ourselves about their consistency, since our chance pictures are not likely to be mutually consistent. But what is not well is to offer nothing but metaphors when constructive conceptions are needed.
As a fact, then, to conclude our sketch with a few words of general criticism, Mr. Bradley's effort to conceive the unity of the finite in the Absolute is founded upon principles whose negative basis in Book I, the present critic in large part cordially accepts, while wishing, indeed, that Mr. Bradley had seen the way to supplementing his account of Self-Consciousness with a more positive theory. As to the positive principles at the basis of Book II, the present critic is also in pretty full sympathy. In fact, the whole first half of the book seemed to the present reader, despite all special matters of doubt, one of the most brilliant and powerful pieces of expert work in all recent metaphysical literature. On the other hand, the latter portion of the book gives an impression almost throughout of impatience with constructive detail, or else of unwillingness to risk definite formulations. The limitations of human insight we must all admit; the proper use of metaphors we must all admire; but a philosophy whose constructive formulas are apparently incapable of being translated by their author out of the metaphorical language in which he chooses to embody them, is, in the present condition of human reflection, unnecessarily near in its attitude to that reverence for the Unknowable which Mr. Bradley condemns in Mr. Spencer's thought. For Mr. Spencer's Unknowable is also a creature whose relations to us can be expressed only in metaphors.
But, it may be said, a confession of doubt or of ignorance is never unseemly in philosophy. One can see but what one has come to see. Yet Mr. Bradley, as a fact, is well acquainted with a vast literature of constructive metaphysical efforts on the part of men who have tried to define the Absolute on the general lines laid down in the early part of his own book. How "unity in variety," how an "individual system," "one whole of finite elements" in which "nothing is lost," is to be possible,—this problem has often been in genera] defined. And that the categories of thought in relation to its object, and of self-consciousness, have been employed to define just such an unity, nobody is better aware than Mr. Bradley. Now Mr. Bradley deliberately rejects the categories of the world of thought and self-consciousness, as being after all but finite, and as incapable of defining more than mere appearance. The present reader can only insist that, carefully as Mr. Bradley has indeed examined the categories of thought and object, the categories which
