Jump to content

Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/65

From Wikisource
This page has been validated.
MIND AND ITS OBJECTS
59

leaves, so to speak, a fighting chance for such a doctrine, after the nature of the world has been considered.[1] This I think is fair, and I should, for myself, accept that issue; and I believe that modern metaphysic, and Green's method, is with me.

One more observation bearing on my primary thesis in this section. I find on p. 171 a reference thus worded: "the argument (Bradley's) that any and all diversity, and so any and all relations of any and all terms are self-contradictory." Cf. the axiom about relations, taken seemingly as peculiar to realists, p. 477. I must think that here insufficient study of a great writer is revealed. In the first place diversity is present, according to Mr. Bradley as I read him, both in primary feeling and in the Absolute. In the next place, his attitude to relational diversity is really, it seems to me, quite simple. He, of course, so far from rejecting all diversity, was one of the first who fought for and established the principle of identity in diversity in English philosophy. It was his great contention. His books are full of it. What he in principle refuses to accept I understand to be bare conjunction[2] that is, the bringing together of differents, without mediation by any analysis of their conditions satisfactory to thought. Very likely no such analysis is ultimately and completely satisfactory. But every science, surely, in daily practice, demands all of it that can be offered, and rejects

  1. P. 32.
  2. "Appearance and Reality," p. 600, cf. 570 (ed. 2).