Mr. Bradley that such varieties might seem, to a higher experience, artificial, and that, as such, they might be “transmuted” even in coming to their unity in the higher view. For in such cases we never experience that these varieties are self-evidently what they seem to us. And our conception that they are many is associated with a confession of ignorance as to what they are. A good example of all this is furnished by our conception of what our own lives, or the course of human history, would have been, if certain critical events had never taken place.[1] What, in such instances, we have on our hands is an ignorance as to the whole ground and meaning of the critical events themselves. A fuller knowledge of what they meant might render much of our speech about the “possibilities” in question obviously vain.
Determinate decisions of the will involve rendering invalid countless possibilities that, but for this choice, might have been entertained as valid. In such cases the nature of the rejected possibilities is sufficiently expressed, in concrete form, by the will that decides, if only it knows itself as deciding, and is fully conscious of how and why it decides. That Absolute insight would mean absolute decision, and so a refusal to get presented in experience endlessly numerous contents that, but for the decision, would have been possible, — this I maintain as a necessary aspect of the whole conception of individuality. Whoever knows not decisions that exclude, knows not Being. For apart from such exclusion of possibilities, one would face barely abstract universals, and would, therefore, still seek for Another. Our whole conception of Being agrees, then, with Mr. Bradley’s in insisting that the bare what, the idea as a mere thought, still pursuing, and imitatively characterizing its Other, not only does not face Being as Being, but can never, of itself, decide what its own final expression shall be. Thought must win satisfaction not as mere Thought, but also as decisive Will, determining itself to final expression in a way that the abstract universals of
- ↑ On such possibilities, “counter to fact,” see again the discussion in the Conception of God, loc. cit., and in later passages of the same essay.
