F. H. Bradley

“ And, if we are not consistent, yet how can we proceed rationally without an intellectual standard? And I think we are driven to this alternative. We must either be incapable of saying one word on the relative importance of things; we can tell nothing of the comparative meaning, and place in the world, owned by art, science, religion, social life or morality; we are wholly ignorant as to the degrees of truth and reality which these possess, and we cannot even say that for the universe any one of them has any significance, makes any degree of difference, or matters at all. ”

“ There cannot for metaphysics be, in short, any hard and absolute distinction between truths and falsehoods. With each assertion the question is, how much will be left of that assertion, if we suppose it to have been converted into ultimate truth? Out of everything that makes its special nature as the predication of this adjective, how much, if anything, will survive? And the amount of survival in each case, as we have already seen, gives the degree of reality and truth. ”

“ But the union in all perception of thought with sense, the co-presence everywhere in all appearances of fact with ideality—this is the one foundation of truth. And, when we add to this the saving distinction that to have existence need not mean to exist, and that to be realized in time is not always to be visible by any sense, we have made ourselves secure against the worst of errors. From this we are soon led to our principle of degrees in truth and reality. Our world and our life need then no longer be made up arbitrarily. They need not be compounded of the two hemispheres of fact and fancy. ”

“ We reach a higher stage where some existence embodies, or in any way presents in itself, a law and a principle. However, in the mere example and instance of an universal truth, the fact and the law are still essentially alien to each other, and the defective character of their union is plainly visible. Our standard moves us on towards an individual with laws of its own, and to laws which form the vital substance of a single existence. ”

“ With any view of the world which confines known reality to existence in time, and which limits truth to the attempt to reproduce somehow the series of events—with any view for which merely a thing exists, or barely does not exist, and for which an idea is false, or else is true—how is it possible to be just to the various orders of appearance? ”

“ But, none the less, a building up of the sense-world from the ground of actual presentation is a condition of all our knowledge. It is not true that everything, even if temporal, has a place in our one “real” order of space or time. But, indirectly or directly, every known element must be connected with its sequence of events, and, at least in some sense, must show itself even there. The test of truth after all, we may say, lies in presented fact.
We should here try to avoid a serious mistake. Without existence we have perceived that thought is incomplete ”

“ However little we desire it, these form, in effect, actual constituent factors in our real universe. And the ideas, belonging to these several fields, certainly cannot be entertained without an identification, however vague, of each with its department of the Real. We treat the imaginary as existing somehow in some world, or in some by-world, of the imagination. And, in spite of our denial, all such worlds are for us inevitably the appearances of that whole which we feel to be a single Reality. ”

“ Our thoughts certainly, for some purposes, may be taken as wholly false, or again as quite accurate; but truth and error, measured by the Absolute, must each be subject always to degree. Our judgments, in a word, can never reach as far as perfect truth, and must be content merely to enjoy more or less of Validity. I do not simply mean by this term that, for working purposes, our judgments are admissible and will pass. I mean that less or more they actually possess the character and type of absolute truth and reality. ”

“ Any arrangement existing in my head must qualify the absolute Reality. But, when the false abstraction of my private view is supplemented and made good, that arrangement may, as such, have completely disappeared. The ontological proof then should be merely another way of insisting on this doctrine. Not every idea will, as such, be real, or, as such, have existence. But the greater the perfection of a thought, and the more its possibility and its internal necessity are increased, so much more reality it possesses. ”

“ The problems of unperceived Nature, of dispositions in the soul, and the meaning in general of “potential” existence, require our attention. And I must begin by calling attention to an error. We have seen that an idea is more true in proportion as it approaches Reality. And it approaches Reality in proportion as it grows internally more complete. And from this we possibly might conclude that thought, if completed as such, would itself be real; or that the ideal conditions, if fully there, would be the same as actual perfection. ”

“ Nothing anywhere, not even the realized and solid moral will, can either be quite real, as it exists in time, or can quite appear in its own essential character. But still the ultimate Reality, where all appearance as such is merged, is in the end the actual identity of idea and existence. And, throughout our world, whatever is individual is more real and true; for it contains within its own limits a wider region of the Absolute, and it possesses more intensely the type of self-sufficiency. Or, to put it otherwise, the interval between such an element and the Absolute is smaller. ”

“ A desire is not a judgment, but still in a sense it implies one. It might, indeed, appear that what is ordered or desired is, by its essence, divorced from all actual reality. But this first impression would be erroneous. All negation, we must remember, is relative. The idea, rejected by reality, is none the less predicable, when its subject is altered. ”

“ The universe we certainly feel is one, but that does not prevent it from appearing divided, and in separate spheres and regions. And between these diverse provinces of our life there may be no visible connection. In art, in morality and religion, in trade or politics, or again in some theoretical pursuit, it is a commonplace that the individual may have a world of his own. Or he may rather have several worlds without rational unity, conjoined merely by co-existence in his one personality. ”

