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THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN 
 CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 
 
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PREFACE 
 
 I TAKE as the leading example of what I desire 
 to discuss in the present work the familiar 
 opposition of Realism and Idealism. These terms, 
 as understood throughout the various aspects of 
 life, are traditional battle-cries and watchwords 
 rather than names of precision ; but even as 
 designations of philosophical attitudes they have 
 histories full of inspiration ; and, varied as are the 
 meanings which they have possessed and possess 
 to-day, it would seem a churlish proposal that 
 those whose hearts are set upon what they suggest 
 should be called upon to employ them no more. 
 Yet the very fulness of signification which they 
 have acquired is inimical to definiteness of appli- 
 cation, more especially when the application is an 
 antithesis. Every philosophy, we must suppose, 
 is bona fide impressed with the significance, which 
 seems to it pre-eminent, of some certain general 
 character or interest which it finds attractive and 
 commanding within the universe. But it is not 
 inevitable, nor is it the case, that the general 
 name or watchword which indicates the principal 
 passion distinctive of any persistent philosophical 
 attitude is or has been sustained by the same facts 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 and arguments throughout, or, again, by facts and 
 arguments in conflict with those which have sus- 
 tained its traditional opposite. 
 
 It may be true at starting that the " Idealist " 
 is taught to say, " On earth there is nothing great 
 but man, in man there is nothing great but 
 mind " ; while the Realist's temper may be " to 
 order man and mind to their proper place among 
 the world of finite things."^ But it is certain that 
 each of them, if he follows his primary clue 
 freely, with an open mind, and his eye upon the 
 object, may, or rather must, be led to investiga- 
 tions and appreciations which will carry him to 
 seek completeness in regions within his opponent's 
 spiritual home. It is, I believe we might in 
 general say as an example, at least one party of 
 the most realistically minded who care most in- 
 tensely for transcendent theism or polytheism and 
 for the persistent finite individual subject — for 
 spirit and spiritualism, in short, as a bounded 
 division of the universe, sharing it with matter ; 
 it is at least a faction of the idealistically minded 
 who refuse to see in mind and nature either the 
 factors of an ultimate antithesis, or provinces of 
 data either of which is simply reducible to the 
 other. Each of them, to the best of its power, 
 finds room for the complementary elements ; and 
 the freer, more subtle, and more penetrating their 
 
 1 Alexander, Proc. Brit. Academy, 191 3-14, p. 279. 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 respective explorations, the more they show in- 
 dications of supporting one another. The sub- 
 stitution of these fine and dissolvent analyses, of 
 this sapping and mining under fortifications of an 
 obsolete type, for a warfare of crude antagonism 
 and bombardment at long ranges, is perhaps on 
 the whole a new thing in the history of philo- 
 sophy (though indeed it began with Plato), and is 
 a feature of remarkable promise in the philosophy 
 of to-day. 
 
 There may be others, therefore, besides the 
 present writer, who are weary of the clamorous 
 and spurious pretensions to highly significant 
 antagonism on a basis of etymology misunder- 
 stood which attach in common usage to the titles 
 in question ; and who will be ready, under any 
 such heading as that of " speculative philosophy," 
 to recognise with Professor Alexander and the 
 neo-idealists of Italy (the recognition is itself a 
 case of what I have in mind) that every philosophy, 
 and not " idealism " only, is attempting to do 
 justice to the standpoint of "the whole,"^ and to 
 appreciate to the best of the experience it controls 
 and the analysis it can command the respective 
 places of externality and mind and value in the 
 universe. 
 
 It is with a view to illustrating what I hope is a ; 
 convergence of investigations towards some such 
 
 ^ Cf, Alexander, Proc. Brit. Academy, p. 297. 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 truly speculative attitude — free, concrete, pene- 
 trating, and widely appreciative — which contem- 
 porary philosophy on all sides seems very strikingly 
 to reveal, that I shall try to point out in their 
 connection some fundamental features shared by 
 the groups of thinkers most strongly opposed to 
 one another to-day. 
 
 What first attracted my attention to this point 
 of view was the really startling diiFerence and 
 agreement between the Italian neo-idealists who 
 follow Croce and Gentile, and the English and 
 American neo-realists, who are represented, say, 
 by Professor Alexander and the Six. On the one 
 side thought, self-creative and all-producing, the 
 ultimate principle and even the ultimate type and 
 form of reality ; on the other, a self-existent 
 universe, actual in space and time, in which mind 
 — that is, distinct individual minds — holds a place 
 on equal terms with other finite things. And yet 
 in both alike, such is the spirit of the age, we 
 have the actual and ultimate reality of Time, 
 progress to infinity, as the fundamental character 
 of the real, and with these inevitably (what I 
 suspect to be a deep-lying motive in both) the 
 specifically ethical and non-religious attitude, for 
 which, to quote the old humanistic watchword 
 and paradox, " the end is progress."^ 
 
 ^ I believe this to be, or to have been, a motto put up in 
 Newton Hall, the Comtist meeting-place in London. I 
 admit that 1 cannot recall the source of my information. 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 Other features, analogously related, have ap- 
 peared in philosophy on all sides. One such is 
 plainly connected with a change in the fashion 
 of argument since Kant attacked abstract on- 
 tology. By this change a new rank has been 
 given to man's primitive and indestructible in- 
 stincts and emotions in which his own incom- 
 pleteness on various sides of his being, in religion, 
 for example, in knowledge, in social living, be- 
 comes irrefragably clear to him.^ This is not an 
 abandonment of what is sound and cogent in 
 those old arguments in which man used the 
 technical language of thought to embody his 
 overwhelming sense of his unity with and in a 
 universe which excelled himself. It is not a lesser 
 or a weaker logic : it is a fuller and a better logic. 
 It is examining on all sides the unities and dis- 
 crepancies of man's concrete experience, and 
 discerning the conclusions towards which these 
 index-characters inevitably point. You are no 
 longer taking a single bearing with a single 
 compass, but are covering a whole region with 
 a systematic survey. 
 
 Again, in connection and continuity with the 
 above recognition, you find not in one group 
 alone, but in all quarters of the philosophical 
 world, the insight that truth, value, and a common 
 
 ' Alexander, op. cit., p. 305. I am aware that in intention 
 this thinker's attitude is not neglectful of the special claims of 
 religion. 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 possession of externality, affirm themselves as the 
 solid meeting-point of minds in social intercourse, 
 so that the identity and universality of mind, if 
 you doubt it in one sense, returns upon you as a 
 granite-hard fact in another ; and the evidence 
 for it in all its senses is continuous and analogous. 
 In short, when actual experience is explored by 
 painstaking and appreciative analysis, when you 
 look at things straight and simply and in the con- 
 crete, and disentangle their implications with care 
 and sympathy (I have in mind as an example 
 Professor Whitehead's " Concept of Nature "), 
 then you find the connection of one member with 
 another in the universe to have all sorts of charac- 
 teristics of inevitable complementariness, which 
 are not adequately represented by such expressions 
 as " mind creates " or " mind discovers," " sensa 
 exist, do not exist," "are dependent, are inde- 
 pendent," "are mental, are material," "things 
 are located in space, are not located in space." 
 With more careful and less controversial modes 
 of approach, you find you can get below these 
 first obvious answers in the common-sense cate- 
 chism, and pursue, as Hegel pointed out,^ in the 
 higher walks of thought modifications of a common 
 basis, rather than tumble this way and that^ 
 between crude contradictories. 
 
 1 McTaggart, "Studies in Hegelian Dialectic," chap. iv. 
 ^ Plato, Rep. 479D. 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 These remarks on the ontological mode of 
 statement and reasoning, together with what I have 
 further observed on the same topic in the body of 
 my work,^ may indicate, for those whom it inter- 
 ests, the general position which I should take up 
 towards Dr. McTaggart's writings, and in par- 
 ticular to his important treatise on the Nature of 
 Existence. It would be improper and, indeed, 
 impossible to suggest here a summary criticism 
 upon a book which has but recently appeared, and 
 which, perhaps, with the best opportunities for 
 studying it, I should not have been equal to 
 criticising. All that I hope to gain by mentioning 
 it in this place is to set before my readers the con- 
 ception that the direct ontological method which 
 he pursues is perhaps not to be held in principle 
 to supersede all interest and value in the attempts 
 at a critical survey of experience in which my work 
 has mainly consisted. It seems to me almost 
 fundamental to our respective standpoints that I 
 hold no experience, however empirical prima facie, 
 to be destitute of metaphysical implication, while 
 Dr. McTaggart, though not, as I understand, 
 excluding on principle empirical data, does appear 
 to move in a region comparable to that which is 
 thought of as the region of the a priori. I base 
 no criticism on this appearance. I should wish to 
 be considered capable of moving in this region 
 
 * E.g., p. 202. 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 myself. I only desire that enquiries which, prima 
 facie, go outside it may not as a matter of course 
 be ruled out of order in philosophy. I may add 
 that whatever might be my conclusion if it were 
 possible for me thoroughly to examine Dr- 
 McTaggart's special argument — a matter not of 
 a few days — I can have no hesitation in saying 
 that I completely sympathise with the doctrine 
 which he proposes to sustain, " the idealism which 
 rests on the assertion that nothing exists but 
 spirit."^ 
 
 I think that I ought also to indicate, at least in 
 a word or two, my attitude to Mr. Bradley' s well- 
 known criticisms of time, space, and relations. 
 For it seems probable that the popular verdict may 
 be that these features of the world have in recent 
 mathematical theory been demonstrated as actual 
 existences, and that any criticism directed upon 
 them ipso facto falls to the ground. The line 
 which I have taken in the latter part of the present 
 work, in harmony with that which I believe Mr. 
 Bradley to have consistently maintained,** shows 
 how I should reply to any such suggestion. My 
 view would be that the absolutist, to whom a 
 perfectly thoroughgoing relativity has always been 
 of the essence of the real,^ has played an effective 
 
 1 "Nature of Existence," sect, 52. 
 ^ See " Essays," p. 411, n. 
 3 Seep. 155, n. 
 
PREFACE xiii 
 
 part in forcing philosophy to the more concrete 
 standpoint from which it treats such experiences 
 to-day. In space-time, change, and relation, it 
 now deals with the relational wholes, relational 
 arrangements, unities comprising and sustaining 
 relations,^ apart from which absolutism has alw^s 
 maintained both relations and terms to be^ incon- 
 ceivable. Unities contain relations, but unities 
 are not relations, nor constituted by relations. 
 " The universe contains change, but the universe 
 itself cannot change."^ 
 
 Such an estimate as that offered by Lord 
 Haldane in his work on the Reign of Relativity 
 appears to me therefore merely as an interpretation 
 of the absolutist arguments, which would be fair 
 if he had not, as I must think, omitted to con- 
 sider throughout the aspect insisted on in the 
 sentence I have just quoted, and emphasised 
 throughout the whole of Mr. Bradley's works. 
 I have offered in the body of my work a brief 
 comment — no more — on Lord Haldane's valuable 
 
 BERNARD BOSAl^QUfiT. 
 
 OXSHOTT, I 92 I. 
 
 ^ " Essays," pp. 200, 303-306. 
 * Loc. cit., note 2, p. xi. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGBS 
 
 Preface - ... - v-xiii 
 
 Example of Realism and Idealism ; " drapeaux," not 
 precise antithetical notions. Say mottoes are 
 "Mind" V. "Things"; but each affirms comple- 
 mentary elements — God of Theism, and Nature. 
 Free analyses, revealing continuity of positions, 
 characteristic of moderns. Recognition that every 
 philosophy seeks " the whole " in its own way. 
 Neo-idealists and neo-realists, antagonism and 
 coincidence — creative thought and real Time 
 agree in reality of change. Again, ontology re- 
 placed in all quarters by study of instinct and 
 emotion; crude antagonism of common-sense or 
 abstract dicta superseded in examining concrete 
 experience, vi-xiii. 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 Mind and its Objects - - - 1-27 
 
 Defer general comparison of neo-realists and neo- 
 idealists, 
 
 I. Idealism which rejects reduction of all experience to 
 thinking, supported by neo-realism, 1-3, G. E. 
 Moore. Refutation of Idealism : (i.) Idealist 
 wrong if he thinks a chair is not a chair ; 
 (ii.) reality of sensa (weakness of argument to 
 distinct factors in them), 3-7. 
 
 z. Universality of Mind. Alexander denies general, 
 asserts "collective"; realist's sensa form common 
 world ; behaviourism and cross-sectionism. Mind 
 is objects (and vice versa f). Social reality and 
 common ground of minds, Hocking. But, again, 
 realism unsuccessful with "physical objects "(r^ 
 critical realism) ; these come better from advocates 
 of constructive thought (Stout). Avoidance of re- 
 duction to single type of reality; realists and older 
 idealists, 7-1 1. 
 
 XV 
 
xvi CONTENTS 
 
 PAGES 
 
 3. Contamination of nature by mind strongly suggested 
 
 by relativity theorists (realists ?) — e.g.. Whitehead : 
 (i.) Statutory nature ; (ii.) Resident observers in 
 space-systems ; (iii.) Situation of objects and 
 system of reality, 11-19. 
 
 4. Being and Structure of Mind. Meeting-point of 
 
 Aristotelian ideas, behaviourism, searchlight doc- 
 trine. Gentile's thought in act, views resting on 
 immediate experience (Bradley and James), 19-zi. 
 Three examples : (i.) Infallibility of judgment 
 while judging ; (ii.) the world-judgment ; (iii.) 
 contrast of enjoyment and contemplation. All 
 deny that subject, as such, can be object, zi-24. 
 For substantive existent mind must go to one 
 section of new realists, Alexander (besides view of 
 enjoyment), Laird. Half realists support recent, 
 half older idealism, 24-27. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 The Universe and the Real World 28-62 
 
 1. The Universe seems to contain the "real world" 
 
 and more besides, Holt, Bradley, Russell (one 
 view), " Gegenstandstheorie," 28-33. 
 
 2. Real and unreal objects, the problem, Hoernle. 
 
 Systematisation of " appearances," etc., Alexander. 
 Theories of error, Green, Stout, Bradley ; dream 
 ' world and worlds of imagination ; their basis ; 
 mathematics and art. Against these, e.g., Russell 
 (other view), " real world only world." Universe 
 of reality larger than "real world," but not in- 
 coherent, Burritt. Relation of Hoernle and Russell 
 to Kant on hundred thalers. General agreement 
 of Holt, Alexander, Stout, Bradley, and Russell 
 (one view), 33-51, 
 
 3. Material for comparison of neo-idealists with Alex- 
 
 ander : Agreement on reality of time and pro- 
 gress ; conception of reality as human thinking 
 opposed to space-time with derivatives, 51-62. 
 
CONTENTS xvii 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 PAGES 
 
 The Ontological Argument in its Form of 
 
 To-Day ... - 63-75 
 
 1. Concrete analysis main reason of meeting of ex- 
 
 tremes. Two opposite contrasts with Kant, 63-64. 
 Changed usage of term "experience," 65-66. 
 Appreciations of man's unity with others an^ with 
 world, in analysis of instinct and emotion, e.g., in 
 Alexander ; assurance of minds of others ; religious 
 appetite ; cf. James and Bradley, Marett. The 
 mystics. 
 
 2. The neo-idealist rejects above analysis and mystic 
 
 consciousness, 70. 
 
 3. Special instinct of sociality, in assurance of minds of 
 
 others. Alexander's position dist. Stout's. A piece 
 of primitive logic (author's suggestion), 71-75. 
 
 4. Transition to following chapter, as examination of 
 
 ontological argument in its concrete value, 75, 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Essence and Existence - - 76-99 
 
 Attitude to ontological argument on all sides inadequate. 
 
 Adduce examples, and Spinoza's profound views, 
 
 not to prove being of God, but to remove prejudice 
 
 that truth is not normal to mind. 
 I .' Some random cases, with analogy to " the harder 
 
 reading is the better." " The sun to the north," 
 
 in Herodotus, 76-78. 
 
 2. Irrepressible ideas — e.g., "Freedom is quality of 
 
 man." Connect their character with " causa sui " 
 (come of themselves). Religion, 78-80. 
 
 3. From here a further vista. The categories as irre- 
 
 pressible ideas ; and whole of finite fact. Essence 
 and existence must fit as key to lock ; to adjust 
 them is whole process of science. Causes of 
 essence and of existence not really separable. 
 Bradley on what can be made. Thought involves 
 existence in proportion to its coherence with the 
 world, 8p-8z. 
 
xviii CONTENTS 
 
 PAGES 
 
 4. Common element of above cases as in Spinoza, 
 " prima facie, thought is adequate," Mind cannot 
 create sensations and ideas which are not of things. 
 Hence (i.) instructive to treat error as questionable 
 feature of thought ; (ii.) (a) ontological argument 
 weakened by restriction ; (^) Kant's attitude not 
 ultimately tenable, (i.) Clear and distinct thought 
 must be true ; hence restriction of the argument 
 to what must be clearly thought — e.g., whole 
 reality, (ii.) (a) On this restriction extremes meet 
 in Spinoza — mind pure passion or pure action, in 
 both cases essence involves existence (or non- 
 existence) for necessary and impossible things, not 
 for possible things. Reason, his idea of essence 
 imperfect, 82-87. Instance, definition of a thing 
 not determines its number. Criticised, 87-go. 
 (/8) Kant accepts denial of ontological argument re 
 finite things, and extends it to everything. Details 
 from Spinoza to show that denial re finite things 
 will not wholly stand. Essence, e .g., does (in one 
 view) affect duration of finite things. Crudity of 
 Spinoza's view of essence where separation from 
 existence is maintained. His admission of contrary 
 in politics, 90-96. Better to start from " truth 
 normal to mind." An interpretation of a criticism 
 of Hegel's. Relation to a better view of inference, 
 96-99. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 7-1-5 = 12 - - - - IOO-I16 
 
 1. Extremes of thought may meet in error. Erroneous 
 
 imputation of intellectualism and error of pro- 
 gressist and moralistic attitude, 1 00. 
 
 2. Errors which meet in imputation of intellectualism 
 
 and block universe. Copying theory ; transcend- 
 ence if not pure creative thinking ; duration ; the 
 alleged "refined" ideal (James), 100-103. 
 
 3. 7 + 5 = 12 an eternal novelty. This character sup- 
 
 posed to be denied by law of identity and by a 
 reality which is not = thinking. The four atti- 
 tudes, 103-106. 
 
CONTENTS xix 
 
 The parry attempted by them ; the error imputed 
 not adopted. But we say, imputed because 
 adopted ; could not be imputed if its absurdity 
 understood. Re-rejoinder in defence of the parry ; 
 conception of acquired or secondary tautologous 
 identity, (i.) Primary impossibility of imputing 
 tautological identity to Greeks and their followers, 
 (a) Plato's theory of reality ; (j8) formulae of non- 
 contradiction in Plato and Aristotle, 1 06- no. 
 (ii.) Acquired tautologous identity ; novelty or 
 synthesis exhausted in being known, or even know- 
 able, so that block recurs in spite of it ? But how 
 know that truth continues true ? Only by its 
 being in one with life of universe. Will sun rise 
 to-morrow ? " Why not ?" So 7 -t- 5 = I z not 
 true as isolated proposition, but only on basis of 
 coherence with whole, continuous with all experi- 
 ences, new and old. So far with Gentile, only 
 insist that universe beyond mere thinking is not 
 transcendent of experience, but continuous with it. 
 The whole, in its creative origination, does not 
 move as a whole from what it is. This is open 
 secret of 7 -I- 5 = 1 2, 1 1 o-i 1 3 . (iii.) To think that 
 it does move as a whole proves misconception of 
 law of identity, even in those who seem to explain 
 it well (Watts Cunningham). Progressist runs 
 away from paradox of reality and inference, which 
 is ultimate. Teleology does not escape being an 
 approximation-theory, 11 3-1 14. 
 
 Meaning of intellectualism. Not always, but usually, 
 dyslogistic. Implies cognition to be taken as type 
 of thought, and cognition by intellect to be in 
 terms of false identity, as Bergson maintains. 
 This imputation rests on the misconception of 
 identity above dealt with; nature of the judgment 
 slurred. If it is appreciated, term " intellectualist " 
 is meaningless, except in formal sense "satisfies 
 intellect" (Watts Cunningham), 11 4- 116. 
 
XX CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 PAGES 
 
 Time, Progress, Moralism - - 1 17-126 
 
 Neo-idealism and Professor Alexander's realism com- 
 pared in Chap. II., Sect. 3 ; pass here to general 
 influence of progress-of-the-species theories. Their 
 three main features : ultimate reality of time ; 
 perfectibility of the human species ; morality and 
 religion related to realising this. Corollary, evane- 
 scence or diminution of evil (special view of neo- 
 idealists), 11 7- 1 1 8. Change of reality (not in 
 reality) discussed. Reality is " becoming." 
 
