an alteration in conditions which are not directly intellectual, you may thus indirectly ruin the intellectual world. Now this I take to be the case with our alleged possible surplus of pain. That surplus must, I consider, indirectly produce, and appear in the intellect as, a self-contradiction. ”

“ Stout says that I have overlooked, and which I on the contrary claim to have preached in vain—the distinction between the psychical fact itself and what that becomes for reflection. A sensation or feeling or sense of activity, as we have just described it, is not, looked at in another way, an experience of activity at all. If you keep to it it tells you nothing, just as pleasure and pain, I should add, tell you nothing. It is a mere sensation, shut up within which you could by no reflection get the idea of activity. ”

“ And that mere ‘existence’ should be a reason for anything seems difficult to conceive, even if we suppose (as we cannot) that mere existence is itself anything but a false, self-contradictory, and in the end meaningless abstraction.
But the true reason why we judge that anything will continue (whenever and wherever we so judge) is radically different. It is an inference based not on ‘existence’ but on ideal synthesis of content, and it concludes to and from an identity not of ‘existence’ but character. It rests in a word upon the Principle of Ideal Identity. ”

“ The conclusion which would follow is that neither bodies nor their relations in space and time have, as such, reality. They are on each side an appearance and an abstraction separated from the whole. But in that whole, on the other hand, they cannot, as such, be connected intelligibly, and that whole therefore points beyond itself to a higher mode of being, in comparison with which it is but appearance.
The idea of the motion of a single body may perhaps (I am ignorant) be necessary in physics, and, if that is so, then in physics of course that idea must be rational and right. ”

“ Now if the knowledge of each singly fell in each severally, each for itself would be the world, and there could nowhere be any knowledge of the many reals. But if, one or more, they know the others, such knowledge must qualify them necessarily, and it must qualify them reciprocally by the nature both of the known and of the knower. The knowledge in each knower—even if we abstract from what is known—seems an internal change supervening if not superinduced, and it is a change which cannot well be explained, given complete self-containedness. ”

“ A failure to explain is certainly not always an inconsistency, and to prove that a view is unsatisfactory is not always to demonstrate that it is false. Mr. Hobhouse’s crucial instance to prove the reality of A-B apart from the self could to the Solipsist at most show a sequence that he was unable to explain. [7] How in short in this way you are to drive him out of his circle I do not see—unless of course he is obliging enough to contradict himself in advance by allowing the possibility of A-B existing apart, or being real or true independently and unconditionally. ”

“ But, if so, the nature of the known must depend on the knower, just as the knower is qualified by the nature of the known. Each is relative and neither is self-contained, and otherwise knowledge, pre-supposed as a fact, is made impossible.
Suppose, in other words, that each of the Many could possess an existence merely for itself, that existence could not be known, and for the others would be nothing. But when one real becomes something for another, that makes a change in the being of each. ”

“ I maintain on the contrary that no ground could either be more irrational in itself or more wanting in support from our ordinary practice. And first, by way of introduction, let me dispose of any doubt based on the idea of Possibility. The nature of our world is such that we see every day the existence of finite things terminated. The possible termination of any finite temporal existence is therefore suggested by the known character of things. ”

“ A real intellectual harmony involves, I must insist, the perfect identity throughout of idea with existence. And if ideas of what should be, and what is not, were in the majority (as in a miserable Universe they must be) , there could not then, I submit, be an intellectual harmony.
My conclusion, I am fully aware, has not been demonstrated (p. 534) . The unhappiness of the world remains a possibility to be emphasized by the over-doubtful or gloomy. ”

“ But, however that may be, I must be excused the remark that on such subjects it is perhaps not surprising that any man should come in the end to any result whatever, yet that in philosophy any man should use the idea of a single moving body, as if it were a thing self-evident and free from difficulty—this really surprises me. ”

“ Knowledge must somehow be a state of one or more of the Many, a state in which they are known to be plural; for except in the Many where can we suppose that any knowledge falls? Even if relations are taken to exist somehow outside of the Many, the attempt to make knowledge fall merely in these relations leads to insoluble difficulties. And here, since the Many are taken to be the sole reality, such an attempt at escape is precluded. The knowledge therefore must fall somehow within the reals. ”

“ And if it is so easy to understand that the idea of change is not really inconsistent, cannot Professor Watson formulate it for us in a way which is true and ultimate, and then explain what right he has to treat it as calling for correction? The objection—to turn to another point—raised against the doctrine of distinct time-series, [5] I am unable to follow. Why and how does this doctrine rest on the (obviously false) view of time’s independent reality? Why, because time is an aspect of the one reality, must all series in time have a temporal unity? ”

