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.[1] 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.[2] 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.[3] 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
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Op. cit. pp. 163 ff., 361, 545 ff.
- ↑ 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.”