 Narrowness of ideas of progress — humanistic. Ad 
 infinitum, being rooted (for neo-idealists) in concep- 
 tion of reality as "becoming," 1 18-1 19 ; continuous 
 attainment supposed to remove objection to end- 
 lessness. Progressive extinction of evil. Practically, 
 " meliorism " the common attitude of neo-idealism, 
 neo-realism, pragmatism, 119-121. Christianity as 
 ethical religion (Gentile) opposed to Greek theory 
 of good. Definite antagonism to any idea of 
 religion as self-realisation by faith in a perfect 
 whole, 1 2 1- 1 24. Urgency of the progressive and 
 ethical claim. Consequent need of discrimination 
 and discussion as between time in the absolute and 
 an absolute in time, 124-126. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Critical Realism and the Theory of the 
 
 Absolute .... 127-149 
 
 How far absolutism and neo-realism agree. Where 
 they part company, 127-128. Critical realism in 
 what sense realism, and how criticises neo-realism 
 — the normal or apparent thing not a self-contained 
 existent. So far at one with absolutism, 129-130. 
 A further point of analogy, severance of what and 
 that. State critical realism in sliding scale, due to 
 trying to live up to its strict doctrine. Existents 
 are one with no essence, nor with physical deter- 
 
CONTENTS xxi 
 
 PAGES 
 
 mination, nor with all essences which characterise 
 the thing, 130-134. Difference from absolutism 
 might seem verbal. Truth cannot include past or 
 existent bodily; is a form into which reality passes, 
 revealing itself in ideas. Question is whether 
 severance of truth from reality is relative (as for 
 absolutism) or absolute (as for critical realism). 
 If latter, no reunion between what and that, 
 134-136. Existent is taken as particular, not as 
 individual. Individuality is above level of physical 
 object and belongs to whole thing. The existent, 
 physical object, cannot be distinguished, on their 
 theory, from Kant's unknowable Ding-an-sich, 
 136-138. It is foreign to apparent thing, con- 
 nected with it by causation, and can have no 
 content, for content belongs to essences not to 
 existent. Full criticism of this type of realism 
 from Husserl ; such an existent would have to be 
 apprehensible, by appearances ad infinitum, could 
 not be cause in normal sense ; is not foreign, but 
 same thing as thing of sense, and merely a higher 
 theoretical account of this — a transcendent of per- 
 ception, but not a transcendent of world of con- 
 sciousness, 138-143. Resulting analogy and differ- 
 ence of view between critical realism and abso- 
 lutism ; truth is for both determination of a real 
 by ideas, but for realism the real is a particular, 
 transcendent of experience, for absolutism a grow- 
 ing whole transcendent of immediacy. Omission 
 of realism to consider the actual object of thought 
 as the real determined by thought, 143-147. 
 Summary, 148-149. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Unity of the Universe, and Religion 150-174 
 
 This chapter to traverse same journey as Chapter VI., 
 
 on the other side of the hedge. 
 Note that relativity does not perhaps establish ultimate 
 
 progressiveness of universe. Compare analogy ot 
 
xxii CONTENTS 
 
 purely personal time-view compared with supposed 
 absolute measurement of time — e.g., clock-time. 
 This latter is universal and serviceable in a sense, 
 but foolish to take it as more real than the 
 personal time-view, or as superseding it in every 
 way. So in the world of relativity. The varying 
 and " relative " time-systems can be correlated, as 
 I gather, in a common world, by certain methods 
 of transformation. But there is no ground for 
 treating their diversity as unreal, or superseded by 
 their reduction to terms of each other, 150-153. 
 The total of connected time-systems are real in- 
 dividual times, and do not form a time — a time of 
 the universe, 153-155. Note on relativity of motion 
 in previous philosophy, and on implication of time 
 with space in popular measures of length, 155-156. 
 Now to estimate the depth of the agreement between 
 neo-idealists and neo-realists in the assertion of real 
 change, and the admission of unity which limits 
 it. Common demand phrased as creative thought, 
 and creative time. But do the thinkers in ques- 
 tion assert this " becoming " of the universe as 
 such — all that is ? Suggest, assertion of unity 
 without universe on one side, and universe 
 without unity on other, 155-159. (a) Unity of 
 events for neo-idealists in oneness of thinking 
 spirit ; nothing transcending this is real, 159-160. 
 Reality is both history and philosophy — experience 
 at its fullest, 1 60- 1 6 1 . What is the " Tutto "? The 
 spirit which is one with the categories whose alter- 
 nation constitutes the advance ; some signs that it 
 transcends human thinking, 161-162. (/8) Note 
 the meagreness of the whole thus indicated and 
 the sides of reality excluded from the system. 
 Thus, for these idealists the unity lies in thinking, 
 but it does not expand into a universe ; everything 
 transcendent of immediacy rejected. Unity is 
 affirmed, not exhibited in differentiation. Result- 
 ing preference of " meliorism " and moralism to 
 rehgious faith, 162-164. 
 
CONTENTS xxiii 
 
 JPAGBS 
 
 Turning to neo-rcalist (a) evolution is rooted'in restless- 
 ness of space-time. Alexander's view of real 
 time ; involves real past, not reverse. Universe 
 conceived as connected in its full differentiation, 
 but without unity of consciousness, though with 
 something analogous to it throughout (as time to 
 space). Note also the special emotion towards the 
 whole, the basis of religion, not recognised in those 
 idealists, and the dream of deity, pervading all 
 phases of progress, 165-167. (fi) How far is 
 unity recognised in these ideas ? Answer clear ; 
 unity is space-time, which is the absolute as the 
 lowest expression of the universe. N.B. — It is not 
 within any further space or time. Still, for us, 
 being brought together in no vvhole of mind, 
 universe has no unity. Alleged particularity of 
 minds. No community of mind between God 
 and man, 167-172. 
 
 Yet (7) meeting of extremes with older idealists in 
 special observation of religious experience. 
 Two concluding chapters will set out for com- 
 parison the attitudes of faith and conduct which 
 belong to the two principal time-views, and 
 attempt to show what the decision is that has to 
 be made, 172-174. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 Unity of the Universe and Change- 175-201 
 
 An attempt to bring to a relevant issue the recognitions 
 of change and unity respectively which have been 
 surveyed. Start from abstract position, and eluci- 
 date by comparison of emotions and responses. 
 Initial criticism of question-begging phrase, " mere 
 coherence," "mere thought," 175-176. 
 Plain principle — the whole, as such, cannot change. 
 For if it seems to, it is less than the whole. 
 Dialectic available against this, to be treated from 
 concrete, to make it clear precisely what our 
 subject-matter is, 176-177. (a) "The whole" is 
 all that is, theatre of all that happens. Must dis- 
 
xxiv CONTENTS 
 
 tinguish movement within it from movement of 
 it — no relevance in terms like totum simul or rigid 
 universe, 177-180, £.^., relation to possibilities. 
 Possibility is partial vifithin real; universe not 
 within a larger universe, like finite things which 
 can have purpose or adjustment to others. Ques- 
 tion is, is it, the whole of what is, engaged in a 
 passage from nature to nature ? . Models 
 
 on which our imagination treats the question, 
 finite beings with " careers." Contrast world of 
 values. Does universe as such " run a course," or 
 reveal an infinite inexhaustible nature ? In 
 "running a course," must constrict itself into a 
 channel, 180-183. (z^) From this standpoint re- 
 survey ideas offered of ultimate reality in evolu- 
 tion. Youthful aspiration of Hegel, typical. 
 Humanism concentrated in religion of humanity. 
 Rejection of other-worldliness and substitution of 
 the human as sole reality — rejection of metaphysic 
 and religion (Croce) ; perfectibility of man, and 
 ethical standpoint, all round philosophical horizon. 
 Gentile, Perry, James, Dewey, ethical societiss. 
 Their failure symptomatic (Alexander). Creative 
 finalism ; relation of teleology to coherence in full 
 sense. Now compare sentence of Hegel with 
 these ideas ; note the mood as outside philosophy. 
 Bradley on the practical region. James. Alex- 
 ander's "in the end," compare the reference to 
 Hegel and note Alexander's teaching on the exist- 
 ence of all that is, 1 8 3- 1 94. 
 Lord Haldane's " Reign of Relativity " in some degree 
 open to analogous observations, though its main 
 principle solid ; comment on. (i) Knowledge as a 
 fact. (2) Watts Cunningham and the objective 
 order ; relation to Green. Error due to Royce ? 
 (3) Perfectibility and progress not the supersession 
 of the illusion (Hegel), but the illusion itself, of 
 which religion is the supersession, 194-200. 
 These attitudes, the purely ethical and the 
 religious, seem to be what most profoundly divide 
 
CONTENTS XXV 
 
 PAGES 
 
 the thinking world to-day. Concluding chapter 
 will attempt to exhibit their fundamental paradox 
 and its solution in terms of ordinary life, 200-201. 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 A Comparison and a Conclusion - 202-217 
 
 Method of setting out in the concrete the attitudes 
 which embody principles. Attempt to carry out 
 in this way a comparison between the moods and 
 ideas we have discussed. The assurance that 
 universe as such is ultimately progressive in time — 
 by what kind of observations it is suggested. 
 Narrowness of the progress alleged. Specific 
 " movements "; course of ideas ; not, what thought 
 requiras. Where ultimate reality lies — in what 
 thought requires ; »»/ = actual thinking. Pro- 
 gressistic attitude neglects universe ; is individu- 
 alistic — ethical attitude. Endless progress cannot 
 be defended qua attainment on ground of approxi- 
 mation. Defectiveness of a progress which is a 
 career of a special group on a special line — hasti- 
 ness of postulates about civilisation, happiness, 
 culture ; contrast with large revelation of spiritual 
 meaning, 202-209. Bradley on humanism, 208. 
 Reasonable ideas of progress, retaining doctrine 
 of reality of time ; rejection of anthropocen- 
 tric position ; man learning from universe, not 
 " mastering nature." Succession of events ad 
 infinitum as character of finite existence, common 
 ground to all doctrines ; question is what it 
 implies, 209-2 1 1 . Now start from opposite view 
 — viz., that change is not ultimate in the whole. 
 Expectation would be the same as regards series of 
 events as a fact, depending on nature of finite. 
 But would lay less stress on outstripping past, as if 
 the gain were to leave it behind. All determinate 
 advance would be seen to involve loss, and all 
 past to be full of indications of perfect whole 
 uttering itself in finite. The whole as a whole 
 
xxvi CONTENTS 
 
 PAGES 
 
 must be beyond the series of changes, though 
 revealing itself in it, 211-Z13. These would be 
 the opposing attitudes natural to the respective be- 
 liefs, but would not amount to philosophical proof 
 of either, 213-214. But the moral and religious 
 tempers which underlie such attitudes, do rest on 
 principles of different value. Moral point of view 
 self-contradictory and cannot be final, and in ex- 
 perience is not taken so. It belongs to the general 
 mood which we saw that it accompanies ; and 
 shares its defect in taking the temporal series as 
 ultimate reality, and so throwing man's perfecti- 
 bility within this, 214-215. The religious point 
 of view makes it possible to express the individual's 
 effort in the only form open to it — viz., in finite 
 attainment within the existent series, and yet also 
 for the individual to unite himself with perfection 
 by faith and will, in the infinite whole which 
 finite attainment partially expresses through sub- 
 ordinate change. The universe so conceived does 
 not itself move from itself in a course of time and 
 change, 216-217. 
 
 Index - . . . 218-220 
 
SOME ABBREVIATIONS IN 
 REFERENCES 
 
 Alexander : " Space, Time, and Deity " 
 (The Gifford Lectures at Glas- 
 gow, 1916-18) ... ... ... "Space,etc." 
 
 BosANQUET : " The Principle of In- 
 dividuality and Value " ... "Principle." 
 
 " Value and Destiny of the In- 
 dividual" "Value." 
 
 " Logic, or the Morphology of 
 
 Knowledge " (ed. 2) "Logic." 
 
 " Implication and Linear Influ- 
 ence" ... ... ... ... "Implication." 
 
 Bradley: "Appearance and Reality" 
 
 (ed. 2) ... ... ... ... "Appearance." 
 
 "Essays on Truth and Reality" ... "Essays," 
 
 Crock (Benedetto) : " Filosofia dello 
 Spirito "— 
 " Esteticacome Scienza dell' Espres- 
 
 sione e Linguistica Generale" ... "Estetica." 
 "Filosofia della Pratica" (Econo- 
 
 mica ed Etica) ... ... ... "Pratica." 
 
 " Teoria e Storia della Storio- 
 
 grafia" ... ... ... ... " Teoria e Storia." 
 
 xxvii 
 
xxviii SOME ABBREVIATIONS 
 
 Gentile (Giovanni) : " La Riforma della 
 
 Dialettica Hegeliana " "Riforma." 
 
 " Teoria Generale dello Spirito 
 
 come Atto Puro " "Spirito." 
 
 " Discorsi di Religione " "Discorsi." 
 
 Haldane (Viscount) : " The Reign of 
 
 Relativity" "Relativity." 
 
 HoERNLi : " Studies in Contemporary 
 
 Metaphysics" Hoernle. 
 
 Holt and Others : "The New Realism : 
 
 Co-operative Studies in Philo- 
 sophy"... ... ... ... " New Realism." 
 
 HussERL (Edmund) w^ith Others : 
 
 Jahrbuch fiir Philosophie und 
 
 Phanomenobgische Forschung, 1 9 1 3 Jahrbuch, 1 9 1 3 , 
 "Logische Untersuchungen," 
 
 Band IL, Teil ii " Log. Unters." 
 
 Janet (P.) : " Dieu, I'homme et la beati- 
 tude" [tr. from Spinoza] ... Janet. 
 
 Joachim : "A Study of the Ethics of 
 
 Spinoza" ... ... ... Joachim. 
 
 Van Vloten and Land's edition of 
 
 Spinoza's works ... ... V. VI. and L, 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 MIND AND ITS OBJECTS 
 
 I WILL not begin my discussion with that most 
 striking antithesis and identity to which I referred 
 in the Preface — namely, the main relation between 
 the neo-realists, and, as I will venture to call them, 
 the neo-idealists, consisting in their doctrines of 
 time and progress as ultimate reality. For this 
 remarkable agreement involves one entire philo- 
 sophical position of to-day, and it will better be 
 approached when we come to deal in conclusion 
 with the total issues of life and value. 
 
 In the present chapter, then, we will consider 
 some kindred points of view which, without uniting 
 extreme antagonists in absolutely identical posi- 
 tions, nevertheless analyse away, in many degrees 
 and directions, the apparently solid differences 
 between them. 
 
 I. And in the first place, while it is true that 
 the "modern" or " neo "-idealist .insists upon 
 thought — actual thinking — as the creator, 
 condition, and only genuine type, of reality, it is 
 to be borne in mind that there is another idealism, 
 or at any rate a philosophical position, which 
 might equally well claim the title of speculative 
 philosophy, and which, rejected by the neo-idealist, 
 
2 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 might well appeal for support to the neo-realist. 
 Thought, it is aware, is not a matter of reproducing 
 a transcendent world^a block universe — fixed in 
 itself as an object without life or activity, _ It 
 considers the operation of thinking, not as copying 
 a given model, but as coherent construction. 
 Nevertheless it is not to be persuaded that the 
 great life and spectacle of the universe can be 
 represented either as a product of discursive 
 thinking, or as reaching its completeness and 
 culmination in anything which can reasonably be 
 described by that analogy — for example, in the 
 philosophical consciousness. Such a speculative 
 philosophy welcomes the neo-realist's assertion 
 that the world of sense-perception has being in its 
 own right, and that the splendours and values 
 which we seem to contemplate directly are appre- 
 hended by us as they truly are. That philosophy 
 does not volatilise, so to speak, our world of fact 
 and externality, but accepting for it all that it 
 claims of existence and reality, then passes on to 
 interpret its conditions, and assign its significance 
 more profoundly, I hold to be the eternal 
 lesson of thinkers like Plato and Hegel; and in 
 recent thought it was certainly the fundamental 
 position of T. H. Green. To make more of 
 experience, and not less, is their unceasing effort 
 and uninterrupted aspiration. The body of reality 
 is not a dead transcendent block, limited once 
 and for all, because it is beyond the immediacy of 
 our mental life. Our mental life is prima facie a 
 feeble and isolated thing until it has learned in 
 some degree to draw force and volume from the 
 
I] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 3 
 
 real which is in nature and in the world — in all 
 the great fortns of experience. It is only as you 
 build up experience in all its richness of detail 
 that you can begin to approach the real whole or 
 the completer mind which this kind of 'idealism 
 aspires to apprehend. Tou do not make the 
 world ; it communicates your nature to you, 
 thdugh in receiving this you are an active organ 
 of the' world itself. Everyone who is inspired by 
 love of nature and the yearning for a full ex- 
 perience must turn with relief, I think, from the 
 neo-idealist to the neo-realist, or to the more 
 robust idealist of an older date. He instinctively 
 recoils from the tendency to reduce all forms 
 of experience to any single one of its types or 
 kinds. 
 
 I take as a notable illustration Dr. Moore's 
 well-known " Refutation of Idealism " {Mindy 
 1903). This, as I read it, is to be welcomed 
 from the standpoint of speculative philosophy in 
 two respects at least : (i.) The implication, as 
 I understand it, on the first half-page, that the 
 Idealist is in the wrong if he maintains that 
 particular things in space are in themselves alto- 
 gether different from what they look like to us 
 (except in the sense of the strictly continuous and 
 additional determinations proffered by physical 
 science). Here I take Dr. Moore to be with 
 Plato and Hegel, and, to go to their minor 
 successors, with T. H. Green and, say, Nettleship. 
 It is hardly fair to attempt to answer for a living 
 writer, but I should have thought Mr. Bradley 
 would condemn any departure from this attitude 
 
4 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 as a misuse and misconception of the doctrine 
 of " relativity " in its older sense. " If the reader 
 believes that a steam-engine, after it is made, is 
 nothing but a state of the mind of the person 
 or persons who made it, or who are looking at it, 
 we do not hold what we feel tempted to call such 
 a silly doctrine, and would point out to those who 
 do hold it that, at all events, the engine is a very 
 different state of mind, after it is made, to what it 
 is before." And in the footnote, "We may remark 
 that the ordinary philosophical person, who talks 
 about ' relativity ' [In the older sense, of course], 
 does not seem to know what he is saying. He 
 will tell you that ' all ' (or ' all we know and can 
 know ' — there is no practical difference between 
 that and ' all ') is relative to consciousness, not 
 giving you to understand that he means thereby 
 any consciousness beside his own, and ready, t 
 should imagine, with his grin at the notion of a 
 mind which is anything more than the mind of 
 this or that man ; and then, It may be, a few 
 pages farther on or farther back, will talk to you 
 of the state of the earth before man existed on it. 
 But we wish to know what in the world it all means, 
 and would suggest, as a method of clearing the 
 matter, the two questions: (i) Is my conscious- 
 ness something that goes and Is beyond myself; 
 and if so, in what sense ? and (2) Had I a father.? 
 What do I mean by that, and how do I reconcile 
 my assertion of it with my answer to question (i) .?"1 
 The tone of this passage is what strikes me as so 
 suggestive. Obviously it never occurred to the 
 
 ' "Ethical Studies," p. 61 and note. 
 
I] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 5 
 
 writer that the chair would be more spiritual if it 
 were not a chair. Certainly for myself, if an 
 idealist were to tell me that a chair is really not 
 what we commonly take it to be, but something 
 altogether different (unless he meant " a dance of 
 electrons " or the like), I should be tempted to 
 reply in language below the dignity of controversy. 
 The position in question — Hegel's and Green's 
 — is, I should say, that a chair is a chair right 
 enough; that is, that what an upholsterer or 
 anyone in a drawing-room would tell you about it 
 is quite a true description. But when you come 
 to ask further questions, there is much more to : 
 be said, and these questions the upholsterer has 
 never raised, and, as such, can never raise. Here 
 the physicist's standpoint may fairly be used as 
 an illustration. It is ridiculous to say that it 
 contradicts what the chairmaker says, any more 
 than an economist's view of a sovereign con- 
 tradicts a metallurgist's. Take Professor White- 
 head's " Concept of Nature " with its account 
 of the situation of an object.^ Does it mean 
 that I am wrong in thinking that I am sitting 
 on my chair ? Of course, if Dr. Moore's 
 implication is the opposite — viz., that in main- 
 taining the spirituality of the universe, the \ 
 idealist both does and must maintain that we 
 are wholly wrong in our common notion of a 
 chair, then I must think that he has misunder- 
 stood the facts necessary to idealism, and so , 
 far has failed to bring assistance to speculative 
 philosophy. 
 
