The Idealistic Reaction Against Science/Chapter 4

by Antonio Aliotta

CHAPTER IV

ENGLISH NEO-HEGELIANISM

1. Two Attempts at Escape from the Agnostic Position. — Thinkers have tried to escape from the agnostic position in two different ways: one, whose course we have followed through neo-criticism and empirio-criticism, aims at the critical elimination of the problem by the reduction of all reality to phenomena only, and the dismissal of that Absolute which appeared to baffle knowledge, a proceeding reminding us of a child who imagines that by shutting his eyes to something of which he is afraid he can destroy it; the other is the return to that speculative method which positivism had vainly endeavoured to replace by science. Some of these speculative attempts, which were inspired by post-Kantian idealism, have been already treated in their relation to neo-criticism; this applies more especially to those which are closely connected with the teaching of Fichte, Schelling, and Schopenhauer, and which are more or less deeply tinged with romanticism and irrationalism; we must now sketch the outlines of that movement of thought which arose in England in opposition to traditional empiricism and its ultimate tendency, agnostic positivism, claiming to be able to supply that which was lacking in scientific intellectualism, and reaching in the works of Hegel a higher form of rationalism.

2. The Eternity of Thought, as Affirmed by Green in Opposition to Empiricism. — The philosophy of Thomas Hill Green^[1] appears to be a reaction from the empiricist and psycho-genetic method which had for centuries been the predominant feature of English philosophy,^[2] a righteous vindication of the eternity of consciousness and thought against those who would fain regard it as a contingent phenomenon, having its origin in time, and doomed to vanish in time. It must be said in his favour that he is not carried away by the facile enthusiasm for the new theory of evolution, and that he clearly saw the petitio principi concealed in every alleged biological explanation of consciousness.^[3]

The world of nature and experience, in so far as it is a series of inter-connected facts, presupposes the conscious and intelligent principle which is supposed to be derived therefrom;^[4] an experience without a subject is an epistemological absurdity, just as would be an eternal system of relations (such as the physicist’s conception of the world) without an Eternal Thought to impart reality to that system. The consciousness of change cannot be in its turn a process of change, since it must be present at all stages of that process; experience of a series developing in time presupposes a conscious principle external to time, and hence not of natural origin.

