F. H. Bradley

“ Our conclusion, in brief, has explained and has confirmed the irresistible impression that all is beyond us.
Everything is error, but everything is not illusion. It is error where, and in so far as, our ideas are not the same as reality. It is illusion where, and in so far as, this difference turns to a conflict in our nature. Where experience, inward or outward, clashes with our views, where there arises thus disorder confusion and pain, we may speak of illusion. It is the course of events in collision with the set of our ideas. ”

“ We do not know, except in vague outline, what the Unity is, or, at all, why it appears in our particular forms of plurality. We can even understand that such knowledge is impossible, and we have found the reason why it is so. For truth can know only, we may say, so far as itself is. And the union of all sides of our nature would not leave them, in any case, as they are. Truth, when made adequate to Reality, would be so supplemented as to have become something else—something other than truth, and something for us unattainable. ”

“ It costs little to find that in the end Reality is inscrutable. It is easy to perceive that any appearance, not being the Reality, in a sense is fallacious. These truths, such as they are, are within the reach of any and every man. It is a simple matter to conclude further, perhaps, that the Real sits apart, that it keeps state by itself and does not descend into phenomena. Or it is as cheap, again, to take up another side of the same error. The Reality is viewed perhaps as immanent in all its appearances, in such a way that it is, alike and equally, present in all. ”

“ And if, in general and in the rough, our ideas are answered by events, that is all surely which, as finite beings, we have a right to expect. We must reply then, that, though illusions exist here and there, the whole is not an illusion. We are not concerned to gain an absolute experience which for us, emphatically, could be nothing. We want to know, in effect, whether the universe is concealed behind appearances, and is making a sport of us. What we find here truer and more beautiful and better and higher—are these things really so, or in reality may they be all quite otherwise? ”

“ The absolute knowledge that we have claimed is no more than an outline. It is knowledge which seems sufficient, on one side, to secure the chief interests of our nature, and it abstains, on the other side, from pretensions which all must feel are not human. We insist that all Reality must keep a certain character. The whole of its contents must be experience, they must come together into one system, and this unity itself must be experience. It must include and must harmonize every possible fragment of appearance. ”

“ We have found that Reality is one, that it essentially is experience, and that it owns a balance of pleasure. There is nothing in the Whole beside appearance, and every fragment of appearance qualifies the Whole; while on the other hand, so taken together, appearances, as such, cease. Nothing in the universe can be lost, nothing fails to contribute to the single Reality, but every finite diversity is also supplemented and transformed. Everything in the Absolute still is that which it is for itself. ”

“ We admit the healthy scepticism for which all knowledge in a sense is vanity, which feels in its heart that science is a poor thing if measured by the wealth of the real universe. We justify the natural wonder which delights to stray beyond our daylight world, and to follow paths that lead into half-known half-unknowable regions. ”

“ The impossible absolutely is what contradicts the known nature of Reality. And the impossible, in this sense, is self-contradictory. It is indeed an attempt to deny which, in the very act, unwittingly affirms. Since here our positive knowledge is all-embracing, it can rest on nothing external. Outside this knowledge there is not so much as an empty space in which our impotence could fall. And every inability and failure already presupposes and belongs to our known world. ”

“ But every pursuit obviously must involve some kind of governing principle. Even the extreme of theoretical scepticism is based on some accepted idea about truth and fact. It is because you are sure as to some main feature of truth or reality, that you are compelled to doubt or to reject special truths which are offered you. But, if so, you stand on an absolute principle, and, with regard to this, you claim, tacitly or openly, to be infallible. And to start from our general fallibility, and to argue from this to the uncertainty of every possible result, is in the end irrational. ”

“ Our result, in brief, cannot be doubted, since it contains all possibilities. Show us an idea, we can proclaim, which seems hostile to our scheme, and we will show you an element which really is contained within it. And we will demonstrate your idea to be a self-contradictory piece of our system, an internal fragment which only through sheer blindness can fancy itself outside. We will prove that its independence and isolation are nothing in the world but a failure to perceive more than one aspect of its own nature. ”

“ Once give up your finite and mutable person, and you have parted with everything which, for you, makes personality important. Nor will you bridge the chasm by the sliding extension of a word. You will only make a fog, where you can cry out that you are on both sides at once. And towards increasing this fog I decline to contribute. It would be useless, in such company and in such an atmosphere, to discuss the meaning of personality—if indeed the word actually has any one meaning. For me it is sufficient to know, on one side, that the Absolute is not a finite person. ”