 1 Pp. 146, 190. 
 
6 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 And (ii.) I believe he does well in insisting on 
 the distinctness and objectivity of sensa, whatever 
 may be the precise conditions of their being. 
 The point for philosophy seems to me to be that 
 anyhow they are not nothing, and I agree with 
 Professor Whitehead's observation that "it 
 seems an extremely unfortunate arrangement that 
 we should perceive a lot of things that are not 
 there "^ (secondary qualities). The idea that 
 things are somehow volatilised or made " sub- 
 jective" or non-existent, if to, say, one hundred 
 accepted conditions of their being you add a 
 couple more, making a hundred and two, is one 
 which must obstruct all sane philosophy until the 
 neo-realists have taught us to dismiss it as 
 absurd. But indeed I understand Professor 
 Whitehead to accept the percipient event as one 
 of the hundred. 
 
 Otherwise I confess Dr. Moore's argument 
 seems to me in the main merely formal and even 
 verbal. From the presence of any common point 
 in two different things he seems to argue that 
 each of the things consists of at least two elements 
 no less distinct and unconnected than two qualities 
 belonging to disparate series ("green" and "sweet," 
 p. 444). Surely there never was such a hiatus in 
 a serious argument. However, that is not my 
 present point, and the contribution to philosophy 
 stands fast independently. 
 
 This is our first case then. The speculative 
 philosopher recognises as a comrade in speculative 
 
 ' "Concept of Nature," p. 27. 
 
I] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 7 
 
 philosophy the neo-realist who demands a place 
 and being and value, distinct whether isolable or 
 no, for all that sense-perception has to give us. 
 The question of production as against discovery, 
 we shall see, is neither here nor there in the, 
 problem of existence and reality. . The product 
 is as inherently necessary to the producer as the 
 producer to the product, and as the created to 
 the creator. If it is a mind and eye that say " red " 
 under certain conditions, that makes no difference 
 to the reality of red, and only a partial difference 
 to the generality of its existence ; for the con- 
 nection after all is general or natural, and not 
 personal.^ 
 
 Of course, when we come to speak of the 
 unity of the universe, we may find one detailed 
 view more suggestive than another. But what- 
 ever are our views in detail, it is much to have 
 learnt that every experience is to have its rights 
 if we mean to be serious with speculative philo- 
 sophy. 
 
 2. The idea of a general or universal character 
 in mind or minds has usually marked a boundary 
 between realism and Idealism. The general will, 
 for instance, seems nonsense to Professor Alex- 
 ander, who still rejects a general mind totidem 
 verbis from his realistic point of view,^ though 
 finding room for a collective mind, and attaching 
 indeed fundamental importance to it. But when 
 
 1 Stout, "GifFord Lectures," Syllabus II., p. 4. Cf. White- 
 head's "percipient event." 
 
 2 " Space, Time, and Deity," II., 241, 351-2. 
 
8 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 we look closer at neo-realist and analogous con- 
 tentions, we find the opposition undermined. 
 
 To begin with, if sensa can exist apart from 
 sense or thought, it is obvious that here at once 
 we have a common element ready to hand for 
 minds. The sensa are there, the same for you as 
 for me — a postulate which is as necessary to the 
 idealist as to the realist — and in as far as we 
 apprehend them, these are common elements 
 before our minds, if not constituting them. This 
 postulate of a common world, indeed, is a postu- 
 late in which realistic common sense, as we shall 
 see, seems led by the suggestions of necessity to 
 anticipate the most ultimate demands of reason. 
 Obviously, it is an idealistic position in advance 
 of anything which mere mentalism can offer. In 
 the familiar recent doctrines of a world which 
 is common through the social need and contact, 
 which latter is a criterion if not the criterion of 
 truth and reality,^ we have this universality of 
 mind drawn out and insisted on to-day, especially 
 by the realist and his ally the behaviourist and 
 cross-sectionist.^ We gasp when we come upon 
 a realist argument that mind is nothing but the 
 objects that enter into it. h good scientific law, 
 we are accustomed to think, is convertible, and if 
 we apply the rule in this case, where have we 
 landed .'' But anyhow, the social criterion of 
 reality is as familiar in Royce and Gentile as in 
 Perry, Holt, and Alexander. I cite also an inter- 
 
 ^ Cf. Alexander, op. cit., II. 303. 
 
 2 Alexander on Holt, II. 109. Cf. Proc. Brit. Academy, 
 1913-14, p. 290. 
 
I] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 9 
 
 esting statement of it from another point of view :' 
 " I have sometimes sat looking at a comrade, 
 speculating on this mysterious isolation of self 
 from self. Why are we so made that I gaze and 
 see of thee only thy wall, and never thee ? This 
 wall of thee is but a movable part of the wall 
 of my world ; and I also am a wall to thee. 
 We look out at one another from behind masks. 
 How would it seem if my mind could but once 
 be within thine, and we could meet and without 
 barrier be with each other? And then it has 
 fallen upon me with a shock — as when one think- 
 ing himself alone has felt a presence — that I am 
 in thy soul. These things around me are in thy 
 experience. They are thy own ; when I touch 
 them and move them I change thee. When I 
 look on them, I see what thou seest, and I ex- 
 perience thy very experience. For where art 
 thou ? Not there, behind those eyes, within that 
 head, in darkness, fraternising with chemical 
 processes. Of these, in my own case, I know 
 nothing and will know nothing ; for my existence 
 is spent not behind my wall, but in front of it. . , . 
 And there art thou also. This world in which 
 I live is the world of thy soul ; and being within 
 that, I am within thee. I can imagine no contact 
 more real and thrilling than this ; that we should 
 meet and share identity, not through ineffable 
 inner depths (alone), but here through the fore- 
 grounds of common experience, and that thou 
 
 * From Hocking's " The Meaning of God in Human 
 Experience," p. 265 (borrowed by me from Hoernle's 
 "Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics," p. 229). 
 
10 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 shouldest be — not behind that mask — but here, 
 pressing with all thy consciousness upon me, con- 
 taining me, and these things of mine. This is 
 reality, and having seen it thus, I can never again 
 be frighteneci into monadism by reflections which 
 have strayed from this guiding insight." 
 
 On the other hand, again, take the neo-realist's 
 full contention that sensa can exist without a 
 percipient or thinking mind, and are not " mental," 
 but "material," or physical. Here is a difficulty, 
 as before an advantage, shared with mentalism. 
 In the free appreciative handling of data which 
 prevails to-day, it seems not to matter so much 
 how you class things, or how they are produced, 
 as what they are like in themselves, and how they 
 can be got to behave. For the purposes of science 
 you want a world of physical objects, and mental- 
 ism as such, it is true, with difficulty gives you 
 one. But is realism which takes sensa as its 
 reals in any better case .'' You have here to meet 
 the arguments of the critical realist,^ and the sensa 
 seem to fail you as material for a physical world ; 
 and, indeed, their self-existence is a very partial 
 and doubtful tenet of the neo-realist himself.^ It 
 seems necessary for any speculative philosophy to 
 insist on the continuity of the sensum with the 
 world of physical objects, which, I take it, the 
 neo-realist means to imply while presenting no 
 
 ' " Essays in Critical Realism," and Professor Sellars' 
 "Critical Realism." Stout, Syllabus II. 2-3. 
 
 ^ If, at least, Mr. Russell still counts as one. Note, also, 
 Professor Perry's conditional attitude, " The New Realism," 
 pp. 13 s, 150. 
 
I] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY ii 
 
 adequate rationale of it.^ Here we seem to have 
 the claims of the physical order better met by 
 those who insist ab initio on the unity of the 
 world for thought,^ than by the advocates of self- 
 existent sensa. The fact is, what we need for a 
 full philosophy is to avoid the mania for reducing 
 experience to a single typical form ; and here the 
 term " speculative philosopher " seems so far to fit 
 the neo-realist by reason of his primary free 
 acceptance of everything that comes — if only he 
 keeps it in its place,^ and does not compress the 
 properties into a compactness which involves 
 incompatibility. 
 
 3. There are three points at least which remark- 
 ably illustrate the contamination of nature by 
 mind, and which are revealed by the realistic 
 enquiries summed up under the general head of 
 relativity. I believe that besides the higher 'in- 
 struction which this doctrine carries for those who, 
 unlike myself, can follow its mathematical con- 
 sequences, it has in general, and interpreted by a 
 very simple and elementary analogy, a consider- 
 able importance for metaphysics. I shall return 
 later to the analogy. At the present moment I 
 wish to illustrate the effect which, though a purely 
 empirical enquiry, it has produced in contaminating 
 nature with mind. 
 
 The three points which, greatly daring, I borrow 
 
 ' Cf. Stout, Syllabus II., p. i. See below on "Critical 
 Realism." 
 
 ^ Cf. Stout, ibid. 
 
 ^ To talk of a " world " of sense data is at once a theory ; 
 but it needs drawing out. Cf. Holt in " The New Realism," 
 p. 372. Hoernle, op. cit,, p. 77. 
 
12 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 from what little I can grasp of Professor White- 
 head's " Concept of Nature," are — (i.) the moral 
 of bifurcation ; (ii.) the need or convenience of 
 assuming observers in "time-systems"; (iii.) the 
 situation of objects. 
 
 (i.) It is of course an obvious remark that "the 
 physicist's actual procedure cuts across and ignores 
 all classificatory boundary-lines dividing the 
 supposedly physical from the supposedly mental."^ 
 Colours and sounds are taken not as " sensations " 
 or "ideas," but zs phenomena. So far as I under- 
 stand, I gather that this is the attitude embodied 
 in Professor Whitehead's criticism of the " bifur- 
 cation " of nature. And I take it that for the 
 philosophy of science it is absolutely sound. In 
 adopting it, the author tells us exactly what he is 
 doing, and at what point the philosopher begins 
 to get excited about something else beyond the 
 limits which the author has just laid down. For 
 the author does not mean to say anything " as to 
 the psychological relation of subjects to objects, or 
 as to the status of either in the realm of reality." ^ 
 
 So far, so good. But I think we can be doing 
 no wrong if, at our own risk and for our own 
 purpose, we try to say a word or two more. 
 
 We have been told what the author's discussion 
 contemplates. There are certain normal objects 
 which are included, and are to be considered, 
 within the pale of nature — that is to say, within the 
 pale of what is accessible to sense-perception. 
 Now we seem, in restricting with the author our 
 
 ' Hoernle, p. io6. 
 
 ^ " Concept of Nature," p. 47. 
 
I] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 13 
 
 discussion to this province, to be considering what 
 we might call a statutory nature, like the statutory- 
 income on which we have learnt to pay our income- 
 tax ; not on all that comes to us, as it comes, but 
 on an amount determined according to rule by 
 what it is convenient for general purposes to take 
 account of. To draw the line in this way is 
 artificial. The contamination of nature by mind 
 would not in a complete consideration arrest itself 
 at the boundary where our statutory attention 
 would be arrested. We should meet with dis- 
 turbing factors in mind^ and further-reaching 
 considerations in the system of reality, and should 
 be carried into a metaphysical valuation. 
 
 The moral of bifurcation, or of the rejection of 
 bifurcation, would then, for our purpose, be this : 
 we have delineated as nature a solid province of 
 coherent fact in which sensa and physical condi- 
 tions are equally good phenomena. We are right 
 — we are compelled by logic — in working under 
 this scheme, not to go back upon it. We cannot 
 have it two ways. All the same, it tells us for 
 certain that we cannot find a nature which is not 
 mixed with mind. The sensa may exist per se, 
 but we cannot get them so. They are in every 
 case abstractions out of the fuller wholes — even if 
 mere cross-sections of the world of objects — which 
 we call minds, and they are open to influences 
 which our statutory nature cannot include. 
 
 It makes little ultimate difference whether we 
 treat mind as creative, with the " modern " 
 idealist, or as actively receptive, with the normal 
 1 E.g., in apperception. 
 
14 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 logician, or as purely selective, with such a realist 
 as Professor Alexander. Whatever line you take, 
 you are driven to explain the appearances of 
 things by some sort of relativity to mind. And 
 our humble moral is merely this, that this elemen- 
 tary platitude of normal philosophy, this position 
 which gives rise to the extremist creationism of 
 the newest and most audacious " idealism," is 
 enforced upon us in the case we are considering 
 by the most intimate, analytic, and appreciative 
 study of the plain natural facts from the bare 
 point of view which considers how in their fulness 
 and concreteness they are given in actual experi- 
 ence. So fully is this the case that the " idealist " 
 might at once deny ab initio Dr. Moore's first 
 half-page, and might say that he himself alone 
 is taking the world as he finds it, and as it 
 seems. 
 
 (ii.) I do not profess to know whether it is more 
 than an illustration when the relation of time 
 systems to one another is elucidated by the postu- 
 latlon of an observer at rest in the space system 
 belonging to each. I quote the passage I have In 
 mind, deserving to be known, and no doubt, in 
 fact, widely familiar, for the simplicity with which 
 It explains a fundamental Idea : 
 
 " If there is no absolute position, a point must 
 cease to be a simple entity. What is a point to 
 one man In a balloon with his eyes fixed on an 
 Instrument, is a track of points to an observer on 
 the earth who is watching the balloon through a 
 telescope ; and Is another track of points to an 
 observer In the sun who Is watching the balloon 
 
I] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 15 
 
 through some instrument suited to such a being. 
 ... I have at least explained exactly what I do 
 mean by a point, what relations it involves, and 
 what entities are the relata."^ 
 
 It seems clear to me that in this explanation the 
 three observers are exceedingly convenient ; but I 
 do not know whether we are to take them as neces- 
 sary. I should have imagined — again wholly meo 
 periculo — that the features of relativity, which can 
 be generally described, as they are described in the 
 passage before us, on the basis of certain hypotheti- 
 cal systems, would equally exist in actual systems in 
 the absence of these resident observers, so to 
 speak, and that therefore the relations of points 
 and point -tracks in different systems to one 
 another could in principle and in theory be known 
 and expressed by any single observing and cal- 
 culating mind apart from their appreciation by 
 observing minds in the systems, each to each. 
 The vision would be one of bewildering complex- 
 ity, but I cannot understand" that it would be 
 theoretically inconceivable. Whether there could 
 be a universe at all without a mind is not the 
 question here. It is whether there could be 
 relativity without a mind in every system. If so, 
 it cannot be argued that the demonstration of 
 relativity has at this point carried farther on a 
 realistic basis the contamination of nature by 
 mind. But it is clear that something of the 
 kind is strongly suggested and is highly appro- 
 priate in elucidation of the principle. It is very 
 difficult, I imagine, to obtain the essential quasi- 
 1 " Concept of Nature," p. 135. 
 
1 6 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 absolute rest-points except by the contrivance of 
 locating an observer in each. But, in principle, 
 I should have thought it is enough to conceive 
 one. Therefore the moral of relativity is not, if 
 1 am right, the permeation of the universe by 
 mind^ or minds, but only a strong suggestion 
 in that direction. 
 
 (iii.) As leading up to a further suggestion, I 
 cite a most significant passage : 
 
 " The explanation of nature which I urge as an 
 alternative to this (of nature as ' a mere aggregate 
 of independent entities, each capable of isolation ') 
 is that nothing in nature could be what it is except 
 as an ingredient In nature as It is. The whole 
 which is present for discrimination is posited in 
 sense-awareness as necessary for the discriminated 
 parts. An isolated event is not an event, because 
 every event is a factor in a larger whole and is 
 significant of that whole. There can be no time 
 apart from space ; and no space apart from time ; 
 and no space and no time apart from the passage 
 of the events of nature. The Isolation of an 
 entity in thought, when we think of it as a bare 
 ' It,' has no counterpart in any corresponding 
 isolation in nature." Here, in the most concrete 
 of realisms (whether or no the author calls him- 
 self a realist), we find implied the central principle 
 that " the truth is, the whole " which reunites in 
 some degree all thinkers who in any way claim to 
 be philosophers. We have to remember, also, 
 what will be insisted upon more fully below, how, 
 for Professor Alexander at least, the recognition 
 
 ' Contrast Carr, " Relativity," chap. viii. 
 
I] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 17 
 
 of time as inherent in space and in nature is in 
 itself an avowal of something necessary to being 
 which bears an analogy to mind. Here the 
 realist has hold of a clue which carries him into 
 sympathy with Bergson and the modern idealist. 
 Whether they make the completest use of this 
 feature in which their philosophies participate is a 
 question we shall have to face in our conclusion. 
 
 In the meantime, I develop the recognition of 
 "the whole " with reference to the attitude com- 
 mon to Professor Whitehead, and, say. Professor 
 Holt, with regard to the situation of objects. 
 
 Anyone who had ever considered appreciatively 
 Plato's treatment of conflicting perceptive judg- 
 ments of magnitude and of the reconciliation of 
 contradictions must have been led to the view 
 that a " thing " in its completeness must include 
 all its conditional appearances. Among other 
 results, this leads to a difficulty in pronouncing 
 where in space the thing is situated. - 
 
 " It is seldom possible to say just where the 
 object itself terminates and its relations to other 
 entities commence."^ So Professor Whitehead^ : 
 " Science and philosophy have been apt to en- 
 tangle themselves in a simple-minded theory that 
 an object is at one place at any definite time, and 
 is in no sense anywhere else."^ "This admis- 
 sion," he continues (viz., the admission " that 
 each object is in some sense ingredient throughout 
 
 1 Holt in « New Realism," p. 371, 
 
 ^ " Concept of Nature," p. 145. 
 
 ^ Carlyle's famous words, however, cannot yet be forgotten : 
 " Nothing can act except where it is ; with all my heart, 
 only, where is it ?" 
 
i8 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 nature "), " is obviously a necessary axiom for 
 those philosophers who insist that reality is a 
 system. I am maintaining the humbler thesis that 
 nature is a system." We enjoy here the result 
 of a direct and impartial study of experience, 
 which carries us forward towards the unity of the 
 universe. A fuller statement follows : 
 
 " In truth, the object in its completeness may 
 be conceived as a specific set of correlated modifi- 
 cations of the characters of all events, with the 
 property that these modifications attain to a certain 
 focal property for those events which belong to 
 the stream of its situations. The total assemblage 
 of the modifications of the characters of events due 
 to the existence of an object in a stream of situ- 
 ations is what I call the ' physical field ' due to 
 the object. But the object cannot really be 
 separated from its field. The object is, in fact, 
 nothing else than the systematically adjusted set 
 of modifications of the field. The conventional 
 limitation of the object to the focal stream of 
 events in which it is said to be ' situated ' is con- 
 venient for some purposes, but it obscures the 
 ultimate fact of nature."^ 
 
 To my mind, there is a philosophical moral in 
 all this, just as there was in the features noted 
 before. When a really instructed and appreciative 
 gaze is turned even on a limited province of the 
 world, it reveals in the experience submitted to it 
 the character which is found there by philosophers 
 of genius like William James and Mr. Bradley. 
 Isolations and abstractions are provisional ; " there 
 '^ " Concept of Nature," p. 190. 
 
i] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 19 
 
 are no lines in nature," as a great artist said. 
 What you have is an immediate and continuous ' 
 unity, in which your reflection can find order, but 
 cannot find separation. A "thing" has to be) 
 grasped like a theory ; you cannot handle it like 
 a brickbat ;^ you cannot make it up as a whole by 
 putting its appearances together, for every appear- 
 ance involves a correlative condition, and most of 
 the conditions are incompatible with each other. 
 All this a thorough realism gives us to-day. We 
 wish we could live to see in what central results 
 these convergent influences will in the future 
 combine. 
 
 4. Perhaps there is no question on which the 
 various aspects of speculative philosophy are more 
 remarkably distributed among the philosophical 
 groups of to-day than the question of the being 
 and structure of the mind. Psychology without a 
 soul, it has been said, has long been familiar ; but 
 now we seem to be confronted by psychology 
 without a consciousness.^ As we all know, the 
 question has been propounded, " Does conscious- 
 ness exist .''" Now in this line of enquiry, as we 
 have partly seen already, neo-realism and radical 
 empiricism are singularly bold. And yet in their 
 boldness they are pursuing a course largely akin 
 to Aristotle's conceptions,^ and also to the main 
 track of post-Kantian idealism, and, as I 
 understand it, to the self-creative thinking of 
 
 ' Holt, /oc. at. ^ Hoernle, p. 237. 
 
 ^ Hoernle, /oc. cit. Aristotle, Professor Hoernle points out, 
 has a behaviourist side. But we noted above that if you 
 convert the cross-sectionist proposition you get a startling 
 opposite extreme. 
 
20 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 the recent Italian group. In the beginning, if 
 not in the end, there is a close analogy between 
 immediate experience as construed by Mr. Bradley 
 and by William James ; and for both of them, as 
 for the main post-Kantian philosophy, the mind 
 is just what it experiences and what it does. 
 Behaviourism and the searchlight and cross- 
 sectionist doctrines are welcome accentuations and 
 illustrations of such ideas as these, and emanate 
 from the extreme neo-realist group ; to whose 
 free and audacious handling of direct inspection — 
 I do not say introspection — speculative philosophy 
 appears to me greatly indebted. 
 