We cannot conceive of any reality external to this Eternal Thought which comprehends within itself the whole system of objective relations: the dualism of Kant, according to which the form of phenomena, i.e. their relations, is derived from the intellect, while matter, i.e. sensations, takes its rise in some mysterious source beyond all thought, is therefore inadmissible.^[5] Kant’s error lies in assuming as a possibility the existence of a formless sensation, not qualified by thought; whereas every form of experience implies at least the distinction between the actual fact and the preceding moment, and hence an intellectual reference. If everything be eliminated which can be expressed in terms of relations, no reality will remain. If we divest our knowledge of a thing of every relation, that is to say of every thought, not even simple consciousness is left, since consciousness cannot exist where change and difference cannot be noted, and where there is no relation of sequence and intensity between the sensation experienced at the moment and those preceding it.^[6] In the most elementary act of perception we establish a relation between terms which can only be given in and by virtue of relations, and that which enters into this conscious relation is not sensation as such, but the fact that the sensation is felt.^[7] If, for instance, I recognise the action and presence of the fire in my vicinity, that which forms an integrant part of my knowledge is not the impression of heat, but merely the idea that I feel warm. This is proved by the fact that if I go farther away in order to make sure that the heat is produced by the fire, the impression of heat diminishes in intensity, whereas the perception of the scorching fire does not become more precise or undergo any change. Further, a too intense sensation does not act as an aid to knowledge, but rather as an impediment in its path, and, whilst the impression is perpetually subjected to a process of transformation, the fact conceived of its existence remains always the same. For instance, the sensation of red conveyed by a lady’s sunshade may vary in intensity, but there is no change in my knowledge of the fact that the sunshade is red in this determinate way. Knowledge in its ultimate analysis consists of relations, and experience, when all is said and done, is but a manifold of thought relations. If it be impossible to derive thought from sensation, as the empiricists do, the inverse procedure is equally unjustifiable, because, just as there is no such thing as pure sensation, there is no such thing as pure thought: these two phrases merely stand for abstractions to which there exists no corresponding reality either in the facts of the world or in the consciousness to which these facts stand in relation.^[8] Sensation and thought do not exist independently of each other, but are two inseparable aspects of the same living experience.^[9] By this we do not mean that all sentient animals must also be capable of thought: the relations from which the reality of their sensorial life is derived do not exist for their consciousness, but for the Absolute Thought, in which the component relations of phenomena exist to all eternity, even when empirical consciousness is not aware of their presence. So long as we feel without thinking, the world of phenomena is non-existent for us, yet we possess a certain form of existence, since, even if the relative sensations be not real facts for our consciousness, they yet exist in the consciousness of the Absolute.^[10] The action of the mind does not consist in abstracting certain attributes from things as presented to us by experience, thus mutilating experience and rendering it barren; it is rather thought itself which constitutes the attributes and makes them into objects by colligating them with one another. Knowledge does not pass from the concrete to the abstract, from rich and full perception to poor and empty conception; on the contrary, it passes from the universal to the individual. The categories do not stand at the end, but at the beginning; they are not ultimate truth, but rather that which we apprehend in even the simplest perception; they are the most universal and primitive of relations, by means of which we create objects in order of progression, determining them by means of relations which grow more and more numerous and exact, until we attain individual concrete ideas possessed of a greater wealth of synthetical relations. Knowledge goes through two phases, the one spontaneous, the other reflective: in the former we pass from the universal to the individual, and interpret things according to the laws governing our mental activity without being aware that we are doing so; in the reflex phase we retrace our steps from the concrete to the abstract, defining clearly the relations existing between individual objects; these relations are, of course, not derived from experience as such, but rather from that which we ourselves have unwittingly introduced into it in the first stage of knowledge. Empiricists leave this second phase out of their reckoning, and ignore the activity of the mental principle in the spontaneous construction of the world.

The difference between conception and perception, the imaginary and the real, the general abstract idea and the individual concrete presentation, amounts to this: that in the case of perception we have, in addition to the conceived relations which constitute the idea of the object, the thought that this idea is or has been felt; whereas in pure conception relations are considered independently of the impressions which they determine, i.e. of the fact that these impressions are or are not present. In the case of the single concrete idea, there is but one actual or possible impression, determined by a network of relations which are extremely numerous, and which have been noted more or less vaguely from the first; whilst simpler and more general relations may be equally well verified by a large number of relations without determining any one of them. A perfectly adequate conception of the conditions of a phenomenon would therefore in no way differ from its reality, since it would of necessity include amongst those conditions the relation that the phenomenon can be and is felt.

If objects exist only by virtue of their relations, relations in their turn are possessed of no consistency apart from the harmonious system of all relations, towards which of its very nature thought must tend. The consciousness of a unique system of relations at once universal and coherent is the criterion of truth and reality to which we unconsciously look even in our most elementary acts of judgment: a relation is real and true when it is in logical agreement with the whole manifold of known and knowable relations, and is false when it contradicts them.^[11] Macbeth, when he imagines that he sees a dagger before him, is deceived because he has established false relations between his own actual sensations and other sensations, relations, that is to say, which are out of harmony with the whole system of relations constituting the universe. All our researches into the objective nature of appearances have one and the same aim — the discovery of an unchangeable order of relations, a complete system having nothing external to itself. The unity of the system, i.e. the unity of nature, is presupposed in all knowledge, and is the basis and gauge of its certainty. In mathematics this certainty is undoubtedly more stable, and rests upon a surer foundation, but we are not therefore justified in placing the exact, a priori, necessary science in opposition to the a posteriori and contingent natural sciences. In reality, mathematics, like other sciences, is the result of experience, in the sense that it consists in the analysis of the unconscious products of primordial mental creation, and that it rediscovers in things the relations unconsciously infused into them by thought. Its one and only claim to superiority lies in the fact that it is based on the simple and general conditions governing the existence of natural objects, that is to say, on quantitative and spatial conditions, of which it is possible to conceive apart from all others. The natural sciences, on the other hand, are not contingent, as is thought by those who place them in opposition to mathematics, since induction is not based on experience, analogy, or custom derived from many repetitions, which could never be sufficient authority for laying down a universal law. We do not pass from the known to the unknown, since such a transition would be unintelligible, nor from like to like, since we should have no authority for such a transition, but from identical to identical. In order to assert that that which has been recognised as true in one case holds good of a whole class, we must know that all the cases in question, whether they have come under observation or not, are identical as regards a certain aspect, that is to say, as regards that relation at all events to which the present induction refers.

