of a self or of a system of selves beyond a certain point, when, that is to say, you have excluded, as such, all finitude and change and chance and mutability—have you not in fact carried your idea really beyond its proper application? I am forced to think that this is so, and I also know no reason why it should not be so. The claim of the individual, as such, to perfection I wholly reject. And the argument that, if you scruple to say ‘self,’ you are therefore condemned to accept something lower, seems to me thoroughly unsound. I have contended that starting from the self one can advance to a positive result beyond it, and my contention surely is not met by such a bare unreasoned assumption of its falsity. And if finally I hear, Well, you yourself admit that the Absolute is unintelligible; why then object to saying that the Absolute somehow unintelligibly is self and the self is somehow unintelligibly absolute?—that gives me no trouble. For the Absolute, though in detail unintelligible, is not so in general, and its general character comes as a consequence from a necessary principle. And against this consequence we have to set nothing but privation and ignorance. But to make the self, as such, absolute is, so far as I see, to postulate in the teeth of facts, facts which go to show that the self’s character is gone when it ceases to be relative. And this postulate itself, I must insist, is no principle at all, but is a mere prejudice and misunderstanding. And the claim of this postulate, if made, should in my opinion be made openly and explicitly. But as to the use of the word ‘self,’ so long only as we know what we mean and do not mean by it, I am far from being irreconcilable. I am of course opposed to any attempt to set up the finite self as in any sense ultimately real, or again as real at all outside of the temporal series. And I am opposed once more to any kind of attempt to make the distinction between ‘experience’ and ‘the experienced’ more than relative. But on these and on other points I do not think that it would prove useful to enlarge further.
IX. I will now briefly touch on my attitude towards Scepticism. Most persons, I think, who have read my book intelligently, will credit me with a desire to do justice to scepticism; and indeed I might claim, perhaps, myself to be something of a sceptic. But with all my desire I, of course, may very well have failed; and it would be to me most instructive if I could see an examination of my last Chapter by some educated and intelligent sceptic. Up to the present, however, nothing of the kind has been brought to my notice; and perhaps the sceptical temper does not among us often go with addiction to metaphysics. And I venture to think this a misfortune. Intellectual scepticism certainly is not one thing with a sceptical temper, and it is (if I may repeat myself) “the result only of labour and education.”
That, it seems, is not the opinion of the writer in Mind (N. S., No. 11), who has come forward as the true representative of the