 And what is the " subject " of which we read 
 so much in Gentile — the subject which can never 
 be an object, according to that philosopher's 
 doctrine, which has been impeached as denying 
 to the mind all knowledge of its own contents, 
 and therefore involving a complete Agnos- 
 ticism ?^ 
 
 So far as I can see, it is nothing more and 
 nothing other than thought as occupied in think- 
 ing. It is that activity in which mind, so far as 
 at any moment it can reach and penetrate, makes 
 itself one with the whole life of reality, and 
 affirms, in form and intention, that all existence 
 enters into and sustains its decree. The de facto 
 imperfection of the activity makes no difference. 
 The point is that the thinking function unites 
 itself with whatever range of experience at the 
 moment serves for it to represent the whole, in 
 the presence of which thought always lives, and 
 *■ Bonucci, Rivista Trimestrak, I. z. 156. 
 
I] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 21 
 
 the chaf"acterisation of which it always presumes 
 itself to achieve. 
 
 There are three parallel doctrines which may 
 be mentioned as illustrating this conception in 
 different quarters of the philosophical world. 
 
 (i.) The one most simply and closely akin to it, 
 as I imagine, is that which insists that you cannot 
 criticise the judgment you are in the act of pass- 
 ing.-^ You can make it in turn an object, and pass 
 upon it a further judgment; but while you judge 
 it (cognate accusative), and in judging it, your 
 activity is completely absorbed; it is one and 
 indivisible, and you must take yourself, as in that 
 activity, to be infallible and beyond review. The 
 judgment of which you make an object is no 
 longer a judgment whole and entire ; it has 
 acquired some prefix, such as "that," and' has 
 become a subordinate or dependent factor as dis- 
 tinguished from a complete or categorical thought. 
 This is the view of the wider speculative philo- 
 sophy, and I do not believe .that either more than 
 this or less can be meant by Gentile's "subject," 
 which is one with the activity of the transcen- 
 dental ego — the operator in constructive and 
 universal thinking as such — which is something 
 which can never, by any possibility, itself be con- 
 templated as an object. 
 
 If I am right, here again, in the camp where 
 mind is absolutely everything, where there is no 
 reality but thinking makes it so, just for this 
 reason we find no structure assigned to- the par- 
 ticular individual or substantive mind, and it 
 
 1 Bradley, "Essays," p. 381. 
 
22 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 seems to take its place just as an activity of the 
 real, which is while and what it does, but reposes, 
 so to speak, nowhere and on nothing. Naturally 
 enough, for Gentile at least, it is credited with no 
 continuity after death in respect of the empirical 
 individual ; and here, vie shall see directly, the 
 speculative philosopher of extreme idealism con- 
 curs with the most prominent thinker who stands 
 on the ground of realism. 
 
 (ii.) I need not spend many words in referring 
 to a doctrine of the judgment which has been 
 specially affirmed by the present writer. It is 
 here only in point as illustrating and confirming 
 the ultimately categorical nature, excluding all 
 reserve and all self-criticism, with which the 
 judging consciousness sustains its world. 
 
 The waking mind, he has maintained, con- 
 sidered in its logical activity — that is, as thought — 
 is a total and continuous judgment, which sustains 
 by affirmation the world of reality. You cannot 
 open your eyes or attend to any sense-perception 
 or any fact of experience without insisting on 
 some "judgment" which is really a fragment of 
 the one all-inclusive judgment. Its connection 
 with all factors of the comprehensive judgment, 
 although in various degrees implicit, is on examina- 
 tion inevitable and unmistakable. You in London 
 can draw no line in respect of necessity between 
 the thought of Edinburgh and the thought of the 
 Antipodes, any more than you can draw a line 
 between your affirmation of the floor which you 
 see before you and the floor a foot behind your 
 chair. The floor may have a trap-door behind 
 
I] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 23 
 
 you. No matter. No one could say that all 
 your judged inferences are right ; only that, for 
 you, they are inevitable. There are all sorts 
 of subordinate qualifications, reservations, and 
 conditions recognised by tacit or intentional ab- 
 straction within the total affirmation. But all 
 that is an object of thought is ultimately a con- 
 stituent of it, and there are no imaginary entities 
 or floating ideas ultimately isolable from the tissue 
 of the inclusive judgment. 
 
 Here, then, in experience, as, by its nisus which 
 is thought, it recognises the unity of the world, 
 we once more have the self-assertion of the true 
 subject, experience within a certain focus transcend- 
 ing itself in identification with the whole. We 
 need no original pure subject, nor any acts dis- 
 tinctive of a being or substance to be considered 
 as the mind. The subject is the focus which 
 transcends its own immediacy by its inherent 
 identification with the whole, inherent because 
 this is what thought means and consists in. 
 
 (iii.) For the side of speculative philosophy 
 which demands a substantial individual mind, we 
 have to seek a certain type of realist. But my 
 point at the present moment is a minor one ; not 
 to accent his assertion of the substantive mind- 
 structure, but to note that even where that is 
 asserted we find a peculiar and I think a felicit- 
 ously expressed doctrine, which in effect has much 
 in common with the neo-idealist conception of 
 the subject which we have just been consider- 
 ing. I am speaking of Professor Alexander's 
 distinction between enjoyment and contemplation. 
 
U ^THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 The idea is familiar to-day, and I need hardly 
 describe it de novo. For my present purpose the 
 point of it is this : Although the mind is a sub- 
 stance, or at least an individual being of definite 
 constitution, it cannot be made an object to itself 
 in an act of cognition. The reservation har- 
 monises with the very definiteness — some would 
 call it crudity — with which the mind as one thing 
 apart is contrasted with its objects as in external 
 relation with them. The mind, then, in acting — 
 say, in apprehending — is aware of itself, but is not 
 before itself as an object. This awareness, the 
 sense of living in a volition or apprehension, of 
 being engaged in an experience, is what the realist 
 before us calls " enjoyment." We experience our 
 living and endeavouring, but only In a peculiar 
 way, and introspection, as I understand, is only 
 possible as a somewhat more attentive species of 
 enjoyment. 
 
 Here, as I understand the matter. Professor 
 Alexander is so far at one with theorists as much 
 opposed to him as Mr. Bradley and Professor 
 Taylor.^ It is common ground that you cannot 
 get out the contents of the mind and lay it before 
 itself to be looked at. And further, if you are in 
 a sense alive to what goes on in the awarenesses 
 and creations of the mind as a focus of experience, 
 it is an indirect awareness through indications 
 furnished by harmony or discord evident in the 
 immediate experience or feeling, which feeling is 
 always the mind's foundation and the accompani- 
 ment of all its endeavours. Satisfaction, harmony, 
 
 ' Bradley, " Essays," chap. vi. and Appendix. 
 
i] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 25 
 
 and the reverse become known through the 
 general self- feeling which accompanies the con- 
 sideration of certain objects, or of certain trains of 
 ideas. The subject, while it is subject, cannot be 
 before us as an object. But it betrays the success 
 or failure, the smoothness or the jarring of its 
 operations, through the feeling which is its index. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we desire an existent or 
 substantial mind, with acts distinguishable from 
 its objects, and a pure subject to which the acts 
 are referable, we must go to-day, in the main, not 
 to the philosopher for whom mind is the chief 
 thing in reality, nor yet to the extreme new 
 realist, who tends to equate njind with its responses 
 or its objects, but to Professor Alexander perhaps, 
 or to Professor Laird,^ whose free enquiry into 
 the mental experience has results just opposite to 
 those referred to a moment ago. 
 
 Thus on all sides there is a convergence on the 
 conception of mind as consisting of what it does 
 and experiences. And even where it is compre- 
 hended in the belief of the realist (one kind of 
 realist) among isolable individual things, even so, 
 it is not like other objects, an object to be laid 
 before mind itself and contemplated by it, but only 
 conveys the awareness of its activities through a 
 peculiar type of self-feeling. And it may be 
 noted, as I observed just now, that having attached 
 the mind as a quality to a concrete individual 
 thing, the realist who believes that this thing is 
 finite in space and time is as ready to abandon the 
 
 ' Cf. Laird's "Problems of the Self." Professor Laird 
 counts himself a realist. Cf, Stout, Syllabus, IL vii. 
 
26 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 survival of particular minds after bodily death ^ as 
 is the philosopher of the opposite type for whom 
 the particular mind is rather an utterance of the 
 Absolute — however inevitable and - profound — 
 than intrinsically a self-existent unit of a plurality.^ 
 To summarise the results of this chapter : 
 
 1. Neo-realism is actively assisting to restore 
 and maintain the true balance of traditional idealism 
 between creation and discovery as activities of 
 mind, impeached by neo-idealism. 
 
 2. Neo-realism is both by its primary postulates 
 and by social sympathy and investigation led to 
 sustain the conception of a world common to 
 individual finite minds, the thesis of idealism and 
 antithesis of pluralism. 
 
 3. Concrete and realistic examination of nature 
 exhibits it as at least most readily expounded on 
 the analogy of mind (observers in the distinct 
 systems), as only barred by convention from ex- 
 panding into a reality relative to mind, and as a 
 system of unlocalisable objects involving a system 
 of reality which must include it. 
 
 4. In the theory of mind neo-realism both 
 denies (with extreme idealism, and also in further 
 ways) and also supports (with the idealism of the 
 past) the ascription of the unity of mind to a pure 
 subject inherent in it. It agrees with extreme 
 idealism that there is no subject which can be 
 made an object. Both it and idealism sit loose to 
 "immortality," the former because there is a 
 
 1 Alexander, "Time," etc., II., 423. 
 " Gentile, "Spirito," p. 127. Cf. Bradley, "Appearance," 
 p. 501 ; "Essays," pp. 451, 467. 
 
I] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 27 
 
 subject, which would involve specific conditions of 
 continuance, the latter because there is none. 
 
 I confess that I am irresistibly reminded by 
 these considerations of a judgment which I ventured 
 to propound in my first philosophical work,^ in 
 commenting on the idea that the day of the great 
 post-Kantians was done. " The plan of the great 
 masters is being handed over to be carried out 
 piecemeal by the journeymen." 
 
 That seems to me to be on the whole what has 
 been happening, though some of those engaged in 
 the work have been more than journeymen. On 
 the other side, no doubt, we must give weight to 
 T. H. Green's saying, " It has all to be done over 
 again." All this sapping and mining of to-day will 
 doubtless lead up to a reconstruction of speculative 
 philosophy in the concrete, and with respect for 
 the various sides which it presents. 
 
 ' " Knowledge and Reality," Preface. 
 
28 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE UNIVERSE AND THE REAL WORLD 
 
 I. When we speak of the Real World, we are 
 inclined to suppose, before we have reflected on 
 the matter, that our expression must include all 
 that is in the universe. Everything that is, we 
 should naturally argue, must exist, and everything 
 that exists must be real. But we soon observe 
 that usage does not bear us out in this conception, 
 and that the epithet "real" inevitably has the effect 
 of suggesting a contrast with something unreal, 
 which, however we interpret it, must fall, we 
 should suppose, within the universe which includes 
 everything. Thus the real world, prima facie, 
 contains less than the universe. 
 
 To face this paradox frankly and boldly is a con- 
 siderable achievement of modern philosophy, and 
 its consequences are of great importance. And in 
 the statement at least of this problem we feel, as in 
 other fields, that the neo-realist has done excellent 
 service, and that the spirit of the age has brought 
 into substantial agreement, in the recognition of ■ 
 the problem, if not altogether in its solution, 
 extremists from very different regions of thought. 
 Let us start from the outspoken neo-realist : 
 "The picture which I wish to leave is of a 
 general universe of being in which all things 
 
II] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 29 
 
 physical, mental, and logical, propositions and 
 terms, existent and non-existent, false and true, 
 good and evil, real and unreal, subsist." "One 
 entity or complex of entities can belong to two or 
 more classes or groups at the same time, as one 
 point can be at the intersection of two or more 
 lines : so that an entity can be an integral part ot 
 a physical object, of a mathematical manifold, the 
 field of reality, and one or any number of con- 
 sciousnesses, at the same time."^ All these distinc- 
 tions then, prima facie, fall within the universe, 
 and the problem presses upon us whether by some 
 critical procedure we are to diminish their number 
 and variety, or whether, even if AVe are able to 
 bring them into some sort of order and correlation, 
 we are to infer that the universe is not so single 
 and simple an affair as we thought when we first 
 reflected, for example, upon " real " and " unreal." 
 For the "realists," new or old, this approach to the 
 enquiry seems decidedly eccentric. But their value 
 largely consists in their eccentricity; in their habit of 
 picking up all the oddest things they can lay hands 
 on which look like facts, however common sense 
 may appraise their reality, and throwing them at 
 sober people's heads. This is not one's precon- 
 ceived notion of a realist, but I think it is the neo- 
 realist's view of himself. 
 
 Anyone who will compare Mr. Holt's attitude 
 here with Mr. Bradley's teaching in chapters iv. 
 and xvi, of his " Essays on Truth and Reality," 
 will find what, to me, is a very remarkable resem- 
 blance. The realist has picked up important 
 
 1 Holt, "New Realism," pp. 372-3. C/. Hoernl^, 86 J. 
 
30 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 things. The essential point is made when we 
 have noted with Mr. Bradley that the universe 
 must be taken to include both the real and the 
 imaginary.-^ It, the universe, is certainly qualified 
 by the work of imagination ; cancel the imaginary, 
 and how much of it is gone ! It is then certainly 
 changed ; and, we are tempted to say, is changed 
 much for the worse. The " real " world falls 
 within it, as a special construction or convention, 
 attached to my present and waking body ; and 
 the very nature of this basis of attachment shows 
 to demonstration how arbitrary, though unavoid- 
 able, is our selection, out of all the worlds we 
 experience, of that which we shall set up and 
 observe as real par excellence, and the standard 
 for all the rest. 
 
 Mr. Russell, again, in his primary position, 
 seems to accept this point of departure. " Dreams 
 and waking life, in our first efforts at construction, 
 must be treated with equal respect ; it is only by 
 some reality not merely sensible that dreams can be 
 condemned."^ And a further passage is still more 
 explicit : " The analogy [on which we infer other 
 people's minds from their bodies] in waking life 
 is only to be preferred to that in dreams on the 
 ground of Its greater extent and consistency. If a 
 man were to dream every night about a set of 
 people whom he never met by day, who had con- 
 sistent characters and grew older with the lapse of 
 years, he might, like the man in Calderon's play, 
 
 ^ Bradley, "Essays," p. 45. 
 
 =" "Our Knowledge of the External World," p. 86. 
 Hoernle, p. 79. 
 
ii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 31 
 
 find it difficult to decide which was the dream 
 world and which was the so-called 'real' world. 
 It is only the failure of our dreams to form a 
 consistent whole, either with each other or with 
 waking life, that makes us condemn them. Cer- 
 tain uniformities are observed in waking life, while 
 dreams seem quite erratic. The natural hypo- 
 thesis would be that demons and the spirits of the 
 dead visit us while we sleep ; but the modern 
 mind, as a rule, refuses to entertain this view, 
 though it is hard to see what could be said against 
 it. On the other hand, the mystic, in moments 
 of illumination, seems to awaken from a sleep 
 which has filled all his mundane life : the whole 
 world of sense becomes phantasmal, and he sees, 
 with the clarity and convincingness that belongs to 
 our morning realisation after dreams, a world 
 utterly diffisrent from that of our daily cares and 
 troubles. Who shall condemn him ? Who shall 
 justify him ? Or who shall justify the seeming 
 solidity of the common objects among which we 
 suppose ourselves to live }"^ 
 
 Compare, again, Mr. Bradley : " My ' real 
 world,' we saw, is a construction from my felt self. 
 It is an inconsistent construction, and it also in the 
 last resort depends on my present feeling. You may 
 protest that its basis is really my normal waking 
 self, but in the end you have no way of distinguish- 
 ing such a self from the self which is abnormal." ^ 
 And with reference to dreams, in prima facie 
 agreement with the passages from Mr. Russell : 
 
 1 " External World," p. 95. 
 
 2 Bradley, " Essays," p. 46. 
 
32 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 ' Suppose that there are other minds, which, in 
 their waking lives, start from a basis other than 
 that of my waking self, is it impossible that their 
 worlds should be better and more real than mine ? 
 And if you reply that the whole supposition is 
 untenable, such an assertion, we have seen, has no 
 rational ground. Again (to leave other minds), 
 suppose that in hypnotism, madness, or dream, 
 my world becomes wider and more harmonious 
 than the scheme which is set up from my normal 
 self — then does not, I ask, what I dream become 
 at once a world better and more real ? And if 
 you know that this does not and cannot happen, 
 then explain how you know it."^ 
 
 We may compare with these a curious passage 
 of Giovanni Gentile, who in insisting on his thesis 
 of the self-affirmation and self-creation of the 
 subject (ego), rejects the " vulgar notion " that 
 when we awake we grasp at material sensa to 
 restore us to a certainty of our own reality. The 
 truth, he urges, is the reverse. We are not 
 making external nature the touchstone of reality. 
 The touchstone is in ourselves. We are not per- 
 fectly sure of the external reality, and before we 
 can accept it have to fit it in with the whole web 
 of experience which belongs to the subject, in 
 which we can find a place for it, and not for the 
 dream, except as the latter is a fact in our history.^ 
 This point of view is in practical agreement with 
 the others we have referred to, so far as it in- 
 dicates that the " real world " is open to criticism. 
 
 1 Op. cit., p. 464, and the whole of chapter xvi. 
 
 2 "Spirito," p. 90. 
 
II] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 33 
 
 But the absolutism of self-creation ascribed to the 
 ego, because we are supposed to be dealing with 
 the transcendental self when we really are dealing 
 with the empirical self, practically revokes the 
 recognition that the self on which that world is 
 constructed — in fact, the empirical self, though 
 estimated as the transcendental self — offers an 
 unstable basis. Thus he tends to cut down the 
 universe to the " real world " ; and this narrowing 
 effect attends throughout upon his one-sided 
 preference for discursive thought as the true form 
 of the real. He does not recognise that such 
 thought is a shifting basis of construction.^ 
 
 The impartial approach to all forms of ex- 
 perience as prima facie within the universe was 
 suggested to the neo-realists by Meinong's "Gegen- 
 standstheorie," or at least arose in harmony with it ;^ 
 and we shall have now to take further account of 
 this conception, in attempting to bring together 
 the points of view which have been applied in the 
 attempt to introduce some order into any such 
 chaotic aggregate of experience as Mr. Holt's 
 survey, for example, brought before us. 
 
 2. In order that speculative philosophy may 
 draw the fullest gain from the audacious approach 
 we have described, it seems necessary that it 
 should, if possible, assign validity to the hetero- 
 geneous distinctions in question, while ordering 
 and connecting them in such a way as to transmute 
 them from an unaccountable congeries into a 
 system with a connected structure. 
 
 * Green, Proleg. to "Ethics," Sect. 47. Review of J. 
 Caird, " Worics," III. 138. " Hoernle, pp. S6J. 
 
 3 
 
34 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 The governing antithesis is that between the 
 real and the unreal. All the others enumerated 
 above, especially true and false, good and bad, 
 though it would take a complete philosophy to in- 
 vestigate them in detail, yet must follow the lines 
 on which we determine the meaning of real and 
 unreal. " The problem is," as Professor Hoernl^ 
 says, "to find an interpretation of propositions 
 apparently mentioning and referring to unreal 
 objects, which shall save for them, as wholes, the 
 intelligible meaning they clearly have, without 
 saddling us with the task of finding a place in the 
 world for things which have no place there." ^ 
 We will note the main suggestions in this direction 
 which arise in different quarters of the philo- 
 sophical world, and endeavour to estimate their 
 agreement, and to appreciate in some degree the 
 consequences to which they point. 
 
 Before leaving Mr. Holt's pronouncement from 
 which we started (p. 28 above), we must add to it 
 Professor Hoernl6's warning : " There will simply 
 be things which are ' real ' and other things which 
 are ' unreal,' " and if we are realists we shall add 
 that neither sort owes its being in any way to being 
 perceived, conceived, or in some other manner 
 apprehended by a mind." And the root-principle 
 is, he tells us, that whatever any mind is in any 
 way conscious of, must at any rate bep' This is, 
 indeed, what we should expect ; but we shall find 
 that the realists' boldness and originality does good 
 service in varying their points of view, and that 
 Professor Alexander's attitude, for instance, cannot 
 1 Hoernle, p. 87. = Ibid. 
 
ii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 35 
 
 be precisely comprised within the terms of Pro- 
 fessor Hoernl^'s warning. 
 
 First, we may observe that the formulation of 
 the root-principle just mentioned, though a well- 
 intentioned recognition of a truth — that all thought 
 is about some reality — is not sufficiently concrete 
 to help us to advance. The heterogeneous terms, 
 then, all are, but we get from this no kind of 
 suggestion as to how they may be connected with 
 one another. When we pass from Mr. Holt to 
 Professor Alexander,^ we abandon this idea of 
 neutral being in favour of determinate concrete 
 worlds. 
 