The conditions of a natural phenomenon are extremely numerous and are never repeated, hence it follows that at times some of them may escape us; a geometrical problem, on the other hand, depends only upon conditions with which we are thoroughly acquainted, therefore in the one case we attain unconditioned, in the other conditioned, truths. Our knowledge of nature is constantly being extended by connecting facts which are increasingly coherent in their nature, and co-ordinating relations which tend to become more and more complex, and the proof and criterion of the truth of the simpler relations are to be found in the system which harmonises them in itself. The falsity of a theory can only be demonstrated by proving it to be inexplicable; that is to say, by showing that it cannot be connected with other groups of relations. The uniformity and unity of nature become more and more evident the more closely we enquire into it, but, on the other hand, we cannot investigate it without believing it to be already uniform and one, and without implicitly admitting that nature constitutes in itself a unique system of relations which condition each other ad infinitum, presuppose and imply one another ab aeterno, of which individual objects are but the ultimate consequences and combinations, that is to say, without presupposing that nature has a significance present in its totality to Absolute Thought.^[12] Our consciousness, being subject to the limitations of time, cannot fully grasp this significance or identify itself entirely with the Divine Mind, but all human knowledge presupposes this significance, of which our knowledge is the gradual revelation in time. In the interpretation of the great book of nature, in which the Thought of God is revealed to the soul of man, the same thing occurs which each one of us may observe when reading a sentence or phrase; single words succeed one another by means of a process developing in time, but the thought that the whole sentence or phrase must have a meaning is present with us from the moment we begin to read, and, when we have reached the end, this meaning is present to our consciousness as a simultaneous whole, not as a series of successive elements.^[13] Thus, although the psycho-physiological organism may develop empirically in time, our thought in the act of grasping universal relations places itself outside time, and shares in the Absolute Thought. That which we term our mental history is not the development of this eternal aspect of consciousness by which we are made one with God, and which is not subject to development in time, but is rather a history of the process by which the animal organism becomes the vehicle of this development. The empirical consciousness in its incessant evolution and its interruptions and disturbances should not make us forget its eternal element, that Absolute Thought, which is consciousness of time, but which is not itself in time; which is consciousness of becoming, but escapes all change.^[14]

3. Criticism of Green’s Pan-logism. — Green’s philosophy with regard to scientific research differs widely from the empty dialectic of Hegel, which alleged that all the determinations of nature could be constructed out of nothing by means of artificial negations. English Neo-Hegelianism lays no claim to the place of science; its aim is rather to integrate the fragmentary results attained by science, and to find amid the isolated laws and supreme categories of the real the ultimate tie of necessity binding them together in thought. In this direction Green’s epistemology makes a notable step in advance on the logic of Hegel, but he does not succeed in shaking off the prejudice of pan-logism, and persists in the assertion that living concrete reality can be reconstructed by means of a system of abstract relations. There is something in the psychic fact as immediately experienced which no effort of dialectic can ever identify with a system of conceptual relations; sensations, feelings, passions, impulses, volitions as they are given in the concreteness of the human personality, are possessed of an individual aspect which cannot be foreseen, and which, as we shall see, plays into the hands of the opponents of intellectualism. Green asserts that there is no difference between conceiving and feeling, that it will suffice to add to the idea of horse, for instance, the relation of being felt, for the concept of horse to be transformed into the perception thereof; it is, however, one thing to think of feeling and another actually to feel.

