only become contradictory when looked upon apart from the living continuity of consciousness, and, even though we cannot succeed in re-constructing them analytically in their concreteness by means of pure acts of thought without being confronted by insurmountable difficulties, it does not follow that either they or thought are empty appearances, but only that logical relations do not exhaust the whole of reality in every concrete moment of consciousness, and that there exists an individual physiognomy of the world which cannot be reduced to mere systems of relations.
6. Mystical Degeneration of English Neo-Hegelianism: McTaggart. — English Neo-Hegelianism, after striving in vain in the teaching of Green to dispose of the agnostic position of intellectualism by absorbing into an eternal system of relations those irreducible elements which are ignored by scientific knowledge, degenerates with Bradley into a form of scepticism and intuitionism. The mystical degeneration of Hegelianism is still more marked in McTaggart, who no longer regards dialectic as the very life of the Absolute, as did Hegel, but considers it to be merely a subjective means for the re-construction of the eternally perfect system of individual minds, whose harmonious synthesis gives birth to the Absolute, by disposing of the abstract appearances of the reality which develops in time.
This ultimate synthesis of reality cannot be attained by discursive thought, which is unable to reconcile perfect and imperfect, temporal and eternal, the Ego and the non-Ego, experienced immediacy and mediate or rational knowledge, but can be reached only in the state of love in which other beings lose their exteriority and appear to us in the very form of our Ego.[1] English Neo-Hegelianism thus ranks sentiment above reason, and aims at the pole of convergence of contemporary philosophy, the denial of the cognitive value of intelligence, and the search for some more direct means of penetration into reality. Thus the many and various currents, of thought which spring
- ↑ Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (Cambridge, 1901), pp. 270-292; Studies in Hegelian Dialectic (Cambridge, 1896), pp. 214-276.