 We may start our enquiry from Green's sane 
 and concise treatment of the supposed antithesis 
 between the real and the unreal.^ " What is the 
 real .'"' is for him a futile question, which could 
 only be answered by saying the real is everything. 
 When we judge anything to be unreal, we are not 
 opposing a general class of unreal beings to real 
 beings, but are comparing one particular reality 
 with another, from which it ought to be, but in 
 a certain judgment has not been, distinguished, 
 in which case we speak of it as a mere appearance 
 of the other. The conception of the unreal as an 
 abstract universal opposed to the real is a verbal 
 generalisation of the relations between such 
 couples of judgments, all of which affirm par- 
 ticular distinct realities. This may be not really 
 that, but it is always really something. Thought 
 always qualifies a real, though not always rightly. 
 
 1 " Space," etc., I. 200, 
 
 2 Proleg. to "Ethics," Sects. 23, 24. 
 
36 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 This is the simple and general outline of the 
 doctrine which eminent thinkers in all camps 
 appear to accept as the basis of their treatment of 
 error and appearance to-day, taken so widely as 
 to include imagination and illusion/ These dis- 
 tinct degrees or values of partial reality all arise 
 within the universe, and qualify it, owing to two 
 simple and inevitable characteristics of thought: 
 the first, that all affirmation, though it is about 
 a real, is conditioned by the special basis or limita- 
 tion or reservation under which it is necessarily 
 made ; and the second, that in the current practice 
 of thought and perception its dependence on 
 these bases and limitations habitually passes out of 
 sight. Consequently, truth is con|:inually being 
 claimed as absolute or complete for assertions and 
 appearances which are only true under very special 
 conditions. We have already seen the most 
 striking case of this in Mr. Bradley's account of 
 dream worlds and other specially conditioned 
 imaginations, which belong to the universe, while 
 they deviate from what we accept on a normal 
 and commonsense basis as " the real world." And 
 we may confirm our attitude not only by Professor 
 Stout's account of error and imagination,^ but by 
 the extraordinarily complete and ingenious analysis 
 which Professor Alexander has furnished of all 
 degrees of appearance from imagination down to 
 illusion.^ Whether this account remains within the 
 description which I cited from Professor Hoernl6 
 
 * Alexander, re unreality, " Space, etc.,'' II. 224. 
 ^ Arist. Proc, 1910-11. 
 3 "Space, etc.," II. 219^". 
 
ii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 37 
 
 of the realist's " unreal " as owing no jot or tittle 
 of its being to any mode of being apprehended by 
 the mind, approaches, as it seems to me, very 
 nearly to a verbal problem. As a realist. Pro- 
 fessor Alexander substitutes everywhere the idea 
 of selection and combination for that of mental 
 creation and production ; and in this way and for 
 this reason we gain from the realist quarter the 
 most complete and decisive testimony that appear- 
 ances are in every case particular realities within 
 the universe, selected, repieced, recombined accord- 
 ing to laws of their own, which constitute them 
 into worlds by which the universe receives illumi- 
 nation and extension.^ 
 
 When, indeed, we come to values, this author 
 does affirm the co-operation of the mind — as, for 
 example, in the reading of a sense-datum, which 
 makes it beautiful. But quite apart from this, 
 what we want and insist on in the present context 
 is the recognition that imagination, which is but 
 thought acting freely, in pursuing its peculiar 
 quest and interest, whether in mathematics or in 
 romance, is developing a world which qualifies the 
 universe, and is controlled by inherent laws be- 
 longing to those of the universe itself. 
 
 To this conception of the essential truth and 
 value of subordinate worlds, arising through 
 special conditions, interests, and experiences, 
 which guide and inspire and remould our courses 
 of thinking towards original but valid construc- 
 
 ^ I do not mean that a poet, say, can add to the universe ; 
 but I do mean that the greatness of what it is, is largely due 
 to him. 
 
38 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 tions, we find the sharpest opposition in Mr. 
 Russell's second position,-' as I may call it, which 
 seems to have obtained the assent of Professor 
 Hoernld in his valuable discussion, from which 
 I have already borrowed so much. 
 
 Here Mr. Russell sets himself, as I understand, 
 to reduce to order the heterogeneous aggregate 
 of beings recognised by Meinong and Mr. Holt, 
 restricting reality to "the real world," and denying 
 that " unreal objects " even are. 
 
 His explanation, directed to the problem of 
 which Professor Hoernl^'s statement was cited 
 above, turns on the misuse of symbols — that is to 
 say, on the falsity of the assumption that because 
 it is the function of symbols to have meaning, 
 therefore we may take every group of symbols 
 which can be understood in a proposition as 
 having reference to some object which has being. 
 What he substitutes for this assumption, as I 
 understand, is the conception that in speaking, for 
 example, of imaginary objects, say, of fairies, as 
 unreal, we are making use of a general description, 
 and denying that objects which correspond to that 
 description are to be found " in the real world," 
 which I gather that he takes as the world of actual 
 sense-data^ (or sense-percepts ?), 
 
 Thus it would seem that he now adopts as a 
 standard the real world, and attempts, if I' follow 
 rightly, to cut down the universe to this. The 
 position seems a little ambiguous when compared 
 
 ' Contrasting it with that described, p. 30 above. See for 
 this Hoernle, p. 87 and ref. 
 8 Hoernle, p. 89. 
 
ii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 39 
 
 with that of Mr. Holt. Mr. Russell, one might 
 say, accepts unreal objects as a subdivision of the 
 universe in the sense that objects are intelligibly- 
 spoken of which are not real. On the other hand, 
 he will not allow these objects so much as being, 
 but rather treats them as nullities, mere creations 
 of misunderstanding, to be explained away. Thus 
 we are brought back to the real world as the sole 
 and exclusive reality — " there is only one world, 
 the real world,"^ and in it, for example, you will 
 never meet with a sense-perception corresponding 
 to the description of a fairy. 
 
 Thus the whole notion of a number of worlds, 
 such as worlds of dreams or worlds of imagination 
 or other worlds according to the basis offered by 
 the present self from which in each given case our 
 construction starts, is radically swept away, and Mr. 
 Russell's apparent agreement^ with Mr. Bradley, 
 Mr. Holt, and Profess6r Alexander is abandoned. 
 
 I cannot but think that there is a misconception 
 here, and I am unable at this particular point to 
 follow Professor Hoernl6, who endorses his posi- 
 tion. I gather that the latter agrees with Mr. 
 Russell that the idea of " universes of discourse " 
 — a real world, a world of fairy tale, a world of 
 literary fiction, etc. — is an evasion of the problem. 
 These "worlds" arise in the real thoughts of real 
 human beings by that misuse of symbols which 
 has been explained. " There is only one world, 
 the * real ' world ; Shakespeare's imagination is 
 part of it, and the thoughts that he had in writing 
 * Hamlet ' are real. So are the thoughts that we 
 
 ' Russell in Hoernle, p. 88. ^ See above, p. 30. 
 
40 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 have In reading the play. But it is of the very 
 essence of fiction that only the thoughts, feelings, 
 etc., In Shakespeare and his readers are real, and 
 that there is not, in addition to them, an objective 
 Hamlet. When you have taken account of all 
 the feelings roused by Napoleon in writers and 
 readers of history, you have not touched the 
 actual man ; but in the case of Hamlet you have 
 come to the end of him. If no one thought about 
 Hamlet, there would be nothing left of him ; If 
 no one had thought about Napoleon, he would 
 soon have seen to it that someone did."^ 
 Professor Hoernle emphatically agrees. 
 
 Here I regret to say that I cannot follow. The 
 whole matter in question has been discussed at 
 length by Professor Stout,^ Professor Alexander,' 
 Mr. Bradley,* and myself.^ I need only refer to 
 the crucial point, and Illustrate it briefly. It will 
 be enough to deal with the world of imagination. 
 
 It Is hardly necessary to clear out of the road 
 the notion that imagination somehow differs funda- 
 nlentally from thought. It is simply free con- 
 structive thinking ; the presence or absence of 
 concrete pictorial detail does not affect its nature. 
 Of course, the mathematical imagination has very 
 little of this. But, again, of course, thinking may 
 proceed on a special basis — what in logic we 
 
 ' Russell, "Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy." 
 Cf. Hoernle, p. 88. 
 
 ^ Arist. Proc, 1910-11. 
 
 ^ "Space, etc.," II. 219^$^. * "Essays," iv., xvi. 
 
 s "Knowledge and Reality," 14+ if: "Logic" (z ed.), 
 I. 274 n. 
 
ii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 41 
 
 should call hypothetical thinking — and the con- 
 dition on which it proceeds may be more or less 
 forgotten. So far you have the beginnings of 
 illusion, but that is no reason why in pursuing 
 imaginative thought such a special reservation or 
 abstraction, if it occurs, should thus be forgotten. 
 Illusion is not necessary to imagination. 
 
 The identity of thought and imagination being 
 established, we proceed to insist on the principle 
 to which Mr, Holt, as I should say, paid lip- 
 homage with his doctrine of universal being or 
 subsistence, but did not give it effective develop- 
 ment. In Professor Stout's words, it is " What- 
 ever is thought, in so far as it is thought, is 
 therefore real."^ Thus in developing, e.g.^ a 
 romance with the scene laid in the eighteenth 
 century, a writer of fiction is pursuing the possi- 
 bilities, which are real qualifications arising out of 
 features of the universe, presented by human life 
 subject to the conditions and reservations operative 
 in the eighteenth century, as he understands 
 them. He is making out a world subject to laws 
 which are real, which belong to it, and which he 
 did not invent. Professor Alexander's account of 
 imagination is practically the same. Mr. Bradley^ 
 criticises Professor Stout's vivid and effective 
 expressions, in which he represents the possi- 
 bilities so developed — say the hero's life in the 
 eighteenth century — as realities of the universe,^ 
 It is dangerous to come between the points of 
 such mighty opposites ; but I am convinced for 
 
 ' See Bradley, "Essays," p. 275. ^ Loc. cit. 
 
 ^ Stout, Arist. Proc, 1910-11, pp. 192, 197. 
 
42 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 my own part that this is a minor matter, and 
 turns upon the nature of a " real possibility," as 
 Mr. Bradley himself has explained it.^ A real 
 possibility, speaking generally, is a consequent 
 whose conditions are in part known to be real and 
 none of them known to contradict reality. Such 
 a possibility is not straight away as it stands a 
 reality, because the supposal which completes it 
 is not fully attached to the content of the whole, 
 but has only a partial basis in a special [world 
 within which thought is working ad hoc ; but all 
 the same, it has a real position in the universe. 
 In the framework of logic, to which all these con- 
 ceptions must come back, it is the assertion made 
 by a hypothetical judgment ; and in every hypo- 
 thetical judgment there is a fundamental cate- 
 gorical assertion — the assertion of the real basis of 
 the nexus between antecedent and consequent, 
 upon which basis their particular connection is 
 supposed. Imagination — free thought — could not 
 work unless It were affirming a basis of this kind 
 in reality, and building further upon suggestions 
 arising out of it. The best imagination keeps its 
 real basis most fully in view, and takes in so much 
 of the universe that Its depth of real content Is very 
 far superior to that of commonsense actuality — 
 " Create he can Forms more real than living man." 
 But thought, when governed by no controlling 
 interest, may undergo a slip or break, leaping 
 from a relevant to an Irrelevant feature of the 
 Imagined complex, and starting a fresh and rela- 
 tively disconnected development on that arbitrarily 
 ' "Principles of Logic," p. 187. 
 
II] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 43 
 
 selected basis. There you have arbitrary fancy, 
 and the grasp of reality is much inferior. But 
 reality you must have, as long as you have 
 thought. 
 
 Now to go to illustrations. Will any man 
 maintain that in reading with imaginative enjoy- 
 ment — say " Ivanhoe " — his attitude of thought is 
 that these ideas once ran through Walter ' Scott's 
 mind ? In the first place, if it were so, it would 
 be plainly inadequate to the facts. For much, 
 the ordinary person has no idea how much, of the 
 romance is true, and is on the whole taken as 
 true by the reader, of reality in historical fact. 
 Much more is true, and is judged as true, in 
 spirit — that is, is a just representation of human 
 nature, and must be so taken if there is to be 
 imaginative enjoyment. Every character in the 
 book has its own world of thought and feeling, 
 and all of these are derived, with such and such 
 degrees of correctness and fidelity, from the 
 general features and characters which experience 
 warrants us in holding real, and are so taken in 
 imaginative enjoyment. As Professor Alexander 
 says,-^ the whole thing is put together, not out of 
 actual experience, but on the lines followed by 
 such objects when real for actual experience. 
 
 All this affirmation of real characteristics, though 
 embodied in what technically speaking are implicit 
 hypothetical judgments conveying categorical 
 affirmations of great complexity, would be abso- 
 lutely annihilated if we tried to regard the 
 achievement of imagination in question as consist- 
 1 "Space, etc.," II. 219/". 
 
44 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 ing solely in the thoughts which passed through 
 the author's mind when writing it, and which are 
 aroused in the readers' minds when reading it. 
 The suggestion is a contradiction in terms, for 
 thought so taken would be thought no longer.^ 
 It would be, per impossible, a series of psychical 
 events devoid of meaning. 
 
 The illustration by a comparison of Hamlet 
 and Napoleon is simply disposed of. The plain 
 fallacy is in taking Napoleon before his work is 
 done and Hamlet after. Strike out, then, all the 
 effects of each on humanity, and Napoleon, being 
 ex hypothesi still alive, may produce some more ; 
 Hamlet, his influence having ex hypothesi — an 
 arbitrary and impossible hypothesis — reached the 
 ultimate end of its growth, and supposing all of it 
 up to that point annihilated, can create no more. 
 
 But this is all arbitrary supposition. The two 
 creations are great by their effects on man ; if 
 you test them by abolition, you must abolish all 
 effects or none. The flesh-and-blood existence 
 does not make the difference ; it is one among 
 other features, and counts for something. But if 
 it made the difference, why am not I as important 
 as Hamlet .'' Both abstractions of the total in- 
 fluences are ridiculous absurdities ; and the only 
 effect of the illustration is to enforce the tremen- 
 dous reality of the world of imagination, and its 
 probable superiority, in causal influence, to "the 
 real world" continuous with our bodies. I cite 
 what seems to me a very convincing passage from 
 Elihu Burritt : 
 
 ^ Stout, loc. cit,, p. 194. 
 
ii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY '45 
 
 " Let us go ^ to a higher authority and example 
 than the unconsidered impression of these un- 
 thoughtful minds for a truer conception of what 
 this creative faculty of the human mind was to do 
 and be for the material well-being and spiritual 
 life and destiny of mankind. . . . What was 
 Christ's view and example, in regard to this great 
 faculty of idealism ? Why, He created a hundred- 
 fold more fictitious personages and events than 
 Dickens, or Thackeray, or any other novelist ever 
 did. We read that He seldom spoke to the 
 people except in parables. And what were His 
 parables ? They were ideals, that were more 
 vivid than the abstract reals of actual human life. 
 They were fictions that were more truthful than 
 facts and more instructive. They were fictitious 
 transactions, experiences, and actors ; but every 
 one of them had a true human basis, or possir 
 bility of fact, .which carried its instructions to the 
 listener's mind with the double force of truth. 
 Take, for example, the Prodigal Son. Histori- 
 cally he was a fiction. But to the universal and 
 everlasting conscience and experience of mankind, 
 there has not been a human son born into this 
 world for two thousand years endowed with such 
 immortal life and power as that young man. He 
 wiH live for ever. He will give power. 
 
 As long as the heart has passions. 
 As long as life has woes. 
 
 He will travel down all the ages, and in living 
 sympathy and companionship with the saddest 
 
 1 Elihu Burritt (" Life and Labours," by Northend) : 
 Lecture on "The Reality and Mission of Ideal Characters," 
 
46 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 experiences of human nature, he will stand at 
 every door and lair of sin and misery and shame ; 
 he will stand there as he stood in his rags, hunger, 
 and contrition among the swine, and say to the 
 fallen, with his broken voice and falling tears : 
 * I will arise and go unto my father, and say unto 
 him. Father, I have sinned against heaven and in 
 thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called 
 thy son ; make me as one of thy hired servants.' 
 
 "The Good Samaritan historically was as fictitious 
 a being as the Prodigal Son. But what one man 
 has lived on the earth since he was introduced 
 to the world who has been worth to it the value 
 of that ideal character ? What one mere human 
 being has worn actual flesh and blood for the 
 last two thousand years who lives with such 
 intense vitality in the best memories, life impulse, 
 and action of this living generation as that ideal 
 of a good neighbour ? What brightest star in our 
 heavens above would we hold at higher worth 
 than the light of his example ? For ever and for 
 ever, as long as men shall fall among the thieves 
 that beset the narrow turnings of life, or into the 
 more perilous ambush of their own appetites and 
 passions, so long the Good Samaritan will seek for 
 them with his lantern in one hand and his cruet of 
 oil in the other, and pour the healing sympathy of 
 his loving heart into their wounded spirits ; and, 
 with a hand and voice soft and tender with God's 
 love, raise the fallen, bind up their wounds, and 
 bring them back to the bosom of the great salva- 
 tion. . . . Take, for instance, the most impres- 
 sive and valuable character to mankind that the 
 
II] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 47 
 
 Old Testament has handed down to us, the king 
 and poet David. How the blue of twenty-five 
 centuries has smoothed the rough crevices and 
 wide discrepancies of his actual human life ! He 
 never stands before us in his bald, historic reality. 
 We have created him a new and immortal being, 
 as a companion and counsellor in all our ex- 
 periences of trial, temptation, sin, joy, and sorrow. 
 We have taken the living breath of his beautiful 
 and tender psalms, or life, and breathed it back 
 into a human ideal, which we call David. ..." 
 
 Professor Hoernl6 considers his and Mr. 
 Russell's position to be in harmony with the 
 argument of Kant and Hume against the onto- 
 logical proof. A concept cannot guarantee the 
 existence of a real object corresponding to it. 
 The only difference between " real " and imaginary 
 dollars is that the former are empirically given 
 and the latter are not.-^ The sound view on this 
 difficult question was laid down, I should urge, 
 in a few words by Green ^ : " The mere idea of 
 a hundred thalers is no doubt quite different 
 from the possession of them, not because it is 
 unreal, but because the relations which form the 
 real nature of the idea are different from those 
 which form the real nature of the possession." 
 The difference, as Mr. Bradley argues at length in 
 chapter iii. of his " Essays," is one of content.^ 
 
 ' Hoernle, p. 91. 
 
 " Proleg. to " Ethics," Sect. 24. 
 
 ^ P. 43. And so, if I understand right, says Professor 
 Alexander, "Space, etc.," II. 250, note, in ageeement with 
 Miss Wodehouse : "The difference between supposal and 
 belief is not merely, as Mr. Meinong thinks, one of mental 
 
48 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 J The fact is that in a certain sense the ontological 
 
 ( argument is sound. Every idea in its way, sub- 
 
 ! ject to one or another reservation or condition or 
 
 abstraction, qualifies the real. The point is to 
 
 determine by its content in what mode or subject 
 
 to what condition its qualification is to be taken. 
 
 Mr. Russell, then, from whose earlier position 
 we hoped for a remarkable coincidence uniting 
 Mr. Holt's comprehensive enumeration of beings 
 and Mr. Bradley's recognition of diverse worlds 
 within the universe, has in his later attitude aban- 
 doned us, and serves only as an extreme example 
 of the contradictions which arise if we take the 
 common-sense real world as a standard in this 
 discussion. Nevertheless, in different degrees of 
 emphasis a single conclusion presses upon us alike 
 from the extreme neo-realist in harmony with 
 " Gegenstandstheorle," from such a rationalising 
 neo-realist as Professor Alexander,^ and from'such 
 
 lit 
 
 original "thinkers in other philosophical camps as 
 Mr. Bradley and Professor Stout. 
 
 And the conclusion, borne in upon us from so 
 many quarters, may be expressed in Mr. Bradley's 
 pregnant words : 
 
 " In what sense, then (we may ask once more), 
 and how far are we justified when we regard such 
 states as dreams and madness as irrational, and 
 take their deliverance as unreal .'' We believe in 
 
 attitude, but of the contents of the object." See further on 
 ontological argument, essay on Essence and Existence, below. 
 ' "Space, etc.," II., chaps, vii.-ix. inclusive, form a 
 complete and orderly survey of the various worlds of appear- 
 ance, some of which (see on value) are dependent on mind, 
 
n] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 49 
 
 the first place their content to be more narrow and 
 less consistent ; and within our actual knowledge 
 that belief is, we have seen, to speak in general, 
 correct. Such a conclusion, on the other hand, 
 even so far as it goes, we must remember, is ex 
 parte. It rests on the mere assumption that our 
 waking world has a sole or superior reality. 
 Again, what we call abnormal states lead in general, 
 we find, to isolation and destruction. Between 
 dream bodies, for example, we can discover no co- 
 operation, and these bodies seem in relation with 
 no common environment. Now that, to speak in 
 general, they have no working connection with 
 our environment, must be admitted. On the 
 other hand, to conclude that these bodies have no 
 world of their own and are everywhere isolated, 
 each from all others, goes (we saw) beyond our 
 knowledge. Our judgment once more here is 
 simply ex -parte. We are resting throughout on 
 the assumption that our ' real ' world of fact is 
 the one reality. 
 