Green, however, passes with the greatest ease from the concept of the sensation to the sensation itself, without perceiving that between the two there is an impassable gulf fixed. We may think that all the conditions necessary to the verification of a sensation have been fulfilled, but this will not make us feel. If it were so, the blind could restore their own sight by studying a treatise on optics! Nor can the sophistical argument be adduced that one of the essential conditions is lacking, namely, the normal structure of the eye, since, according to Green, the complete concept of this structure should suffice to transform the idea into a real fact. The intuitionists cannot succeed in accounting for the constant and universal in reality; Green goes to the opposite extreme, and places himself in a position which prevents his understanding that which is individual, concrete, and changeable in the history of the world. From his point of view, indeed, there is no such thing as time, there exists merely the concept of time, which is something external to time; there is no such thing as change, but only the idea of change, which is external to it; there is no such thing as an individual, but only the concept of one which by its very nature must of necessity be universal. If reality then be a network of eternal relations, present in their totality to the Absolute Consciousness; if even a human person be but a fragmentary group of those relations, does it not become impossible to explain the evolutionary motion of things, their incessant transformation, and everything which is most spontaneous, living, and fruitful in the concrete development of our inner life? In the eternal immobility of the idea, time with its efficacious rhythm, and the world as a whole, become, to quote Bradley, merely an illusory appearance. But is not the birth of this illusion too an inexplicable mystery, if human consciousness be a web of unchangeable relations? How did it issue from the eternity of thought in order to project itself into time? Moreover, if the Absolute live in it, must not its every idea perforce be true? In Green’s philosophy there is no room for error and illusion, which can only be understood if we admit a certain degree of independence and spontaneity in the individual subject as against Absolute Consciousness. We can form no conception of objective reality as a system of relations, complete, fixed, and unchangeable from all eternity, since every new form which makes its appearance, every individual in his concrete physiognomy, becomes the centre in cosmic evolution of a fresh network of countless relations which tend to become more widely extended, more interwoven, and more complicated in successive moments. The reduction of the Absolute to the eternal contemplation of ideas eternally present to its consciousness amounts to the same thing as turning it into a caput mortuum, like the impassive deities of Epicurus in their blissful ease. We cannot conceive of a consciousness which is not life, development, perennial creation, and fruitful activity, nor of a thought which cannot be enriched by new relations, whilst preserving the coherency and identity of its fundamental laws; nor of any form of spirituality without qualitative development, or which is not manifested in original actions which cannot be foreseen. Pan-logism aims at the absorption of everything into a system of eternal relations, and must therefore inevitably end in denying the reality of that which is most vital and most concrete in the world of consciousness. If its premisses be granted, Bradley’s philosophy is the necessary conclusion.