“ Any finite truth, on the other side, remains subject to intellectual correction. It is incomplete not merely as being confined by its general nature, as truth, within one partial aspect of the Whole. It is incomplete as having within its own intellectual world a space falling outside it. There is truth, actual or possible, which is over against it, and which can stand outside it as an Other. But with absolute truth there is no intellectual outside. There is no competing predicate which could conceivably qualify its subject, and which could come in to condition and to limit its assertion. ”

“ It is senseless to attempt to go beyond, and to assume fields that lie outside the ultimate nature of Reality. If there were any Reality quite beyond our knowledge, we could in no sense be aware of it; and, if we were quite ignorant of it, we could hardly suggest that our ignorance conceals it. And thus, in the end, what we know and what is real must be co-extensive, and assuredly outside of this area nothing is possible. A single possibility here must, therefore, be taken as single and as real. Within this known region, and not outside, lies all the kingdom hidden by ignorance ”

“ An organism or society, including every self past present and future—and we can hardly take it at less than this—is itself an idea to me obscure, if not quite inconsistent. But, in any case, its reality and truth cannot be ultimate. And, for myself, even in Ethics I do not see how such an idea can be insisted on. The perfection of the Whole has to realise itself in and through me ”

“ We are impotent to divide the universe into the universe and something outside. We are incapable of finding another field in which to place our inability and give play to our modesty. This other area for us is mere pretentious nonsense; and on the ground of our weakness we do not feel strong enough to assume that nonsense is fact. We, in other words, protest against the senseless attempt to transcend experience. ”

“ The universe, as truth, in other words preserves one character, and of that character we possess infallible knowledge.
And, if we view the matter from another side, there is no opposition between Reality and truth. Reality, to be complete, must take in and absorb this partial aspect of itself. And truth itself would not be complete, until it took in and included all aspects of the universe. Thus, in passing beyond itself and in abolishing the difference between its subject and predicate, it does but carry out the demands of its proper nature. ”

“ It neither puts ideas and thought first, nor again does it permit us to assert that anything else by itself is more real. Truth is the whole world in one aspect, an aspect supreme in philosophy, and yet even in philosophy conscious of its own incompleteness. So far again as our conclusion has claimed infallibility, it has come, I think, into no collision with the better kind of common sense. ”

“ I do not mean that on subordinate points, such as the personality of the Deity or or a continuance of the individual after death—points on which there is not any general consent in the world—philosophy is bound to adopt one particular view. I mean that to arrange the elements of our nature in such a way that the system made, when understood, strikes the mind as one-sided, is enough of itself to inspire hesitation and doubt. ”

“ It will be either below, or else wider than and above, the distinction. And a soul, as we have seen, is always the creature of an intellectual construction. It cannot be the same thing with a mere centre of immediate experience. Nor again can we affirm that every centre implies and entails in some sense a corresponding soul. For the duration of such centres may perhaps be so momentary that no one, except to save a theory, could call them souls. Hence we cannot maintain that souls contain all the matter of experience which fills the world. ”

“ A thing is real when, and in so far as, its opposite is impossible. But in the end its opposite is impossible because, and in so far as, the thing is real. And, according to the amount of reality which anything possesses, to that extent its opposite is inconceivable. The more, in other words, that anything exhausts the field of possibility, the less possible becomes that which would essentially alter it. Now, in the case of such truth as we have called absolute, the field of possibility is exhausted. Reality is there, and the opposite of Reality is not privation but absolute nothingness. ”

“ Finite truth and fact, we may say, is throughout “hypothetical.” But, either with this term or with “conditional,” we have to guard against misleading implications. There cannot (from our present point of view) be one finite sphere which is real and actual, or which is even considered to be so for a certain purpose. There can be here no realm of existence or fact, outside of which the merely supposed could fall in unreality. The Reality, on one hand, is no finite existence; and, on the other hand, every predicate—no matter what—must both fall within and must qualify Reality. ”

“ But in all this diversity of existence we saw nothing opposed to a complete harmony and system in the Whole. The nature of that system in detail lies beyond our knowledge, but we could discover nowhere the sign of a recalcitrant element. We could perceive nothing on which any objection to our view of Reality could rationally be founded. And so we ventured to conclude that Reality possesses—how we do not know—the general nature we have assigned to it. ”