“ If we take pleasure and pain, or one of them, to be not aspects of sensation but themselves special sensations, that will of course make no real difference to the argument. For in any case such sensations would be mere aspects and adjectives of their whole psychical states. I would add that, even in psychology, the above distinction seems, to me at least, to possess very little importance. The attempt again to draw a sharp distinction between discomfort and pain would (even if it could be successful) make no difference to us here. ”

“ The knower is evidently and plainly altered; and, as to the known, if it remained unchanged, it would itself remain outside of the process, and it would not be with it that the knower would be concerned. And its existence asserted by the knower would be a self-contradiction.
Such is in outline the objection to a plurality of reals which can be based on the fact of knowledge. It would be idle to seek to anticipate attempts at a reply, or to criticise efforts made to give existence and ultimate reality to relations outside the reals. ”

“ A man may take the view that there is an original experience of activity the content of which is complex and holds that which, when analyzed by reflection, becomes our developed idea of activity. Without of course venturing to say that this view is certainly false, I submit that we have no reason to believe it to be true.
(ii) A man may hold that we have an original experience which is not in itself complex nor has any internal diversity in its content. ”

“ We cannot, if we abstract the aspects of pleasure and pain and confine ourselves to these abstractions, discover directly within them an internal discrepancy, any more than we could do this in every abstracted sensible quality. But since these aspects are as a fact together with, first, their sensible qualities and, next, the rest of the world, and since no relation or connection of any kind can be in the end merely external, it follows that in the end the nature of pleasure or pain must somehow go beyond itself. ”

“ And if the Reality were not the complete identity of idea and existence, but had, with an outstanding element of pain, a necessary overplus of unsatisfied desire, and had so on the whole an element of outstanding idea not at one with sensation—the possibility of resolving this contradiction would seem in principle excluded. ”

“ It is not by crude attempts at elimination that you can deal with the Solipsist, but rather (as in this chapter I have explained) by showing that the connection which he maintains, though really essential, has not the character which he assigns to it. You may hope to convince him that he himself commits the same fault as is committed by the assertor of naked primary qualities, or of things existing quite apart from myself—the fault, that is, of setting up as an independent reality a mere abstraction from experience. ”

“ The Solipsist, while he merely maintains the essential necessity of his self to the Universe and every part of it, cannot in my opinion be refuted, and so far certainly he is right. For, except as a relative point of view, there is no apartness or independence in the Universe. ”

“ It involves certainly an alteration of the knower, and an alteration such as we cannot account for by any internal cause, and which therefore is an argument against, though it cannot disprove, mere self-existence. And in the second place, when we consider knowledge from the side of the known, this disproof seems complete. Knowledge apart from the known is a one-sided and inconsistent abstraction, and the assertion of a knowledge in which the known is not somehow and to some extent present and concerned, seems no knowledge at all. ”

“ To say, Because a thing is now at one time it therefore must be at another time, or Because it has been through one duration it therefore must be through another duration, and to offer this argument, not as merely for some other reason admissible, but as expressing a principle—strikes my mind as surprising. ”

“ Everything finite, because somehow together in one whole with everything else, must, because this whole is one above the level of bare feeling, co-exist with the rest at the very least relationally. Hence everything must somehow, at least to some extent, be qualified from the outside. ”

“ On the other hand can motion be predicated of anything apart from and other than the bodies, and, if not, can we avoid predicating it of the bodies, and, if so, is it not their state, and so in some sense a state of each? ”

“ For that is itself at once both any one finite and also what is beyond. And, because no ‘together’ can in the end be merely external, therefore the Whole within the finite carries that outside itself.
By an attempt to fall back upon mere feeling below relations nothing would be gained. For with the loss of the relations, and with the persistence of the unity, even the appearance of independence on the part of the diversity is gone. And again feeling is self-transcendent, and is perfected mainly by way of relations, and always in a Whole that both is above them and involves them (p. 583) . ”

“ A probability, I may here go on to remark, of many millions to one against the truth of some statement may be a very good and sufficient reason for our putting that, for some purpose or purposes, on one side and so treating it as nothing. ”

“ I still hold Will always to be the self-realization of an idea, but it is necessary to provide that this idea shall not in a certain sense conflict with that which in a higher sense is identified with the self. By ‘higher’ I do not mean ‘more moral,’ and I am prepared to explain what I do mean by the above. ”

“ We may conclude then that there is no element in the process of making all harmonious within the Absolute which does not fall within finite centres. What falls outside, and is over and above, is not the result but the last specific character which makes the result what it is. ”