4. The Reductio ad Absurdum of Pan-Logism in Bradley’s Philosophy. — Bradley^[15] maintains that the world, as given to us by experience and as constructed by science in its concepts, is but an illusory appearance of a deeper reality of which philosophy should strive to sound the depths by speculative methods, after having exposed the contradictions latent in the world of appearances. The concepts of which physical science makes use lend themselves perfectly to the determination of limited phenomena, but lead to contradictions when we attempt to use them to express the true essence of reality; they are relative concepts, characterising things in relation to and in comparison with other things, but they can tell us nothing of the terms of those relations; they are working ideas, which are of no theoretical importance, but have only the value of useful fictions, practical compromises.^[16] Bradley starts from the principle of contradiction,^[17] which he regards as the supreme criterion of every reality, and, acting on the strength of this, the one and only article of his logical code, considers himself entitled to administer summary justice to all scientific concepts and intellectual categories — substance, quality, relation, space, time, movement, change, causality, force, activity — which from his point of view imply contradictions and hence cannot correspond to anything real. Let us, for example, consider the relation between the thing and its properties: its substance is not identical with any one of them; what is it then? Merely a link connecting its qualities; but what do we mean by the assertion that one quality is related to another? Neither of them is identical with the other or with the relation to the other; thus the number of contradictions is augmented rather than diminished. Quality does not exist apart from relations, but relation in its turn is not conceivable except as existing between qualitative terms: on the one hand, it would appear that quality is the result of relations, since qualitative difference cannot exist apart from a process of distinction; on the other, it would appear that relations in their ultimate analysis are forms of quality. Nor is it of any avail to draw a distinction between two elements in a quality, one pre-existent to the relation, and rendering that relation possible; the other resulting from the relation itself; since we should have to explain the mutual relation of these two elements, both belonging to one and the same thing; we are, that is to say, confronted with the problem of a new relation no less inexplicable than the first, and so on ad infinitum. The relation cannot be identified with the things related, and, taken by itself, is nothing.^[18] No less contradictory are space,^[19] time,^[20] movement,^[21] activity,^[22] causality,^[23] etc., because when these concepts are resolved into various combinations of qualities and relations, the difficulties set forth above will arise afresh. The fundamental concepts of the special sciences are then mere appearances due to faulty perspective, which must be eliminated by rising to a higher experience embracing all possible appearances transfigured to a greater or less degree in an integral harmonious system; these illusions, however, are possessed of a certain degree of reality; there is no such thing as a truth which is entirely true, just as there is no such thing as an error which is entirely false; we can only speak of a greater or lesser degree of truth; error is partial truth, it is false only because it is one-sided and incomplete. All appearances are real in some way or other, and to some extent, and the right modifications and transformations (supplementation and arrangement, addition, qualification) may bring them too into the system of the Absolute.^[24] In like manner every finite truth, like every fact, must be to a certain extent unreal and false, and the unlimited nature of the unknown renders it impossible to determine with certainty in the last analysis the proportion of error contained therein. If our knowledge were a system, we could determine the position of each thing in the whole, and gauge accurately the proportion of truth and error contained therein, but the nature of our knowledge renders such a system out of the question.^[25] Thought originates in the separation of the what, the ideal meaning, the predicate, from the that, immediately felt existence, the subject; error, falseness, lies in uniting a what and a that which do not correspond to each other. In the harmony of the whole, each what will find its proper that, and every illusion will consequently vanish; the ideal will coincide with the existent, the intelligible with the thing given. This is impossible to our finite consciousness, which develops in time and has its being in the world of appearances derived from the separation of idea from fact; notwithstanding this, we can approximate in some fashion, and with varying degrees of success, to the total harmonic system by striving to eliminate the contradictory element in phenomena, and to render our thought more coherent and more complete.^[26] The ideal at which knowledge aims is the re-union of idea and fact — an ideal which it can never fully realise; thus its efforts in this direction imply a latent contradiction, since, on the one hand, knowledge is only possible in virtue of the distinction between the what and the that, the predicate and its subject, which are elements indispensable to the judicial function; whilst on the other, its development and perfecting should lead to the elimination of this distinction. There can be no clear and full understanding of truth with this distinction between data and their ideal significance; the moment this difference vanishes, truth ceases to exist and knowledge gives place to the true and real life of the Absolute.^[27] Truth and knowledge are then but illusory appearances, like everything else which implies the separation of idea from fact, and they tend to transcend the bounds of intellect, and to become fused in a form of intuition and universal life of which we can hardly form an abstract idea, an immediate concrete experience, in which all the elements — sensation, emotion, thought, and will — are fused into one comprehensive feeling.^[28] Finite beings cannot enter into the fulness of the life of the Absolute, or have specific experience of its constitution, but human consciousness can form a certain idea of it by retracing its steps to that primitive and diffused feeling to which the distinction between subject and object, and the differentiation of elements was as yet unknown. This intuition, which must embrace and harmonise the various phenomenal aspects of consciousness, will, intellect, imagination, which, considered separately and postulated as absolutes, give rise to contradictions, although it possesses the immediacy of feeling, is nevertheless not subject to the limitations of every kind of distinction and relation as feeling is, but transcends all distinctions and relations, and therefore contains them in a higher unity within itself.^[29] It is a form of psychic or spiritual experience (sentient experience),^[30] because there can be no reality external to the mind, and the truth of a thing is in proportion to its spirituality;^[31] but the modes of conscious experience are too one-sided for any one of them to give us the immediate intuition thereof, hence we must rest content with forming an abstract conception of it by, so to speak, “passing to the limit” of the various appearances.

