on the altar of their universality and identity, but even if concrete becoming cannot be adequately transcribed into terms of abstract thought, it does not follow that it is illogical. The contradiction vanishes when we substitute intuited reality in its fulness for incomplete abstract terms. In like manner will vanish the other alleged contradictions seen by Bradley in the exercise of thought; if thought appear to be overwhelmed by a flood of absurdities, it is because its supreme categories have been divested of all intuitive content, and are then supposed to fulfil their functions in the resulting void. The activity of judgment may be explained by establishing relations between terms which are not wholly the creation of thought, as is asserted by Green, but always have their source in intuitive data; there must necessarily be a limit to the resolution of terms into relations, since there is always something left which cannot be translated into relations. Thus, to use Bradley’s illustration,[1] there is nothing contradictory in the relation between the two properties of whiteness and sweetness in sugar, since the two terms do not exist merely by virtue of the relation which we set up between them, but exist also in as much as they are immediately felt. Their relation is rendered sufficiently consistent by the unity of the subject, even though it be impossible to identify it with either of the two terms. The absurdity arises only when the relation is separated from the subject, and considered as an entity in itself, a thing. In like manner the necessary basis of the relations of succession implied in the concepts of cause, action, force, energy, etc., will be found in the continuity of the epistemological subject, hence it is not surprising that they should give rise to contradictions if we isolate them from that subject. Nothing but the continuous presence of the subject can bridge over the gulf between one term and another, and enable the intellect to grasp the relation between an antecedent which has ceased to exist and a certain consequence which has not yet come into existence. Duration, extension, action, and change
- ↑ Appearance and Reality, p. 20.
