whole, into which thought has entered. Such a whole state would possess in a superior form that immediacy which we find (more or less) in feeling; and in this whole all divisions would be healed up."[1] It is true the term 'thought' is inadequate; but it seems to me the least objectionable of available terms, for these reasons: (I) 'Experience' is apt to suggest multiplicity and a time-process rather than the unity of immediate apprehension. (2) 'Feeling' does express 'immediacy' and absence of difference, but on its lowest level, whereas we wish to express a unity in which differences are included and reconciled, rather than a unity which has not yet differentiated itself, because it is too low down in the scale.[2] (3) 'Will,' unless it be taken in a quite artificial sense, implies motives, which it is absurd to imagine as acting on 'the Absolute,' which, if absolute, can have no wants or cravings. (4) As I have tried to show, Thought, even in the sense of 'relational and discursive thought,' implies a unity amid difference, and therefore may be fitly used to express an immediacy of apprehension, of which we can only have faint and slight experience, the immediacy of feeling combined with the clearness and fulness of thought. Mr. Bradley himself says, "When thought begins to be more than rational, it ceases to be mere thinking"—a sentence which seems to admit a possible distinction between 'thought' in the higher sense and 'mere thinking' in which the dualism is not transcended.
It matters little what precise term we adopt, provided it be once clearly recognized that Reality, or the Absolute, or whatever we call it, cannot be something quite alien to, and inaccessible by, our conscious experience, and that, though including differences, it cannot itself be a plurality.[3] Truth—if there is any meaning in the term—must ultimately be one
- ↑ Appearance and Reality, p. 172.
- ↑ I take it for granted that 'the Absolute' must at least be expressed in terms of the highest elements of our experience, though these terms may need correction and qualification when transferred from their use in reference to human beings.
- ↑ Mr. Bradley's phrase about an "unearthly ballet of bloodless categories" (at the end of his Logic) has been a favorite weapon in the hands of 'Realist' assailants of Idealism. I trust that his exposure of "a plurality of reals" (in his Appearance and Reality, pp. 140-143)