5. Criticism of Bradley’s Dialectic. — Pan-logism thus ends in an act of apostasy, and its dialectic leads to its own annihilation in a form of mystical intuitionism, whose static and contemplative character distinguishes it from that of Bergson.^[32] It is the conception of the one unchangeable and eternal being of the ancient Eleatic philosophers, as opposed to the perennial flux of Heraclitus, and the inevitable end of those who give themselves over to the hollow dialectic of reason divorced from its vital content and articulated in rigorously identical formulas. What then is left of reality? A principle devoid of life and motion, something which has not even the logical coherence of our thought, since this thought is only valuable and important in so far as it opposes itself to the fluctuations of experience and assures the stability of concepts amid the manifold changes of images. Removed from this environment, its function ceases to be possible, and thought itself is arrested and vanishes into nothingness. The law of identity, if it is to be of any efficacy and value, must be applicable to a multiplicity in which the movement of thought is developed; if it be divested of such a content, it ceases to be conceivable. The Absolute, as a mere identity of permanence, is something the reality of whose existence is beyond our power of thought. Moreover, even if we admit that it is possible to think of it as a limited concept, it will still be incomprehensible how such perfect identity can give birth to the illusion of multiplicity, or an inviolable law of permanence to the phantasmagoria of a world in process of evolution.

It is useless to say that change is illusory, since we still have to explain how the illusion arises, because, even if it be nothing else, it is a psychical fact which we experience directly, and whose existence is consequently undeniable. Our thought refuses to admit that if the law of things is a perfect identity the manifold content of consciousness with its unceasing transformations can be derived therefrom without the imperturbable inflexibility of being undergoing any change. Either it is unrelated to phenomenal occurrences and abstract, lifeless unity remains immovable to all eternity in its ataraxy, in which case it is a caput mortuum with which the world of phenomena can readily dispense; or it must be the adequate reason of the constant renewal of consciousness and experience, in which case it cannot preserve its fixity of quietism. But, Bradley would urge, even the change of finite consciousness in time is illusory in so far as it assumes the separation of fact from idea, the that from the what. What authority have we, then, for forming such an opinion of it? The principle of contradiction is only of value as the law governing the judgment, and implies the distinction between two concepts standing in a definite relation to each other, that is to say, they must be such that one excludes the other; now, according to Bradley, judgment and the distinction between conceptual terms are appearances relative to our finite point of view; hence even the principle of contradiction can be but a law of appearances, an illusory law; how can it, then, be set up as a criterion of absolute reality? Who can guarantee that this law is applicable to absolute reality, and is not rather an error of perspective like the rest? May not Hegel be right in assigning to contradiction a place in the very heart of the idea, and in looking npon it as the germ from which its development springs? When we assert with Bradley that finite thought is an appearance, we can no longer consistently regard the principle of contradiction as an absolute criterion any more than any other logical axiom. If logical principles be set up as judges of reality, we grant by implication the value of finite thought, judgment, and human reason. On the other hand, if the unconditioned value of the axioms be granted, it is not a necessary inference, as Bradley, following in the footsteps of Herbart and the ancient Eleatics, would have us believe, that movement and change are illusory, because they contradict the laws governing our thoughts. Multiplicity and transformation, as we receive them directly from intuition, are not contradictory in themselves, the contradiction exists only between our one-sided concepts. We may resolve movement as presented to us by intuition into abstract elements, but in that case we must bear in mind that each one of these elements is but a partial view, a limit which we ourselves have laid down in order to facilitate analysis and research, and which does not correspond to any real division. Thus, on the one hand, if we isolate certain persistent and uniform elements from the process of change which we apprehend by means of immediate intuition, we may state that body remains unchanged; if, on the other hand, we look at it from another point of view, and introduce only varying elements into the idea, regarded in abstraction from the complex of intuitive data, we should be led to a diametrically opposite conclusion. Who, however, can fail to see that the opposition in such a case is the artificial creation of our partial view? Change is in no way contradictory to the principles of human intellect; it is true that the birth of the new amid the unceasing flux of experience eludes the grasp of our abstract concepts, which are constrained to sacrifice the wealth of mind and nature 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,^[33] 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 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.^[34] 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 from the irresistible longing to burst the bonds of agnosticism which stifle the most living aspirations of the soul, mingle their waters in the wild, rushing torrent of the reaction from intellectualism.