“ Under certain conditions, then, the idea of potential being may be employed. But I must add at once that it can be employed nowhere with complete truth and accuracy. For, in order for anything to evolve itself, outer conditions must come in; and it is impossible in the end to assign a limit to the extent of this foreign matter. The genuine cause always must be the whole cause, and the whole cause never could be complete until it had taken in the universe. ”

“ If, again, we take an abstract truth, which, as such, nowhere has existence, we can consider the comparative area of its working influence. And, if we were inclined to feel a doubt as to the reality of such principles, we might correct ourselves thus. Imagine everything which they represent removed from the universe, and then attempt to maintain that this removal makes no real difference. And, as we proceed further, a social system, conscious in its personal members of a will carried out, submits itself naturally to our test. ”

“ We should arrive at the personal relation of the individual to ends theoretical and practical, ends which call for realization, but which from their nature cannot be realized in a finite personality. And, once more here, our standard must be called in when we endeavour, as we must, to form a comparative estimate. For, apart from the success or failure of the individual’s will, these ideas of ultimate goodness and reality themselves possess, of course, very different values. ”

“ There is imagination which is higher, and more true, and most emphatically more real, than any single fact of sense. And this brings us back to our old distinction. Every truth must appear, and must subordinate existence; but this appearance is not the same thing as to be present, properly and as such, within given limits of sense-perception. ”

“ Chance forgets, we may say, the essential connection; and possibility forgets its de facto relation to the Real, that is, its given external conjunction with context. Chance belongs to the world of existence and possibility to thought; but each contains at bottom the same defect, and each, against its will, when taken bare, becomes external necessity. [21] If the possible could be given, it would be indifferently chance or fate. If chance is thought of, it is at once but merely possible; for what is contingent has no complete connection with Reality. ”

“ The idea of the Absolute, as an idea, is inconsistent with itself; and we find that, to complete itself, it is internally driven to take in existence. But even here we are still compelled to keep up some protest against the addition of “as such.” No idea in the end can, strictly as such, reach reality; for, as an idea, it never includes the required totality of conditions. Reality is concrete, while the truest truth must still be more or less abstract. ”

“ For we have found in principle that, if anything were perfect, it would not gain by an addition made from the outside. And, here in particular, thought’s first object, in its pursuit of actual fact, is precisely the enlarging and making harmonious of its own ideal content. ”

“ For the truer always is wider. There is a fair presumption that any truth, which cannot be exhibited at work, is for the most part untrue. And, with this understanding, we may take our leave of the ontological proof. Our inspection of it, perhaps, has served to confirm us in the general doctrine arrived at in our chapter. It is only a view which asserts degrees of reality and truth, and which has a rational meaning for words such as “higher” and “lower”—it is only such a view which can do justice alike to the sides of idea and existence. ”

“ And so, by consequence, chance would involve complete internal dissipation. It would hence implicitly preclude the given existence which explicitly it postulates. Unless chance is more than mere chance, and thus consents to be relative, it fails to be itself. Relative chance implies inclusion within some ideal whole, and, on that basis, asserts an external relation to some other whole. But chance, made absolute, has to affirm a positive existence in relation, while insisting that all relations fall outside this existence. And such an idea contradicts itself. ”

“ A mere thought would mean an ideal content held apart from existence. But (as we have learnt) to hold a thought is always somehow, even against our will, to refer it to the Real. Hence our mere idea, now standing in relation with the Real, is related also to the phenomenal system of events in time. It is related to them, but without any connection with the internal order and arrangements of their system. But this means that our mere idea is determined by that system entirely from the outside. ”

“ Nor need the Absolute reveal itself indiscriminately in a chaos where comparison and value are absent. We can assign a rational meaning to the distinctions of higher and lower. [16] And we have grown convinced that, while not to appear is to be unreal, and while the fuller appearance marks the fuller reality, our principle, with but so much, is only half stated. For comparative ability to exist, individually and as such, within the region of sense, is a sign everywhere, so far as it goes, of degradation in the scale of being. ”

“ The reference to reality may be, in various degrees, undefined and at large. The ideal content may be applied subject to more or less transformation; its struggling and conditional character may escape our notice, or may again be realized with less or more consciousness. But to hold a thought, so to speak, in the air, without a relation of any kind to the Real, in any of its aspects or spheres, we should find in the end to be impossible. ”

“ Thus to be defined from without is, in principle, to be distracted within. And, the smaller the element, the more wide is this dissipation of its essence—a dissipation too thorough to be deep, or to support the title of an intestine division. [6] But, on the contrary, the expansion of the element should increase harmony, for it should bring these external relations within the inner substance. By growth the element becomes, more and more, a consistent individual, containing in itself its own nature; and it forms, more and more, a whole inclusive of discrepancies and reducing them to system. ”