F. H. Bradley

“ Hence we now try to give him a content which falls wholly within himself, and is not common to him with others, and, finding it impossible to account for facts on this supposition, suddenly we turn round and fly to the other extreme, and now suppose him to realize the sheer suppression of himself; not seeing that now we have abjured our premises without having refuted them, and are face to face with the psychological difficulty of how a man is to bring out of himself what was not in himself and part of himself, and with the facts which testify that action without interest is a fiction. ”

“ An act supposes the content on each side to be the same, with a difference, or, under a difference, to be the same. It does suppose that what was in the mind is carried out; and, unless you think that something can be in the self and carried out by the self, without being of the nature of the self (and you would find the difficulties of such a view insuperable) , then you must say that volition is self-realization. ”

“ To conclude—If I am asked why I am to be moral, I can say no more than this, that what I can not doubt is my own being now, and that since in that being is involved a self, which is to be here and now, and yet in this here and now is not, I therefore can not doubt that there is an end which I am to make real ”

“ But, if so, where is the difficulty of my object being one and the same with the object of other people; so that, having filled the form of my personality with a life not merely mine, I have at heart, and have identified with and made one with myself, objective interests, things that are to be, and in and with the existence of which I am not to satisfy my mere private self ”

“ If we hold to this, however, we are met by the impossibility then of accounting for thought and action, as ordinarily viewed; we should know not the real, but something like the real, and should do not what we mean, intend, have in our minds, but only something like it. ”

“ But if from a better metaphysic, or attention to facts, we are willing to give up those metaphysical preconceptions we took for fact, and now see to be futile, then we may also see that, though certainly one person can not be ‘like Cerberus, three gentlemen at once,’ yet that, beside being thus exclusive, none the less in respect of their content (and that makes them what they are) persons are not thus exclusive ”

“ But doubtless there are many persons who, not raising metaphysical or psychological questions, but standing merely on facts, would say, ‘Theory apart, surely when I act I do realize more than myself. I quite see that I may not do so ”