Notes

1. Green published nothing in his life-time but articles in reviews and an Introduction to the works of Hume (1874-75). After his death his Prolegomena to Ethics was edited by A. C. Bradley and published in 1883, and his complete works were collected and published in three volumes by Nettleship (Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1885).
2. Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, edited by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose (new edition, London, 1878). The “Introduction” prefixed by Green to vol. i. is a criticism of the philosophy of Locke (pp. 5-132), Berkeley (pp. 133-151), and Hume (p. 161 to end).
3. “Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. G. H. Lewes: Their Application of the Doctrine of Evolution to Thought,” Contemporary Review, 1877-78, vol. xxx. pp. 25-53, 745-69; vol. xxxii. pp. 751-772.
4. “. . . Experience in the sense of a consciousness of events as a related series . . . cannot be explained by any natural history, properly so called. It is not the product of a series of events” (Prolegomena to Ethics, Oxford, 1899, 4th ed., p. 25. See also his introduction to Hume, p. 164 ff.).
5. Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 45.
6. Op. cit. p. 54 ff.
7. Op. cit. p. 75 ff.
8. “We admit that mere thought can no more produce the facts of feeling than mere feeling can generate thought” (op. cit. p. 60).
9. Op. cit. p. 58.
10. Op. cit. p. 57.
11. Op. cit. p. 18 ff.
12. Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 34, p. 62 ff.
13. Op. cit. p. 85 ff.
14. Op. cit. p. 80 ff.
15. Principles of Logic (London, 1883); Appearance and Reality (London, 1893).
16. Appearance and Reality, p. 284.
17. “Ultimate reality is such that it does not contradict itself: here is absolute criterion” (op. cit. p. 136 ff.).
18. Op. cit. p. 20 ff.
19. Op. cit. p. 35 ff.
20. Op. cit. p. 39 ff.
21. Op. cit. p. 44 ff.
22. Op. cit. p. 62 ff.
23. Op. cit. p. 54 ff.
24. “Error is truth, it is partial truth that is false only because partial and left incomplete” (op. cit. p. 192). “Error is truth when it is supplemented” (op. cit. p. 195).
25. Op. cit. p. 54.
26. Op. cit. p. 364 ff. According to Bradley, the appearance which most nearly approximates to reality and is possessed of the greatest proportion of truth is the one which demands the least addition and rearrangement for its conversion into the Absolute.
27. Op. cit. pp. 163 ff., 361, 545 ff.
28. Op. cit. p. 227. “For our Absolute was not a mere intellectual system. It was an experience overriding every species of one-sidedness, and it was a living intuition, an immediate individuality.”
29. Op. cit. p. 242.
30. Op. cit. p. 144.
31. Op. cit. p. 551.
32. F. C. S. Schiller in an article entitled: “Mysticism versus Intellectualism,” published in Mind (January 1913, p. 87), protests against my interpretation of Bradley’s philosophy. He is under the impression that I intended to say that Bradley wilfully and deliberately reduced English Neo-Hegelianism ad absurdum; it is, however, obvious that I merely assert that Bradley’s dialectic unconsciously reduces pan-logism ad absurdum, and on this point Schiller and I are really agreed.
33. Appearance and Reality, p. 20.
34. Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (Cambridge, 1901), pp. 270-292; Studies in Hegelian Dialectic (Cambridge, 1896), pp. 214-276.