 " Within limits, all must agree, such an assump- 
 tion is necessary. If I am to live at all, I must 
 act, and, if I am to act, it must be on the world 
 which comes to me here and now as given. I 
 cannot will myself away into another sphere, even 
 if there are other spheres better and more real. 
 If my life is to continue, and if I am to realise in 
 it a rational order and scheme of conduct and 
 knowledge, there is but one course possible. I 
 m\ist start from what 1 find, now and here, in 
 feeling and perception ; I must from this basis 
 construct what I call the real world of facts and 
 
50 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 events ; and for most purposes I must accept at 
 least this order as real. There is a higher reality, 
 doubtless, beyond all fact and event, but it is 
 within my own world that this higher world must 
 realise itself for me. And when reflection tells 
 me that, for all I know, the normal world of my 
 experience is but one world amongst others,, what 
 difference should that make ? The true reality is not 
 in any case a 'real' world or worlds of mere fact and 
 event. And in any case for myself a ' real ' world 
 other than my own is useless. It is on my world, 
 and on that alone, that my ideal life can be built. 
 
 "It is well to remember that my life and world, 
 as mere existing facts, have no value ; and the 
 thought of other, of even an indefinite number of 
 other, unknown worlds and lives may keep this 
 truth before our minds. 
 
 " Our world, and every other possible world, are 
 from one side worthless equally. As regions of 
 mere fact and event, the bringing into being and 
 the maintenance of temporal existence, they all 
 alike have no value. It counts for nothing when 
 or where such existence is taken to have its place. 
 The differences of past and future, of dream and 
 waking, of ' on earth,' or elsewhere, are one and 
 all immaterial. Our life has value only because 
 and so far as it realises in fact that which 
 transcends time and existence. Goodness, beauty, 
 and truth are all there is which in the end is real. 
 Their reality, appearing amid chance and change, 
 is beyond these, and is eternal. But in whatever 
 world they appear, that world so far is real."^ 
 1 Bradley, " Essays," pp. 465 _^ 
 
II] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 51 
 
 Conceptions of this kind could not arise unless 
 and until the total complex of experience came to 
 be considered with impartial and appreciative 
 analysis, and we see how this, their essential basis, 
 tends to assert itself, with different degrees of 
 systematic conciliation, in diverse sections of the neo- 
 realist camp. A comparison of Mr. Russell's two 
 positions, showing how he repudiates his own 
 primary suggestion, is almost as instructive as the 
 advance in Professor Alexander towards an orderly 
 array of appearances, all of which qualify the 
 universe. 
 
 The above discussion, we may note, gives us 
 the means of defining reality, which has been 
 pronounced indefinable. Reality is the correlative ^ 
 of thought, and may be defined as the object affirmed 
 by thought. The defect of " Esse is Percipi " is 
 that thought may affirm what transcends perception, 
 though not what transcends experience.^ 
 
 3. If, rejecting the point of view which has just 
 been dwelt upon, we insist on taking ultimate 
 reality as determined by the standard of our single 
 real world, we have to ask ourselves how to esti- 
 mate the relation of time to such reality. We 
 should expect the uncompromising defence of 
 time to come from the neo-realist, and, although 
 we saw that he supplies material for the construc- 
 tion of a very complex system of the universe, yet 
 we are not deceived on the whole in this expecta- 
 tion. Nevertheless, the matter is not quite simple. 
 In the first place, there are realists and realists. 
 Professor Alexander's universe is not a simple 
 '■ Bradley, "Essays," p. 153. 
 
52 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 process of events ad infinitumyas I should suppose 
 that that of the six would be,^ but carries with it 
 pervading tendencies to a sort of self-realisation 
 and totality — a recognition, at all events, of some 
 , demand of that character. M. Bergson, I suppose, 
 is to be reckoned as a realist so far as concerns his 
 recognition of the objectivity of time, though, once 
 more, his interpretation of the universe is of an 
 extraordinary simplicity, and seems to dissolve 
 away all the differences and complexities in which 
 we commonly find a clue to the whole.^ Then, 
 further still, I presume on the whole from the 
 realist camp, there comes the intimate introduction 
 of time into nature through the doctrine of 
 relativity, not necessarily carrying a metaphysical 
 doctrine of the type of Professor Alexander's, but 
 leaving open, as 1 judge, the alternative between a 
 mere mode of being of the universe, subordinate 
 to an ultimate totality, and a progressive passage 
 forming its ultimate nature. 
 
 All this, as I said, is what we should expect. 
 But there is something more, which is a really 
 curious and suggestive phenomenon, and which I 
 will merely state in the present chapter, as a tran- 
 sition to a fuller treatment when we raise issues 
 affecting ultimate values. 
 
 I refer to the estimate of time and progress, 
 mentioned by anticipation in the Preface, which 
 emanates from the Italian neo-idealists, Croce, 
 Gentile, and their followers. For them, as for 
 Professor Alexander, and for our own Professor 
 
 ^ Hoernle on Perry, p. 65. 
 
 " The artistic imagination, for instance : " Le Rire," p. 175. 
 
II] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 53 
 
 James Ward/ the basis of reality is historical. 
 The universe not merely includes,, but is and 
 consists in, an advance in time, primarily at least 
 a succession of events. 
 
 In this remarkable case what I must confess 
 appears to me as at once an extreme exaggeration 
 and an unjustifiable narrowness in the conception 
 of reality springs from the idea of thought as the 
 fundamental creative agency operating through an 
 inherent dialectic. This dialectic has lost — such, 
 I regret to say, is my conviction — that connection 
 with a sense of the whole which, on the one hand, 
 is the ruling motive in the Hegelian system, and, 
 on the other, may be gathered — though, in my 
 view, subject to a lack of system and rationality — ■ 
 from the neo-realist contentions, especially in the 
 pregnant form which Professor Alexander has 
 given them. I will state the doctrine, on its 
 positive and negative side, in their own words. 
 We may take,, for example, a passage from Croce 
 (marginal summary, " Conception of the Cosmic 
 Progress ") : " From the cosmic point of view, at 
 which we are now placing ourselves, reality dis- 
 plays itself as a continual growing upon itself ; 
 nor can a real regress be conceived, because evil, 
 being that which is not, is unreal ; and that which 
 is, is, always and exclusively, good. The real is 
 always rational, and the rational is always real. 
 Cosmic progress, then, is itself also [as well as that 
 of nature] an object of affirmation, not problematic, 
 but apodeictic."^ 
 
 1 Cf. " Realm of Ends," p. 468. 
 
 2 " Pratica," p. 175 (E. tr., 253). 
 
54 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 "The Spirit, an infinite possibility overflowing 
 into infinite actuality, has drawn, and is drawing 
 at every moment, the cosmos out of chaos, has 
 collected the diffused life into the concentrated 
 life of the organism {deW organo], has effected the 
 transition from animal to human life, has created 
 and is creating modes of life ever more lofty. 
 The work of the Spirit is never completed, nor 
 ever will be so. Our aspiration to something 
 superior is not vain. The yearning itself, the 
 infinity of our desire, is a proof of the" infinity of 
 that progress. The plant dreams of the animal, 
 the animal of man, and man of superman ; this, 
 too, is reality, if it is reality that in every move- 
 ment of history man surpasses himself.^ A time 
 will come in which the great exploits and achieve- 
 ments which are now our memory and our pride 
 will be forgotten ; as we have forgotten the 
 exploits and achievements, no less great, of those 
 beings of genius who created what we call human 
 life, and who appear to us as savages of the lowest 
 grade and, so to speak, men-monkeys. They will 
 be forgotten, because the proof of progress is in 
 forgetting ; that is, in the fact being resolved 
 without remainder into the new fact, in which, 
 and not in itself, it has value." ^ Yet "the 
 spiritual activity has the fullest consciousness of 
 its own eternal categories."^ We cannot predict 
 the concrete forms which progress and perfecti- 
 
 ^ An apparent analogy between this passage and Professor 
 Alexander's view of Deity strikes us at once. 
 
 2 There seems to be here a fundamental fallacy. Cf, 
 Wicksteed, "Religion of Time and of Eternity." 
 
 3 " Pratica," p. 1 8o. 
 
n] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 55 
 
 bility will take (because it is our business to make 
 them, not to know them), but we can decide upon 
 issues which are not of fact but of thinkableness or 
 unthinkableness of conceptions — e.g., of individual 
 immortality or the existence of God. It is de- 
 monstrated that these are unthinkable in the 
 traditional form. " Man does not seek a God 
 external to him, like a despot who arbitrarily 
 commands and benefits him ; nor does he aspire 
 to an immortality, which would be insipid rest ; 
 but he seeks that God whom he has in himself, 
 and aspires to that activity which is Life and 
 Death together."^ 
 
 We note in these passages, beside all the 
 attractiveness of their faith in reason, a somewhat 
 narrow basis of humanism ; and on this analogy 
 we are not surprised to find it asserted about 
 nature : " If so-called nature is, it is in evolution ; 
 if it is in evolution, it cannot be so without some 
 consciousness." It is assumed throughout, in 
 harmony with the pre-eminence assigned to active 
 thought, that what is not conscious must be 
 mechanical — an assumption which emphasises the 
 narrowness of the conception on which the whole 
 view depends. " Una natura immobile, esterna, 
 meccanica " — that is what you must come to if you 
 do not take nature as conscious. I cannot recon- 
 cile with these expressions the continuation of the 
 same passage :^ " Nor ought we to find any 
 difficulty in detecting everywhere activity, de- 
 velopment, consciousness, with its antitheses of 
 
 1 "Pratica," pp. 1 79-1 8 1 (E. tr., 258). 
 =* Op. cit., p. 174, 
 
56 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 good and evil, of joy and grief. Certainly neither 
 do the stars smile, nor is the moon pale with 
 melancholy ; these are imaginations of the poets. 
 Certainly trees and animals do not talk like men ; 
 this, when it is not poetry, is coarse anthropomor- 
 phism. But nature, in its inwardness, aspires to 
 good and shrinks from evil ; as a whole it drops 
 tears and thrills with joy ; the struggle and the 
 victory is in every point, and every instant, of the 
 universal life." There is a note of pantheism 
 here, which, if sustained, would make a great 
 diiference to the solidity of these thinkers' view of 
 the universe. I know of no other place in Croce 
 or Gentile which seems to recognise a nature as a 
 positive form of spirit ; and I can only suppose 
 that the character here ascribed to it depends on 
 treating it as unified with the concrete human 
 consciousness. 
 
 The conception of reality as a progress ad in- 
 finitum'^ arises by a simple departure from the 
 Hegelian idea of dialectic. If reality is really be- 
 coming, he urges, it ought not to end ; if it can 
 end, there can be no reason why it should have 
 begun ;2 and therefore the movement of the real 
 must be its own intimate nature as becoming ; but 
 the dialectic must be taken as a movement in time, 
 and its completion self-contradictory. With this, 
 we see at once the conception of the whole as the 
 immanent spring of the movement is struck out ; 
 the separate phases present no contrast with the 
 
 ' I shall notice Croce's protest against this expression 
 beloTv. 
 
 ^ " Saggio Sullo Hegel," p. 152. 
 
ii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 57 
 
 whole such that it can act in them as a spring of 
 movement.* Prima facie, therefore, his idea of the 
 progress of reality — which is inherently a be- 
 coming — would be that of a progress ad infinitum. 
 But this consequence he repudiates — " the progress 
 ad infinitum^ never reaching its goal, is not a 
 progress ; and the idea of approximation is an 
 illusion. " He is aware of the example of Tantalus : 
 " The true conception of progress must therefore 
 fulfil at once the two opposite conditions, of an 
 attainment, at every instant, of the true and good,^ 
 and of raising a doubt at every fresh instant, 
 without, however, losing what has been attained ; 
 of a perpetual solution and of a perpetually 
 renascent problem demanding a new solution ; 
 it must avoid the two opposite one-sidednesses of 
 an end completely attained, and of an end un- 
 attainable, of the progressus ad finitum and of the 
 progressus ad infinitum. This requirement might 
 also be expressed by saying that a true conception 
 of progress should make synthesis of the Oriental 
 idea of cycles or recurrences, or of perpetual con- 
 stancy,^ and of the Western idea of a breathless 
 career towards novelty, or of perpetual change, 
 . supplementing the immobility of the first by the 
 mobility of the second. Without this amendment, 
 
 ' liia., p. 65. Cf. Gentile: "From the abstract to the 
 concrete there is no path" (" Spirito," p. 219). The 
 principle of true dialectic is rather, " Every abstract tends 
 to return to its concrete " (McTaggart, " Studies," p. 97). 
 
 ^ Much like Ward, "Realm of Ends," p. 475, quoting 
 HofFding. 
 
 ^ As I X I X I = I, he adds in a note with reference to 
 Nietzsche, p. 163, oj>, at. 
 
58 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 the two come to the same." Surely what we have 
 here is just a futile attempt to escape the Kantian 
 doctrine of approximation ad infinitum. 
 
 What, then, is the contradiction which drives 
 the reality from form to form, if it is not the con- 
 trast of each with an immanent whole ?^ "The 
 contradiction for us can be no other than this : 
 that every particular form is particular, and this 
 spirit does not stay still, but rather is never as the 
 whole in any one of its particularisations, and 
 therefore its true being is just its circular move- 
 ment, which in its perpetual rotation produces the 
 perpetual increment of itself upon itself, the ever 
 new history." We see the word "whole " in this 
 passage ; but it is clear that the universe as a 
 systematic whole or true infinite, revealing itself 
 in comparable and relatively stable finite forms, is 
 1 struck out. Reality in itself is nothing but a 
 linear movement, circling ad infinitum through the 
 four categories of Croce's philosophy as recurrent 
 phases. Any systematic totality would be pro- 
 . nounced, according to these idealists' mistaken 
 I interpretation, transcendent of experience, whereas 
 in fact it is only transcendent of immediacy.^ We 
 shall see how this misconception affects the ultimate 
 issue between morality and religion. 
 
 I add a passage from Gentile to illustrate more 
 completely the consequence of this prejudice 
 against so-called transcendence in narrowing the 
 
 1 " Saggio," p. 1 68, cf. " Saggio," p. 65, ".Croce's Logic " 
 (E. tr., 103). Something like the immanence of the whole is 
 implied in the " circolo," " Nuovi Saggi," p. 55, but the idea 
 is not grasped. 
 
 ^ Bradley, " Essays," p. 153. 
 
II] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 59 
 
 conception of the universe towards what we have 
 described as the real world — the succession of 
 events in time : 
 
 " Nor can there be progress for an idealistic 
 philosophy which places the ideas or the idea and 
 the truth outside history and the efFectivity of the 
 real ; because, if progress is the realisation of the 
 better, of the true being of things, this realisation 
 is impossible, by definition, when this true being . 
 is outside the things. And as there is no progress, ' 
 there is no history ; since, at bottom, the two i 
 terms are synonymous, as there cannot be develop- ; 
 ment without amelioration, or the manifestation 
 (explicazione) of a law which constitutes the telos 
 {fine) of the development."^ He does not seem 
 to conceive an infinite real whole, expressing itself 
 in many finite forms, which more or less are 
 charged with its values. The narrow humanism 
 of the real progress in question is striking. It is 
 of interest, however, to compare with Professor 
 Alexander's conception of Deity, Gentile's charac- 
 terisation of the world as "una teogonia eterna." 
 But I think he only means by it the succession of 
 reality as unified in the act of human thought, 
 which is for him eternity.^ 
 
 But take the following passage on the work of 
 the creative thought which, in its self-produc- 
 tion, is reality, and compare it with Professor 
 Alexander's treatment of the natural universe : 
 
 "Which synthesis (of subject and object in the 
 subject), as concrete reality of self-consciousness, is 
 
 * Gentile, "Riforma della dialettica Hegeliana," p. 237. 
 ^ "Spirito,"p. 237. 
 
6o THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 precisely the process which is not fact, but act, 
 living and eternal ; whence to think it truly means 
 to realise it. And at this realisation who does not 
 know that the spirit labours, to inaugurate the 
 fulness of liberty, the reign of the spirit, or that 
 regnum hominis in which consists the whole of human 
 civilisation, the mastery and subjection of nature 
 to the ends of man, which are the ends of the 
 spirit ; and hence progressive spiritualisation of 
 the world, and realisation, in a word, of that syn- 
 thesis which resolves the opposition, while preserv- 
 ing it along with the unity in which is its raison 
 d'etre and its significance ?" (Heading, " The 
 World as Eternal History"). 
 
 " But this human perfectibility,^ this ever more 
 potent mastery of man over nature, this progress 
 and increment of the life of the spirit which is 
 always triumphing more securely over the adverse 
 forces of nature,^ and conquers and subjugates 
 them in the inwardness of the mind itself, turning 
 the passions themselves into virtues, as our Vico 
 says : what is it, as we commonly represent it, the 
 journey of humanity from stage to stage, through- 
 out space and time — what else is it but the 
 empirical and external representation of the im- 
 manent eternal victory (full and absolute victory) 
 of the spirit over nature, of the immanent resolu- 
 tion of nature into spirit, which, according to the 
 conception achieved by us of the necessary resolu- 
 tion of history in time into the real and eternal 
 
 ^ Cf. Croce, "Pratica," p. i8o. 
 
 2 There seems to be no idea of nature as that through 
 which man's own nature is being communicated to him. 
 
ii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 6i 
 
 history, is the only possible speculative conception 
 of the relation between nature and spirit V^ And 
 just below nature is emphatically and repeatedly 
 described as the limit, or the obscure limit, of our 
 spiritual being. 
 
 All this seems a narrow intellectualistic concep- 
 tion, in which anyone accustomed to the wide 
 ranges of Hegel or Goethe, Wordsworth or Mere- 
 dith, or simply to the realities of life, feels stifled 
 for want of open space in which the great forms 
 of experience may expand their reality. We all 
 know, I repeat, that all experience comes to us 
 through responses of mind, by which it weaves a 
 web or constructs a fabric. But that the thinking 
 activity and sensuous response, the common faculty 
 and capacity of empirical individuals is, as such, 
 and apart from a total concrete unity which reveals 
 itself in and through it, the diiFerential source of 
 the great organised revelations which come in 
 nature and in history, seems an incredibly formal 
 and trivial doctrine. Nature comes through mind, 
 and could come no otherwise ; but this is not to 
 say that nature is not a great positive experience, 
 in which minds are carried out of themselves and 
 made the vehicle of a spirit which they do noi 
 individually create and confer, but from which 
 collectively they receive instruction and inspiration. 
 And history is not dissociable from nature. Geo- 
 graphy is enough to prove this.^ In Professor 
 Alexander's account of our kinship and connection 
 with the stellar universe, in spite of all the difficulty 
 of his hypothesis of space-time as the stufFof things, 
 
 ' Gentile, "Spirito," p. 214. ^ " Principle," p. 145. 
 
62 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. ii 
 
 the neo- realist seems far closer than the neo-idealist 
 to a just appreciation of what "the whole" must 
 signify for mind. " In the poem which he calls 
 ' Meditation under Stars,' Meredith has described 
 this affinity between us and the stars, and how in 
 the view of it our earth acquires a meaning which 
 it has not otherwise. 
 
 " The fire is in them whereof we are born ; 
 The music of their motion may be ours. 
 Spirit shall deem them beckoning Earth, and voiced 
 Sisterly to her, in her beams rejoiced." * 
 
 You cannot cut down the universe to the 
 creative work of constructive thinking on the one 
 hand, nor to the real world of the context of our 
 waking bodies on the other. The narrownesses 
 and the recognitions of neo-idealists and of neo- 
 realists balance one another, and amplify our con- 
 ception of the whole. 
 
 * Alexander, "Space, etc.," II. 335. 
 
CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 63 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN ITS 
 FORM OF TO-DAY 
 
 I. I VENTURED in a recent work-'- to advance the 
 suggestion that the method of philosophical argu- 
 ment had greatly changed from Kant's day onward, 
 A direct conspectus and collection of the signifi- 
 cance of experience in all its forms — an analysis 
 and synthesis of implications — appeared, I thought, 
 to have taken the place of deductive reasoning 
 from postulated principles. By the side of this 
 observation I now place another and a kindred one, 
 to the effect that'metaphysic has been much more 
 widely interesting in the current and popular sense 
 of the term since Kant's day than before. If we 
 are asked how to rank Kant himself with reference 
 to this transformation, it would be natural to reply 
 that general and popular interest attached itself to 
 the second and third critiques, as contrasted with 
 the first. 
 
