for myself, unable to verify a solution of this kind, connections in the end must remain in part mere syntheses, the putting together of differences external to one another and to that which couples them. And against my intellectual world the Law of Contradiction has therefore claims nowhere satisfied in full. And since, on the other hand, the intellect insists that these demands must be and are met, I am led to hold that they are met in and by a whole beyond the mere intellect. And in the intellect itself I seem to find an inner want and defect and a demand thus to pass itself beyond itself. And against this conclusion I have not yet seen any tenable objection.
The view which to me appears to be true is briefly this. That abstract identity should satisfy the intellect, even in part, is wholly impossible. On the other hand I cannot say that to me any principle or principles of diversity in unity are self-evident. The existence of a single content (I will not call it a quality) which should be simple experience and being in one is to me not in itself impossible intrinsically. If I may speak mythologically I am not sure that, if no diversity were given, the intellect of itself could invent it or would even demand it. But, since diversity is there as a fact, any such hypothesis seems illegitimate. As a fact and given we have in feeling diversity and unity in one whole, a whole implicit and not yet broken up into terms and relations. This immediate union of the one and many is an “ultimate fact” from which we start; and to hold that feeling, because immediate, must be simple and without diversity is, in my view, a doctrine quite untenable.[1] That I myself should have been taken as committed to this doctrine is to me, I must be allowed to add, really surprising. But feeling, if an ultimate fact, is not true ultimately or real. Even of itself it is self-transcendent and transitory. And, when we try to think its unity, then, as we have seen, we end in failure. For thought in its own nature has no “together” and is forced to move by way of terms and relations, and the unity of these remains in the end external and, because external, inconsistent. But the conclusion I would recommend is no vain attempt either to accept bare identity or to relapse into a stage before thinking begins. Self-existence and self-identity are to be found, I would urge, in a whole beyond thought, a whole to which thought points and in which it is included, but which is known only in abstract character and could not be verified in its detail.
And since I have been taken to build on assumptions which I am unable to recognize, I will here repeat what it is that I have assumed. I have assumed first that truth has to satisfy the
- ↑ Feeling is certainly not “un-differentiated” if that means that it contains no diverse aspects. I would take the opportunity to state that this view as to feeling is so far from being novel that I owe it, certainly in the main, to Hegel’s psychology.
