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.[1] It is a form of psychic or spiritual experience (sentient experience),[2] because there can be no reality external to the mind, and the truth of a thing is in proportion to its spirituality;[3] 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.[4] 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
- ↑ Op. cit. p. 242.
- ↑ Op. cit. p. 144.
- ↑ Op. cit. p. 551.
- ↑ 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.