 From that epoch — the epoch of the " Critique of 
 Practical Reason " — the tendency became operative 
 to seek clues to the nature of the universe in the 
 more concrete ranges of human experience ; and 
 it is this tendency which is the source of that 
 
 * "Implication," etc., Macmillan, p. 109. 
 
64 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 specific meeting of extremes to-day which we are 
 here attempting to trace. 
 
 It is a curious point that precisely the opposite 
 antithesis has also been affirmed. Till Kant, it 
 has been said, philosophy was a matter of general 
 interest : with Kant it became the monopoly of 
 scholars and pedants. I suppose the truth is that 
 such men as Locke and Leibniz wrote as men of 
 the world for a public possessing a highly literary 
 and general polite culture, and in touch with 
 questions which were stimulating to common 
 sense, or were concerned with matters of religious 
 orthodoxy ; while the immense elaboration of a 
 new learning in the post-Kantian movement and 
 its successors, although it began with an appeal to 
 universal experience, by that very fact made 
 necessary a new order of devoted students, absorbed 
 in intellectual labour. Their own efforts were, in 
 many ways, from their very magnitude, alarming 
 and deterrent to the public, but they contained 
 within them, as I believe and am maintaining, the 
 enormously broad foundations out of which there 
 were to spring the solid, and yet delicate and subtle, 
 enquiries which were to guide the humanistic 
 culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 
 
 I quote a sentence in which an Italian neo- 
 idealist strikingly portrays the contrast. We may 
 discount, on the ground of our English^ experience, 
 his conception of the universal triumph of idealism; 
 but if we think, instead, of participation in the 
 work of speculative philosophy, what he says is 
 remarkable and true, " In those days [of Hegel 
 
 ^ I mean by English what comes to us in English. 
 
in] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 65 
 
 and earlier] the cause of idealism was entrusted to 
 great advocates, to men of genius, and the success 
 of the idea could not be dissociated from the names 
 and the fortunes of its champions ; whereas to-day 
 we have a single chorus of a thousand voices, 
 dominating all conceited clamour and shrinking 
 rejection. To-day idealism is no longer Greeic, or 
 German, or English, or Italian, or French ; ideal- 
 ism is universal, like the philosophy of which it is 
 the most perfect expression."^ If we read this not 
 of idealism in the strict sense, but of the effort to 
 contribute to speculative philosophy from all 
 regions of place and of experience, it says, I think, 
 no more than the truth. 
 
 " Experience " — it is worth while to pause for 
 a moment upon this word. Forty years ago the 
 idealist logician found no irony too savage to use 
 of " the school of experience." Yet, even then, 
 in other channels than those which joined a narrow 
 theory with Locke and Hume, the term was carry- 
 ing with it a pregnant significance, and it was not 
 to be long before the same great logician and con- 
 troversialist made this very word the banner of his 
 theory of the universe,^ and another writer of world- 
 wide reputation drew upon the tradition of the 
 mystic and of the religious experience-meeting in 
 devoting one of his best-known studies to " The 
 Varieties of Religious Experience." The change of 
 usage marked a new interest and a new analysis ; 
 and our English word perhaps gained in weight 
 and vitality from the accidental absence of any 
 
 * Rinaldo Nazzari, " Principi di Gnoseologia," p. xvi. 
 2 Bradley's " Appearance and Reality,' 
 
 5 
 
66 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 other to serve as a current equivalent for Erleben 
 and Erlebniss. 
 
 And so when we look round us to-day for 
 appreciations of the unity of man with himself, 
 and his fellows, and nature, and the universe, and 
 God, we find not so much an appeal to abstract 
 argument as a consensus from innumerable sources 
 based on a subtle study and appreciation of the 
 emotional continuities by which man betrays his 
 incompleteness in all these directions, and affirms 
 instinctively and emotionally the connection he 
 cannot break. The world of instinct, and emotion 
 is prayed in aid of the world of sense-perception 
 and experiment, and if the impulse to analyse the 
 conditions of an' occurrence is one part of our 
 world-logic, the impulse to feel and respond to its 
 significance is another. The very " universal " 
 itself — the life-blood of rational thought — is 
 Illustrated by comparison with the habitual re- 
 sponse of an animal to conditions that recur in its 
 environment.^ 
 
 Starting, then, from the idea that experiences in 
 the way of emotion, being attached to instincts or 
 impulses around which they cluster, can be in- 
 dications or bases of inference, or symptoms, if 
 we like, pointing to connections with the world, 
 characteristic of human nature, we find stress laid 
 on such revelations all round the scientific and 
 philosophical horizon. The matter is so plain 
 that a couple of distinct examples will suffice. 
 
 * Bradley, " Essays " p. 298. Alexander, " Space, etc.," 
 I, 235, n. "Principle," p. 40, n. 
 
Ill] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 67 
 
 The supersession of the "ontologicial argument"^ 
 by an appreciation of human impulse and emotion 
 is definitely urged by the leading realist, Professor 
 Alexander, to whose work I have appealed so often. 
 The instinctive appetite or demand for God, in 
 his view, has run on separate rails from the recog- 
 nition, for example, of morality ever since the 
 beginning of human life. It is a proof of the 
 reality of Deity,. in the same sort of sense in which 
 hunger is a proof of the existence of food, or the 
 sexual impulse proof of the existence of possible 
 mates. Of course obvious exceptions take place : 
 you may starve ; you may die unmated. But in 
 rerum natura an instinct implies its object ; and if 
 you find a special emotional impulse, such as that 
 of worship and religion, which pervades all sorts 
 of particular experiences, but maintains its unique 
 suggestion and demand throughout them all, you 
 can hardly help recognising the object of this 
 emotion as at least some peculiar feature of the 
 world. I need not explain Professor Alexander's 
 special doctrine of the nisus of the universe 
 towards Deity, a quality which in a certain sense 
 never comes to be actual. It is, as I understand, 
 the implication of the human body and mind in 
 such a nisus, the response in which from the 
 beginning it goes out towards a something greater 
 than itself, which supplies the nerve of his 
 argument. 
 
 Thus the realist of to-day recognises religion as 
 a significant experience. . He does not become an 
 
 ' Cf. in general for the same line of thought " Value," 
 p. 252. 
 
68 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 ontologist in the sense of proving God's existence 
 by abstract argument, and demanding that religious 
 experience shall follow on the proof He finds 
 Deity — something unique in the experienced world 
 that demands a special response — In the religious 
 experience, and, bringing it together with other 
 indications of the same order, Is led to recognise 
 in these various aspects the unity of the world. 
 The experience needs to be completed by reflec- 
 tion, but the experience is the root of the matter. 
 The speciality and separateness ab initio of the 
 emotion in question is of importance In regard to 
 problems which we shall have to raise in the end. 
 " No Irreverence is Implied in asserting that in its 
 elementary character It is less closely allied to 
 morality than to the uneasiness or sensitiveness 
 which all persons feel in some degree, and some In 
 a more pronounced degree, in the presence of 
 natural mysterious occurrences, like the presenti- 
 ment of a coming storm, etc."^ This distinctness 
 of the sentiment of religion and the sense of moral 
 value is a familiar fact,* and Professor Alexander 
 notes a striking comment of Dr. Johnson upon it.^ 
 It begins In its own right, though from its nature 
 it has an intimate relation, but one never passing 
 into identity, with morality. This fact, as I said 
 above, will prove important. 
 
 - The account thus developed of the religious 
 consciousness seems to come to much the same 
 
 1 " Space, etc.," II. 403. ' 
 
 2 Cf. "Value," p. 140, Lecture VIII. 
 
 ^ " A wicked fellow is the most pious when he takes ,to it ; 
 he'll beat you all at piety," in A., II. 405. 
 
in] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 69 
 
 in Alexander the realist, in James the radical 
 empiricist, and in Bradley the absolutist. James 
 concluded from his data that in religion "the 
 conscious person is continuous with a wider self 
 through which saving experiences come."^ And 
 nothing could be stronger than Professor Alex- 
 ander's own sense and expression of the continuity 
 — the " feelers " which we throw out^ — which links 
 us with the universe as a whole. Identity of minds 
 and wills he cannot admit, but the pervading nexus 
 of finite bodies in the space-time of which they are 
 made serves to justify what practically amounts to 
 the same observations as are furnished by other 
 students of religion. It is worth noting that such 
 students find " a general sense of something 
 spiritual, not definite, but vaguely animating the 
 world," in a preanimistic stage of some savage 
 theologies.^ 
 
 It is noticeable that not only the students of 
 facts of religion, such as the author last cited, 
 unite with realists and absolutists in estimating the 
 significance of immediate experience of religion, 
 but there march with them the whole great army 
 of the mystics, who have indeed a side of their 
 nature strongly akin to realism. When we find 
 their insight expressed in a highly abstract form, 
 as in great theologians to whom I have referred 
 elsewhere,* it seems, indeed, to be something of 
 an intermediate stage between the kind of ex- 
 perience we have been considering and the ontb- 
 
 * Cited in "Space, etc.," II. 376. ^ Loc. cit. 
 ^ Ibid., p. 367 (Marett). 
 
 * "Value," p. 253 (Westcott and J. H. Newman). 
 
70 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 logical nexus itself. But the normal mystical 
 experience — the experience which James describes, 
 and which, in the doctrine of the mystical body of 
 the community, links Plato to St. Paul and 
 St. Paul to Hegel — is really a universal character- 
 istic of human nature, and makes us feel our 
 self-transcendence and continuity with the greater 
 world as an inevitable factor of our being. 
 
 2. Only, once more, the neo-idealist, while he 
 apprehends the solidarity of the social self, re- 
 pudiates the teaching of mysticism, and holds 
 religion to be a myth, destined to be absorbed 
 in the philosophical consciousness. Instead of an 
 enhancement of the individual being, he sees in 
 the self-transcendent experience an annihilation 
 of it, and substitutes for the true insight,^ " If 
 God is not, then I am nothing," as a conclusion on 
 the mystical basis, the spurious and non-mystical 
 tenet, " If God is, then I am not." The reason, 
 as I have explained elsewhere, I believe to lie in 
 the equation of thought with thinking and of 
 thinking with reality, which is another aspect 
 of the rejection of all transcendence, extended 
 not merely to what goes beyond experience, but 
 to what goes beyond immanence, as must be the 
 case with all transcendence of the finite Individual. 
 Thus there Is no room for a real which Is more 
 than the succession of events apprehended In 
 discursive thought,^ however much alleged to be 
 a unity. 
 
 ^ Reviews by author of Gentile's "Spirito" and "Discorsi" 
 {Mind, January, 192 1). Cf. Bradley, "Appearance," p. 450, n. 
 2 See Chap. II., supra. 
 
Ill] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 71 
 
 3. On the previous page we saw the experience 
 of religion in its affinity to the experience of 
 sociality. Here again we meet with an argu- 
 ment of the type we are investigating. It has 
 often been pointed out that our belief in the 
 existence of other minds than our own is not 
 well accounted for by the mere analogy which 
 goes from the behaviour of our bodies given in 
 connection with our minds, to the existence of 
 similar minds as indicated by the behaviour of 
 their bodies. The order of cognition so sup- 
 posed is not the right one ; we do not begin from 
 our own bodies (the perception would have to be 
 external, and this comes very late) : we learn of 
 ourselves from our acquaintance with others. So 
 that at least we must go, as Professor Alexander 
 does,^ to the impulse of sociality, in which our 
 experience of the qualities In which others are 
 correlative to us is immediate and direct. It is 
 not that they behave like us, but that they directly 
 respond to us/participating in the situations of our 
 world. In our response to them, as in their 
 response to us, we directly exhibit and perceive 
 the social continuity, or what has been called the 
 consciousness of kind. It seems plain that animals 
 possess this, and a sense-affection on which it 
 depends has In some cases been detected.^ This 
 
 1 "Space, etc.," II. 32. 
 
 2 In the case of ants. Bethe in A., II. 306, n. But I 
 believe that any animal, at least any higher animal, is readily 
 aware of any other animal. Sporting experience tells one 
 that while no non-animal noise nor motion is certain to alarm 
 an animal, any motion referring to it, however slight, is 
 
72 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 would be an instinctive anticipation of what in 
 man and perhaps the higher animals asserts itself 
 as an imperious need of a nature incomplete in its 
 absence. Gregariousness is more sensuous than 
 sociality. 
 
 The distinction between responsiveness and 
 imitation, as grounds of apprehension of other 
 minds, on which Professor Alexander well insists, 
 has not seemed to all enquirers to be quite the 
 fundamental point. It is to be argued by Pro- 
 fessor Stout ^ in his long-hoped-for GifFord Lectures 
 that none of these clues would be operative as 
 clues to the existence of other minds if it were 
 not for what I have called by anticipation, and 
 with reference to his chosen phraseology, a sense 
 of incompleteness on the part of the finite indi- 
 vidual, such as ultimately can only be satisfied by 
 the conception of a universal mind, but which, as 
 I gather, he considers to be the only explanation 
 of the individual's, in the first instance, coming 
 by the thought of any subjective life other than 
 his own. An indication in which this conception 
 operates as " a primitive tendency to apprehend it 
 [the indication] as evidence of the presence of a 
 mind on which it depends " he finds in the teleo- 
 logical order of nature. I have insisted above on 
 my strong conviction that the higher animals 
 display a quite uncanny sagacity in discriminating 
 an intentional movement, such as may be con- 
 detected by it with marvellous sensitiveness. I think that 
 their discernment of teleological movement is almost miracu- 
 lous. 
 
 * Syllabus, II. x. 
 
m] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 73 
 
 cerned with their momentary safety, from any 
 noise or motion which is mechanical and in no 
 way at the moment directed towards them, though 
 it may be meant to alarm them, like a mechanical 
 rattle in an orchard. Partridges, I believe, will 
 nest on a railway embankment, and so forth. 
 
 I should venture, with reference both to Pro- 
 fessor Alexander's view and that of Professor 
 Stout, to advert to a feature — I can hardly call it 
 a principle — of primitive or rudimentary logic 
 which I have noticed in a recent work.^ It is 
 this : that to a simple mind an apprehension of 
 unity, constancy, or identity, which' is sane and 
 true, may never at all pass through the stage of 
 dissatisfaction ; as, in the example which I was 
 discussing, the inference, "The sun will rise to- 
 morrow," would, I urged, be most correctly 
 represented by the question, " Why not ?" The 
 thing comes to the mind as a whole ; a special 
 reason would be required for discriminating against 
 any part of it, and no such reason is discerned, as 
 indeed, in the case in question, there is none to 
 discern. 
 
 So it may be with our incompleteness and our 
 direct responsiveness. Our world comes to us, 
 I take it, all pari passu as a solid, living, and 
 single experience. We lack, not a reason for 
 believing in other minds, but a reason for dis- 
 criminating, in the animated world which includes 
 us, objects which do not behave as minds. It 
 never occurs to us to think of such a thing till 
 scepticism puts it into our heads, and although 
 
 * " Implication," p. 64. 
 
74 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 we have then to admit that we do not directly 
 participate in the immediate experiences of other 
 minds, yet there is so much which they possess 
 in which we do continuously and obviously par- 
 ticipate that we find it an extraordinary effort to 
 separate ourselves from them for theoretical con- 
 sideration. This is why, I think, the accounts 
 of inferential process on the subject are so 
 constrained and so little vraisemblables. The fact 
 is, there is a good ground of inference, as in the 
 case of sunrise ; but there is not, as a rule or in 
 the beginning, any inferential process at all. The 
 unity just is and persists, until gradually put on 
 its trial by reflection. But we may fairly take 
 this condition of consciousness as equivalent both 
 to Professor Stout's sense of incompleteness and 
 to Professor Alexander's sense of inherent par- 
 ticipation in responsiveness. We do not readily 
 discriminate^ our own character as conscious beings 
 from that of our world, and if we are forced to 
 make the attempt, we say, with the Greek 
 philosopher, it is inherently impossible. Man 
 is a social animal. All we have been doing is to 
 repeat this old story in some of the myriad forms 
 in which modern research subtilises, traces, and 
 corroborates it. Among them was the directly 
 common world of mind as Professor Hocking 
 and others presented it to us in an earlier chapter. 
 Modern science and philosophy, 1 have urged 
 elsewhere, offer detailed verification of what to 
 the Greeks was a genuine hazard and lofty 
 adventure of reason — belief in rationality and 
 ' Caird, "Evolution of Religion," I. p. 214. 
 
Ill] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 75 
 
 morality as the nature of things. So the neo- 
 realist, the man of comparative science, and the 
 empiricist, are everywhere at work to-day accord- 
 ing to the method which thought tends to follow 
 in its temporal development, building the founda- 
 tions of that speculative philosophy whose super- 
 structure already exists. Of course, in doing so, 
 they immensely enrich and effectively amend it. 
 
 4. In the following chapter, digressing for a 
 moment from the philosophy of to-day, we will 
 attempt to do justice, which is now rarely done, 
 to the inherent value of the principle which the 
 ontological argument expresses, and which runs 
 through the philosophical positions we have been 
 considering. After all, an essence is an incomplete 
 being. Every essence has in some degree a claim 
 and nisus to existence. 
 
76 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 ESSENCE AND EXISTENCE 
 
 Is it possible to make a valid inference from 
 essence to existence ? I have always been uneasy 
 at the treatment this question has received, whether 
 from Kant, from those whom he criticised, or from 
 those who have resumed the defence of the onto- 
 logical argument since his day. I do not expect, 
 of course, to say anything new in proof or disproof 
 of the being of God ; but I do think that 
 an appreciative survey of the problem may be 
 helpful in removing a common prejudice that error 
 is more natural than truth. 
 
 I. In the hope of attracting the reader's interest, 
 and showing at once the sort of thing I want to 
 insist upon, I will take some cases almost at 
 random, I understand " from essence to existence " 
 as covering what we also express in " from idea to 
 fact." Our idea is the essence, or all we can get 
 to stand for it. 
 
 An incident is in my mind — I cannot say in 
 my memory, for I cannot date it or attach it to 
 any train of events. But suppose that if, e.g., I 
 think of So-and-so, a man of my own age or less, 
 I find that I think of him as dead. I don't believe 
 I have dreamed of his death ; if I had, it would 
 be connected with some night, or with the idea of 
 
IV] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 77 
 
 awaking and recollecting it. I can trace no fictitious 
 suggestion of it ; no confusion, e.g., with the death 
 of somebody else. I may have inferred it unreflect- 
 ively from not having heard of the person for a 
 long time ; but the impression seems too special 
 for that. I conclude, in some cases where the above 
 exclusions are decisive, " It is probably true ; I 
 must have heard or read it and forgotten the cir- 
 cumstance." To some people this is not an un- 
 common experience. They are bona fide doubtful 
 whether they dreamed the thing or self-suggested 
 it, or not ; and the decision is mostly made by 
 reflecting whether an authentic communication of 
 the fact can find a place as an incident in their 
 lives : if they can say, " I might probably have 
 heard of it from X when I met him at A," they 
 will decide, " I fear it is true," 
 
 Well, you may say, but this depends on a bit 
 of evidence you have forgotten, not on the 
 character of the thought. I think it depends 
 largely on an ad hoc uniqueness in the thought, 
 an incapacity to explain it away. But I will not 
 argue the point, but will pass to other cases. 
 
 I find in my mind a very clever saying, or a few 
 quite first-rate verses, and have not the least notion 
 where they came from. Again, I might have 
 dreamed them, or made them up without knowing 
 it. But, not being Coleridge, I rule out that 
 possibility. Then they came from " somewhere " — 
 that is, their nature or quality proves directly that 
 they have an existence beyond my mind. 
 
 One has heard of a rule in emending an author's 
 text, " The harder reading is the better " — i.e., its 
 
78 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 nature is such that it is less likely to have been 
 invented. You infer from its nature to its factual 
 origin. 
 
 So in historical criticism. The alleged circum- 
 navigators of Africa said they saw the sun to the 
 north, and Herodotus did not believe them. But 
 a critic of that day might have argued : " What 
 could make them invent such a fact .'' From what 
 mistake could it arise ? Probably it was true." 
 
 Or you meet a man with highly distinctive 
 qualities, and you say : " That was Goethe or the 
 devil"; "That was Person or the devil" — i.e., 
 the nature of the fact leaves you no alternative as 
 to what its individual existence is. And you can't 
 be wrong where there is no alternative. This is a 
 point in the theory of error. 
 
 There are many other cases where you accept 
 things as true because their nature seems to ex- 
 clude common imagination, confusion, or bias in 
 invention — e.g,^ facts admitted by a hostile witness 
 or historian, or extraordinarily circumstantial and 
 coherent quality in a narrative, as in Defoe's stories. 
 In all these you tend to go straight from the 
 quality or idea of the incident to its reality. 
 
