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XV

MR. BRADLEY'S METAPHORS

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suppressed as such', so Professor Bosanquet speaks of 'the expansion and absorption of the self'.1 With more audacious irony Mr. Bradley speaks of the perfection and harmony which the individual attains in the Absolute as 'the complete gift and dissipation of his personality' in which he, as such, must vanish'. The finite, as such, disappears in being accomplished.' And again, the process of correction' which finite existence undergoes in the Absolute may' entirely dissipate its nature'. 'Transmuted' is the word most favoured by both; but synonyms plentifully scattered through Appearance and Reality are 'merged', 'blended', 'fused', 'absorbed', 'run together', 'transformed', 'dissolved in a higher unity', and even the more sinister terms' suppressed', 'destroyed', and 'lost'.

Mr. Bradley's famous metaphor of the window-frames as expressing the condition of finite selfhood significantly indicates his conception of the process and its final consummation. My incapacity to extend the boundary of my

this ", my inability to gain an immediate experience of that in which it is subordinated and reduced-is my mere imperfection. Because I cannot spread out my window until all is transparent, and all windows disappear, this does not justify me in insisting on my window-frame's rigidity. For that frame has, as such, no existence in reality, but only in our impotence. . . . There is no objection against the disappearance of limited transparencies in an all-embracing clearness.' 3 The Absolute is, in short, 'a whole in which all finites blend and are resolved'.4 And in Professor Bosanquet's account, it seems to be through some such conception of the disappearance of the finite selves, as such, and the re-distribution' or 're-adjustment' 5 of their material in the perfect experience, that evil, which is said to be simply good in the wrong place, disappears, as such, in the Absolute. The contents 2 Appearance and Reality, pp. 419-20. Ibid., p. 429.

1 Ibid.,
p. 263.

• Ibid., pp. 253–4 (italics mine).

• Value and Destiny, p. xxix.

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or qualities of the different selves are, as it were, shaken up together, and neutralize and supplement one another. The metaphor is Professor Bosanquet's own. 'How constantly we hear it said,' he writes, ""They will do capital work together; A's failing will counteract B's," or "if A and B could be shaken up in a bag together, they would make a perfect man." The Absolute is a limiting case of such a process.' But if such an 'all-pervasive transfusion' (to go back to Mr. Bradley's phrase) is the goal or, more strictly, the eternal reality which only our impotence disguises from us, then certainly we need not wonder that the existence of finite centres at all seems on the theory inexplicable and, one might even say, uncalled for. Why should the blessed harmony of the perfect experience be disturbed even in appearance ?

But, in fact, the whole conception of blending and merging, as applied to finite individuals, depends on the failure to recognize that every real individual must possess a substantival existence in the Aristotelian sense. Both Mr. Bradley and Professor Bosanquet, as we saw in the preceding lecture, insist on taking the individual as an adjective, thereby reducing it to a conflux of universals or qualities. But it is a trite observation that no number of abstract universals flocking together can give you the concretely existing individual. To exist means to be the subject of qualities, to have or possess a nature. This is recognized in the current distinction between existence and content, between the' that' and the' what'. And although, as we have already partly seen in another connexion,2 this is a distinction which easily lends itself to erroneous statement, we must be on our guard against a counter-error. It is certain that the 'that' of a thing, the substantival in it, is not to be thought of as a solid core of being, a grain, as it were, of reality-stuff,3 to which, as a support, the qualities

1 Value and Destiny, p. 217.

In Lecture IX.

'Lotze's phrase. Cf. his Metaphysic, Book I, chap. iii, section 31.

