individuals compatible with its own purposes, there is no principle upon which we can limit the amount which it can tolerate. Such a view could not possibly be accepted as in any way consistent with Hegel’s system. It would be in direct opposition to its whole tendency, which is to regard the universal as only gaining reality and validity when, by its union with the particular, it becomes the individual. For Hegel the ideal must lie, not in ignoring the claims of individuals, but in seeing in them the embodiment of the universal.
Mr. Bradley’s own treatment of the problem is of a rather similar type. He has to reconcile the harmony which he attributes to the Absolute with the disharmony which undoubtedly prevails, to some extent, in experience. This he does by taking the finite individual to be, as such, only appearance and not reality, from which it follows that it must distort, and cannot adequately partake in, the harmony of the Absolute. It may be doubted whether we do not fall into more difficulties than we avoid by this low estimate of the conscious individual. But, at any rate, such a solution would be impracticable for any one who accepted Hegel’s version of the Absolute Idea, to which the individual is the highest form that the universal can take.
The objections which apply to the attempt to save the perfection of the Absolute by ignoring the claims of individuals will not apply to our endeavour to escape from our difficulty by ignoring, so to speak, the claims of particular moments of time. None of those considerations which make us consider each separate person as an ultimate reality, whose claims to self-realisation must be satisfied, and cannot be transcended, apply to separate periods of time. Indeed the whole drift of Hegel’s system is as much against the ultimate reality of a succession of phenomena, as such, as it is for the ultimate reality of individual persons, as such. To deny any reality in what now presents itself to us as a time-series would indeed be suicidal. For we have no data given us for our thought, except in the form of a time-series, and to destroy our data would be to destroy our superstructure. But while philosophy could not start if it did not accept its data, it could not proceed if it did not alter them. There is then nothing obviously impossible in the supposition that the whole appearance of succession in our experience is, as such, unreal, and that reality is one timeless whole, in which all that appears successive is really coexistent, as the houses are coexistent which we see successively from the windows of a train.
