order of knowledge. On experience as it develops the ideal of the pure reason may rise to perish never, but it was certainly not discernible at first; and if present now, its full meaning is ineffable still. The superlative, the absolute, the infinite are limiting notions, and for aught we know are notions only: ideals of the reason they may be, but then reason itself is an ideal. There seems no end to the process of rationalising experience, but — as I said at the outset — at least there may be progress, and our confidence, that, as Hegel maintained, the real is rational and the rational real may deepen as we proceed. But we must start where we are and continue as we have begun, letting knowledge grow from more to more. To say this is to imply that those idealists who have attempted to begin with the Absolute have not really done so. That they have not has been amply proved by their critics and admitted by their apologists. But at any rate in the flights of pure thought up to the Absolute the atmosphere of empirical fact by which it is sustained is too diffused to be detected, and when that summit is reached the particular, the many, of actual experience tend to disappear or to be explained away. Thus their “alleged independence” — in which we empirically believe — Mr Bradley declares “is no fact, but a theoretical construction; and so far as it has a meaning, that meaning contradicts itself, and issues in chaos. . . . The plurality then sinks to become merely an integral aspect in a single substantial unity, and the reals [the many] have vanished.”[1] Nevertheless the inevitable reaction, which the impossibility of philosophical finality involves, has already set in: indeed Mr Bradley
- ↑ Appearance and Reality, 2nd edn, p. 143.