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THE CONCRETE INDIVIDUAL

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care attached. It cannot be taken out and exhibited as something over and above the qualities. But reaction from such errors easily leads to an exclusive stress on the content or nature as constituting and differentiating the individuals. Here again, it will be remembered, we have acknowledged the truth which lies in such a mode of statement. Individuals,

it may be quite truly said, are ultimately differentiated by their nature, that is to say, by their specific content, including therein, of course, the peculiar arrangement or make-up of the content-what we may call its peculiar organization or system. But this way of stating the case is true only so long as it does not obscure the fact that we are dealing, in each case, with a concrete existent. There is a subtle danger in the term content-a suggestion that the individual is simply a very complex group of universals. But if, as we are agreed, the individual is not to be regarded as put together, so to speak, out of the abstract universal, in the shape of so many qualities, and the abstract particular in the shape of a point of existence, neither can it be regarded as simply an intricately mingled group of universals—a highly complex adjective. So to think of it is to confound the abstractions of knowledge with the concrete texture of reality; it is entirely to overlook the unity and centrality which is the characteristic of concrete existence, and is what we mean by individuation. Such centrality is acknowledged by our authors in the phrase 'finite centres'. But we have seen how precarious and superficial' Professor Bosanquet pronounces such formal distinctness to be. And when the whole stress is laid on content, the content comes to be regarded as somehow detachable from the centres, and capable of being re-arranged and finally shaken up into perfect harmony in the Absolute. As Mr. Bradley puts it: 'We found no reason why such feelings, considered in any feature or aspect, should persist self-centred and aloof. It seemed possible, to say the least, that they all might blend

with one another, and be merged in the experience of the one Reality. And with that possibility, given on all sides, wł arrive at our conclusion. The this" and "mine" are now absorbed as elements within our Absolute.'

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But such a conception does no more justice to the substantive unity of every existent than did the old associationist dissolution of the self into atomic states or ideas, the doctrine which Mr. Bradley himself so mercilessly caricatured in his Ethical Studies. Mr. Bain collects that the mind is a collection. Has he ever thought who collects Mr. Bain? So runs one of the notes that sticks in the memory. But now Mr. Bradley's own conception of the self seems open to the same retort. To use one of his own illustrations, the qualities or different elements of content in a centre seem as loose and independent as marbles in a bag, and when the string of the bag is loosened the marbles escape, as it were, into the empty space of the Absolute, to group themselves afresh. Or, seeing that the bag, as a receptacle, is ultimately a fiction, or an accommodation to popular thought, we ought rather to speak of temporarily cohering marbles detaching themselves from their groups and being swept into new combinations. But not so must we think of any self or soul or, indeed, of anything that actually exists, not even of the Absolute itself, if it is to be more than an abstraction. if it is really, as it is said to be, an experience.

The term centres of experience' involves, of course, a spatial metaphor, but, try as we may, we cannot get rid of such metaphors; and the term centre, or the essentially similar term focus, which Mr. Bradley, we have seen, occasionally uses as a variant, expresses, as happily as we can hope to do, the characteristic nature of the individual or the concrete universal as (formally at least) a selfcontained world, in which a certain manifold of content acquires an internal unity as a single self or subject. 1 Appearance and Reality, p. 240.

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THE ORIGIN OF FINITE CENTRES

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The self or subject, as we have already said, is not to be conceived as an entity over and above the content, or as a point of bare existence to which the content is, as it were, attached, or even as an eye placed in position over against its objects, to pass them in review. The unity of the subject, we may agree, simply expresses this peculiar organization or systematization of the content. But it is not simply the unity which a systematic whole of content might possess as an object or for a spectator. Its content, in Professor Bosanquet's phrase, has come alive'; it has become a unity for itself, a subject. This is, in very general terms, what we mean by a finite centre, a soul or, in its highest form, a self.

The origin of such centres is, perhaps, the only fact to which we can fitly apply the term creation, for they necessarily import into the universe an element of relative independence and separateness which is not involved in the notion of externality as such. Externality, i. e. the general system of nature, cannot be really separated from the foci in which it finds expression; to make this separation, as we argued in the first course, is to hypostatize an abstraction. But if we try to imagine a purely mechanical system without any such living centres, it might seem possible to conceive it as simply the object of an absolute percipient. And the abstraction may help us to realize, by force of contrast, that a being which exists in any degree for itself, as a conscious subject, rounds itself thereby to an individual whole, and acquires in so doing an independence which we should not attribute to a mere object. To understand the process of such creation is necessarily beyond us; we can barely describe its phases without involving ourselves in contradictions. In one aspect, the soul appears to be the product of the general system of things; in another aspect it appears to be self-created by its own action, to presuppose its own existence at every stage of its progress so that it has been said paradoxically, there is no first moment of self-consciousness, but only a second.

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