possible intelligences need cause no trouble. If, and so far as, we can communicate our thoughts and feelings to dogs and cats, angels and devils, so far is there identity underlying the differences between us and them. To argue that such identity is merely 'logical' and not 'real' is only to evade the question and implicitly to deny the possibility of knowledge, by re-asserting an impassable gap between thought and reality.[1]
Whether we are to say that reality is thought or not, is a good deal a question of language. If the term 'thought' be expressly limited to discursive thought, which is necessarily abstract, and which necessarily accentuates the distinction between subject and predicate, we cannot without qualification identify reality with thought in that sense. The predicate of the judgment is by its very nature a predicate of reality, and so distinguished from it. But this is only one aspect of the judgment. If the difference or distinction were the sole aspect of judgment, judgment would be impossible. Judgment is distinction; but it is distinction within a unity, difference in identity. If the predicate is not predicated of the subject as a part of it (or, in the negative judgment, denied of the subject to which it has been suggested it may possibly belong), there is no predication at all. A theory which asserts difference without identity and a theory which asserts identity without difference, both make predication impossible and land us in the old series of 'Sophistic' difficulties, the outcome of Heracleiteanism and of Eleaticism alike, when these had given birth to popular philosophy. Now, if this identity of the real and that which we think of it is not to be called an identity in 'thought,' we must simply invent some other term. 'Thought' seems to me a good term for the purpose: it is a possible equivalent of νοῦς or νόησις, as well as of διάνοια. Mr. Bradley prefers the term 'Experience' as a name for 'the Absolute,' because of this "dualism inherent in thought" and as an assertion of the all-inclusiveness of the Absolute. "Feeling and will," he says, "must also be transmuted in this
- ↑ On "the identity between souls," cf. Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality, pp. 347-353.
