THE GOAL OF KNOWLEDGE. 483 Common-sense people never doubt not only that the more they know of the world the firmer the hold they obtain of reality, but that if they knew all that it is possible to know they would be as God and know reality as it is. Or, to put it in the form suggested by our former discussion, they never doubt that reality is somehow given in their concept of the world, and that all they have to do is to fill that out and bring it into harmony with itself. Idealist philosophy more- over has until recently acquiesced in this view and in its doctrine of the Absolute done little more than translate it into the language of the Schools. It is sufficiently disquiet- ing to be asked to change all this, and before giving in our adhesion to the newer theory, we may be excused for desiring to examine it a little more closely than has hitherto, I think, been done from the point of view of the presuppositions of Idealism itself. It is hardly necessary before this Society to state the grounds upon which the incompatibility of the form of knowledge with ultimate reality is based by the writers who maintain it. I shall condense them into the two arguments that have commended themselves to two dis- tinguished writers. In the first place it is maintained that knowledge is not the only form of reality. Besides know- ledge there is feeling, and perhaps volition. As Bradley puts it : " Let us imagine a harmonious system of ideal content united by relations and reflecting itself in self- conscious harmony. This is to be reality, all reality, and there is nothing outside it. The delights and pains of the flesh, the agonies and raptures of the soul these are fragmentary meteors fallen from thought's harmonious system. But these burning experiences how in any sense can they be mere pieces of thought's heaven ? For if the fall is real there is a world outside thought's region and if the fall is apparent then human error itself is not included there. Heaven, in brief, must either not be heaven or else not all reality." l The conclusion is, knowledge can never be a complete expression of the whole of reality. But secondly, the ideal of knowledge makes a demand which, if it were satisfied, would be the destruction of one side or the other of the antithesis upon which knowledge itself depends. " If thought were successful it would have a predicate con- sistent in itself and agreeing entirely with the subject. But, on the other hand, the predicate must be always ideal. It 1 Appearance and Reality, 2nd ed., p. 170 foil. ; cp. McTaggart's Studies in Hegelian Dialectic, p. 214 foil.