 2. Then there is a somewhat deeper set of 
 considerations. 
 
 There are irrepressible ideas. 
 
 Consider such a judgment as " Freedom is the 
 quality of man." You cannot establish it by an 
 appeal to " Quod semper quod ubique " — at least, 
 not without an analysis which in very many in- 
 stances would be suspected of special pleading. 
 Still, it seems to carry with it a guarantee of its 
 
IV] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 79 
 
 existence as a fact beyond the mind which thinks 
 it. It is not merely what has been called^ the 
 spurious case of the ontological argument, as when 
 the idea of anger in my mind involves to some 
 slight extent the existence of anger in it. It in- 
 cludes this case, for where the idea of human 
 freedom is present there must always be in some 
 degree the fact of freedom as a character of the 
 mind. But I mean something more than this. 
 What comes of itself, I find that I have set down ^ 
 as an obvious truth, is taken as real, just like what 
 comes everywhere. And I did not notice that my 
 language suggested the familiar phrase " causa 
 sui," We might here connect existence with 
 essence through power or value. A thought 
 which throws so much light and develops so much 
 force must take you, in virtue of its essence or 
 nature, to real existence of that character beyond 
 any one particular mind which thinks it. It is of 
 • no use to say you may be mistaken in it. You 
 may make plenty of mistakes about it. But the 
 quality itself shines by its own light ; you might 
 say it generates existence appropriate to it. It 
 cannot be a mistake for something else. 
 
 So with religion ; you can explain It wrongly, 
 but what you cannot do is to explain it away. 
 One might again refer to the spurious ontological 
 Argument, and say the thought of religion in my 
 mind proves at the outside the fact of religion in 
 my mind; not any such fact beyond my mind. 
 But I doubt that. It seems again to be an irre- 
 
 ^ Bradley, " Appearance," p, 395. 
 2 " Theory of State," pp. 119-izo. 
 
8o THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 pressible thought, to come of itself as something 
 fundamental, and not to be derivable from any 
 confusion or compounding of experience, and 
 therefoi^e to be a feature of the world. 
 
 3. If we are allowed to reach such a point as 
 this the vista opens out and branches. On the 
 one hand, we are led to think of the categories, 
 which seem also to be irrepressible thoughts, and 
 to indicate characters of reality beyond the par- 
 ticular mind to which they occur. 
 I On the other hand, there is opened up to us the 
 whole world of finite fact and existence. You 
 cannot go straight from the nature or essence, the 
 iconception of a finite thing, to its actual existence; 
 ;that is quite plain. But there can be no proof or 
 (presumption of actual existence which is not 
 \ fitted and attached to the essence or nature in 
 question. This is the whole problem of science — 
 to establish proof or explanation precisely relevant 
 to essence. No existence can be established which 
 does not precisely fit an essence. Any essence, 
 nature, idea which claims to involve existence 
 must fit into the world of existence as a key fits 
 into a lock. 
 
 Spinoza, indeed, distinguishes sharply between 
 the cause of existence and the cause of essence. 
 " One man is cause of existence of another, but 
 not of his essence, for this is an eternal truth. If 
 you destroy the existence of one man, that does 
 not affect the existence of another ; but if the 
 essence of one man could be destroyed — i.e., made 
 false — that would abolish the essence of the other." ^ 
 1 "Ethics," I. xvii., S. 
 
IV] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 8i 
 
 Mr. Bradley, with reference to the possibility of 
 making truth, has discussed the limits of what can, 
 strictly speaking, be made} You cannot make, I 
 understand him to conclude, anything but events 
 in the way of existence ; you cannot make the 
 principles or sequences of nature ; you can make 
 beautiful things or true propositions ; but you 
 cannot make things beautiful or propositions true. 
 Here we seem to have a severance something like 
 that of essence and existence or a thing's nature and 
 the cause of its becoming. But we must remem- 
 ber that if the two are, as we suggest, continuous, 
 there must be an element of non-temporal revela- 
 tion in existence, as there is a need for tem- 
 poral duration in essence. " A man produces 
 another man, but not the essence of man " ; but 
 the essence of man would be different, though 
 inappreciably in degree, if what the one man 
 produced in producing the other were different. 
 ^ An essence is not a concept, but the spirit of a < 
 Lliving world, and can only be an eternal truth as 
 /such a spirit ; and though a partial given existence ! 
 ) does not determine it, yet it is only in existence — 
 ' the full complement of existence — that it can be 
 fully revealed. All causation has an element of 
 revelation ; if it were not so, we could make any- 
 thing into anything. 
 
 Thought involves existence in proportion to its 
 coherence with the world, and this depends on the 
 nature of the thought, how far it is a straight 
 reading of reality, a pure deliverance of mind, 
 without confusion. 
 
 1 "Essays," p, 338. 
 
82 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 4. What is the common element of such cases 
 as these ? Something like this, surely, that essence 
 involves existence where affirmation is free from 
 confusion ; that is to say, the sources of error in 
 affirmation are definite. Apart from them, there 
 is no gulf fixed between thought and truth. On 
 the contrary, in Spinoza's words, it is, prima facie, 
 of the nature of a thinking being to frame true or 
 j, adequate thoughts.^ It is nonsense, he urges, to say 
 ," that the mind can feel, and in many ways perceive, 
 what is neither itself, nor existing things, but only 
 things which are neither in it nor anywhere else ; 
 that is, that the mind can by its own power create 
 sensations and ideas which are not of things ; so 
 that, to some extent, it would be considered as 
 a God." 2 
 
 If you can get the mind's thought pure — that is, 
 as it is in its own nature, and free from certain 
 definite defects — you must possess in it a true 
 characterisation of reality. For this is the nature 
 of thought, to characterise reality. Its doing so 
 is not exceptional ; it is inherent ; it is what we 
 mean by thinking. 
 
 This way of looking at the thoughts I have 
 mentioned rests on the common feature that they 
 are " clearly and distinctly " apprehended. There 
 is, or it seemed to me that there is, in all of them 
 something that makes them central or unique or 
 apprehensible in their own right, not as an inter- 
 pretation put upon something in each case which 
 includes them. It is strange, no doubt, to talk of 
 a quality as causa sui, as I almost did in the case 
 1 "T. de I. E.,-" p. 25 (V. VI. and L.). 2 /^,v., p. 20. 
 
IV] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 83 
 
 of freedom ; but the analogy, thus indicated, with 
 the old notion of " substance," in which "essence 
 involves existence," appears to be real. 
 
 From this way of looking at the whole question 
 two considerations arise. 
 
 (i.) First, that the problem how we can attain 
 truth and certainty may be very instructively 
 approached and handled by treating error as the 
 questionable feature, and as that which demands 
 explanation, whereas the affirmations of thought 
 are in principle and prima facie true. In this case 
 we start from the conception that essence, nature, 
 or idea involves existence and account for error 
 by reservations upon it. 
 
 (ii.) Secondly, (a) that the advocates of the 
 ontological argument for the existence of God, 
 before and after Kant, have weakened their general 
 logical position by restricting it to a single case, 
 although they have gained for that case an appear- 
 ance of uniqueness ; (;S) that Kant's attitude, on 
 the other hand, is not tenable ultimately and in 
 principle. I will say a few words on each of 
 these points. 
 
 (i.) The principle that all thinking claims to 
 determine a reality other than the thought seems 
 to be fundamentally one with the principle that" 
 essence involves existence, and with the principle 
 that clear and distinct apprehensions are always 
 true. In the. first of these three shapes it has been 
 recognised as the basis of the theory of error, and 
 its continuity with the principle of the ontological 
 argument has been indicated by Professor Stout^ 
 
 1 " Personal Idealism," p. 36. 
 
84 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 in a discussion of that subject. You cannot be in 
 error about a reality which leaves no opening for 
 
 j misapprehension ; and you must always be thinking 
 
 i about some reality. In the second and third shapes 
 the principle needs much reservation and explana- 
 tion, and I suppose that, prima facie, few thinkers 
 would accept it in these forms to-day. For an 
 apprehension may be clear and distinct in certain 
 respects, or under certain presuppositions only, and 
 when we attempt to assert it without qualification, 
 we may find it no longer clear. And so the argu- 
 \ ment that essence involves existence has been 
 restricted, both before Kant's time, and in the 
 rehabilitation of the ontological argument after his 
 criticism, to the being which is perfect or com- 
 
 \ plete, so that to deny its existence was like denying 
 
 ! that of the universe, 
 
 ! (ii.) (a) On this restriction, which was our second 
 point, there is much that is suggestive in the 
 variations of Spinoza's attitude. He passes from 
 extreme to extreme, but they meet in a most 
 instructive way. 
 
 His primary conception seems to be that if you 
 can get the mind thinking purely according to its 
 own nature, the ideas it so forms will be clear and 
 distinct, and therefore true and adequate.^ In 
 agreement with this view he separates^ the laws 
 of memory and associative imagination from the 
 laws proper of the mind, so that the ideas which 
 come by those processes are governed by other 
 laws than those of the mind as such, and are 
 confused and partial, not true and adequate, 
 1 " T. de I. E.," passim. ^ Ibid., p. 29^ 
 
IV] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 85 
 
 But, as it seems, at an earlier time he had 
 advanced a doctrine which was strangely but 
 suggestively the extreme opposite of this. As the 
 pure and characteristic issue of the mind, know- 
 ledge, or thought in his mature theory is above 
 all things action. Action, activity, is for him in 
 his mature theory the note of all that is true or 
 good in the mind's deliverances. But this earlier 
 attitude was, in words, just the opposite. " L'acte 
 de connaitre est une pure passion, de sorte que 
 nous n'affirmons ni nions jamais quoi que ce soit 
 de quelque chose ; mais c'est la chose elle-meme 
 qui en nous affirme ou nie quelque chose d'elle- 
 meme."^ He goes on to explain truth and false- 
 hood in terms of this idea. Falsehood is only a 
 partial affirmation. 
 
 Now this is a very striking and important view. 
 The world in us /r a judgment ; it does affirm or 
 deny characteristics about itself; our will can not 
 affect it. I, certainly, have constantly found 
 myself driven to this mode of statement, not 
 knowing that Spinoza had made use of it even in 
 an early work. 
 
 And we can see how in essence Spinoza is 
 saying here much the same as he came to say later 
 in terms of the other extreme. The pure action 
 or the pure passion — it does not matter much 
 which you say. The pure mind, or the pure 
 nature of things — it does not matter much which 
 you say. The point is that nothing arbitrary, 
 no will, nor confusion, nor partial perception, is to 
 be admitted. 
 
 1 Janet, " Korte Verhandelung," p, 90, 
 
86 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 There is another striking saying, which brings 
 the two attitudes together in the sense which I 
 have just ascribed to them. "The ancients never 
 conceived, as we do here, a mind acting accord- 
 ing to certain laws, and as a sort of spiritual auto- 
 maton."^ Obviously his meaning is throughout 
 that the mind, uninterfered with by confusion or 
 defect of perception, goes a way of its own, and 
 that the right way. 
 ' We can trace on this basis the nature of the 
 I restriction under which Spinoza asserts that 
 essence involves existence. 
 
 Essence involves existence in case of the totality 
 of being, because the affirmation of the totality of 
 being cannot arise by any error, but is the pre- 
 condition of every possible affirmation, whether 
 true or false.^ 
 
 And, oddly enough, but quite consistently, 
 essence for him can involve non-existence^ — i.e., 
 in things which are self-contradictory, 'the chimaera, 
 or the square circle. Evil, on the other hand, has 
 no essence — is a mere partial perception, within 
 the essence of something else.^ 
 
 Essence, then, controls existence in the case of 
 necessary things and of impossible things alike. 
 
 1 " T. de I. E.," p. 29. 
 
 ' See Stout, " Personal Idealism," p. 35^. 
 
 ^ In the case of the chimaera "respectu implicantiae 
 essentiae suae " (" Cogit. Met.," I. iii., p. 4). " Implicantiae " 
 may = the hindrance presented by or to its essence, but it 
 makes no difference. At any rate it is an eternal truth that a 
 chimaera cannot exist ("T. de I. E.," p. 17). 
 
 * Cf. " Ethics," I. viii., S. 2 : " quocirca modificationum," 
 etc. 
 
IV] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 87 
 
 But in the case of possible things it does not 
 involve existence or non-existence or duration. 
 
 And yet Spinoza is clear that possibility is only 
 a defect of our understanding^ ; if so, one would 
 have expected that whether we knew it or not 
 the thought or nature of anything must fit or not 
 fit, like key to lock, the conditions of its existence 
 or non-existence. 
 
 The reason for Spinoza's negative attitude to 
 the nexus of thought and being in finite things 
 seems to me to have been that he followed the 
 traditional notion of essence, and did not treat it 
 as the fully determinate mode or completely in- 
 dividual conatus in which every singular thing 
 consisted,-- ,, 
 
 We;,Q^ke}take, for instance, his argument that f 
 the definition of a thing does not determine the 
 number in which such things exist. " Suppose," 
 he says, "that there exist twenty men and no 
 more, all told, past and present. To give a 
 reason (explanation) why they exist, it is not 
 enough to give the cause of human nature in 
 general {in genere) ; but it will be necessary in 
 addition to show a cause why neither more nor 
 less than twenty exist, for there must be a cause 
 of existence for each one. Now this cause cannot 
 be contained in actual human nature since the 
 true definition of man does not involve the 
 number twenty." So the cause must be external. 
 It is only substance whose essence involves its 
 
 existence,^ 
 
 1 " Cogit. Met.," I. iii., p. 7. 
 
 2 « Ethics," I. viii., S. . 
 
88 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 To illustrate what seems the difficulty in this 
 view I quote some sentences expressing what I 
 thought obvious when I first approached this 
 point. It may have been just a mistake on my 
 part ; but the definiteness of the opposition, I 
 think, is suggestive. 
 
 " It is obvious that in every concept the in- 
 tension dictates the extension. And the extension 
 so dictated must, as an aggregate of instances, be 
 theoretically at least capable of representation by 
 a number, or, if not, it must be in conflict with 
 any and every number." "The intension even 
 of man, colour, gold, or other ordinary general 
 names, must ultimately and theoretically imply 
 a finite numerical aggregate of instances. This 
 number, which in such cases as the above we can 
 never know, could be of no possible interest to 
 us were it not that it [in principle] affects the 
 import [z'.f., the truth or relevance] of any other 
 number by which any such concept may be ad hoc 
 determined."^ 
 
 The opposition between these two ideas de- 
 pends on the degree in which essence is conceived 
 as abstract and self-contained — a concept in genere 
 — and how far, on the other hand, it is regarded 
 as a character which must ultimately reach out 
 and establish connection with the real world, as 
 key with lock, or, of course, definitely reject and 
 be rejected by it, like Spinoza's chimaera. On the 
 one hand, you cannot expect to unravel in detail 
 the chain of causation which has brought man into 
 existence and determined his growth and multi- 
 1 "Logic" (2 ed.), I., p. 52. 
 
TV] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 89 
 
 plication throughout the world. On the other 
 hand, it seems certain that man's development 
 and expansion in the world cannot have been 
 determined otherwise than by his nature, of which 
 a characteristic part is its adaptability to causes 
 which could not but promote it here and could 
 not but restrict it there. 
 
 The negative conditions are obvious. Man, 
 colour, triangle ; the thought of their nature, 
 extended into the world, must reveal at least 
 some conditions under which they respectively 
 cannot exist. No organic kingdom, no light, no 
 space ; so far in each case the existence of their 
 particulars is excluded. And from this considera- 
 tion to that of positive conditions is only a step. 
 Man cannot but exist where Nature produces him, 
 and in as many particulars as she produces. It 
 is the dullest of anthropomorphisms to suggest 
 that the universe cannot determine him in respect 
 of number because we cannot calculate it. When 
 we know what n thing is, we know in principle 
 whether and where it exists and how many of 
 it there are. If we say we know what a sovereign 
 is, and not how many there are in the world, 
 then we do not really know what a sovereign is. 
 Its production is necessarily relative to its nature, 
 to the need for a thing of that particular nature, 
 to the conditions of its supply, and to the degree 
 of its wear and tear. If you do not understand 
 all these things in their comiectign,_you have not 
 the complete thought of the sovereign ; if you 
 do, you know how many sovereigns there are. 
 If it is true that there is a warp in space, straight 
 
go THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 lines do not exist, I take it, with the simplicity 
 and universality which we used to ascribe to 
 them. I presume they can still be represented 
 somehow ; but they are not the simple data we 
 took them for.'^ Their nature demands another 
 type of existence or being than that which we 
 used to ascribe to them. 
 
 (j8) So Kant's criticism of the ontological argu- 
 ment consists in generalising the restriction of it, 
 which I believe all its great advocates, like 
 Spinoza, have accepted. Essence does not involve 
 Existence in finite or created things. They all, 
 I'l believe, say this. And Kant only takes them at 
 ; their word, and further argues as if what is true 
 'of finite things is true of everything conceivable. 
 But in ultimate principle, I have tried to suggest, 
 the alleged separation is not true even for finite 
 things. You cannot stop understanding the 
 nature of man just at the point where it will take 
 you into considering how and how far such a 
 nature is and must be produced and sustained by 
 such a world. The pure causa fiendi which con- 
 veys none of the essence — the external cause to 
 which existence and not essence is due^ — is a 
 self-contradiction. A cause is not the same as 
 a reason ; but there can be no cause which does 
 not enter into some reason, and a reason precisely 
 means a condition relevant to essence. A house 
 in all its details exists in correspondence — lock 
 and key correspondence — with some form ' of 
 human nature. It is of its essence so to exist. 
 
 1 Cf. my "Logic" (2 ed.), II., p. 230. 
 ^ See above, p. 80. 
 
IV] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 91 
 
 If it does not, its essence is in self-contradiction. 
 Its raison iitre is wanting. And the raison 
 d'etre is the central essence. 
 
 " In a sense particular things are infinite and 
 eternal [in Spinoza's view] — /.?., vi causae cui in- 
 hasrent."^ But then, as I understand, they are no 
 longer particular things. The characters of the 
 infinite and eternal essence do not reveal them- 
 selves within the individual existence. The 
 separation of these two worlds is one with the 
 restriction upon the ontological argument which 
 we have been discussing. Spinoza recognises that 
 a separation of individual essences from each other 
 and from the world is the principle which forbids 
 essences to involve existence. For example (" Short 
 Treatise," Janet, p. 15), "cependant dans aucune 
 des substances que nous savons exister dans la 
 nature, en tant que nous les consid6rons comme 
 substances s6par6es, nous ne voyons pas qu'il y ait 
 aucune n6cessit6 d'existence, de telle sorte que 
 I'existence n'appartient nuUement a leur essence 
 prise separ^ment." Of course in his later works 
 Spinoza would not have spoken thus of plural 
 
 ^ Joachim, p. 76 (his italics). I find a difficulty in the 
 following sentence of Spinoza ("Ethics," II., Axiom i) : 
 " Hominis essentia non involvit necessariam existentiam, hoc 
 est, ex Naturae ordine tam fieri potest ut hie et ille homo 
 existat, quam ut non existat." Does this refer to the fact that 
 a man's existence passes into non-existence, the relative 
 periods of which might surely be dictated by his essence, or 
 does he mean that a given man — or men altogether — might 
 just as well not have existed at all ? This latter opinion 
 seems to me to involve an error. His essence allows and 
 prescribes duration mixed with non-duration. But it does 
 not, I should say, allow nonentity. 
 
92 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 substances in nature. But his view remained the 
 same in principle. It is a remarkable point, illus- 
 trating a factor of severance between particular 
 things and God in Spinoza's doctrine of essence, 
 that, while defining participation of essence to 
 involve reciprocal conditioning, he expressly denies 
 that this degree of unity exists between God and 
 particular beings. God is sine qua non to them, 
 but they are not sine quihus non to Him.-^ And 
 it is expressly to safeguard this truth, as he takes 
 it to be, that he insists on reciprocity as a condi- 
 tion of essence. Particular things might not-exist, 
 without prejudice to the being of God. 1 take it 
 that thoroughgoing mystics would hold a very 
 different language on this head.^ Or does Spinoza 
 only mean that things' duration is intermittent, and 
 that this appearance — not their total absence from 
 the universe — must be taken as compatible with 
 the being of God.? So in "Tractatus Politicus,"^ 
 " Res quaecunque naturalis potest adequate 
 concipi sive existat sive non existat,* ut igitur 
 rerum naturalium existendi principium, sic earum 
 in existendo perseverantia, ex earum definitione 
 non potest concludi."^ For they need the same 
 power, that of God, to persist as they did to begin. 
 But then one would have expected tha,t the 
 
 1 Spinoza, "Ethics," II. xi. 
 
 2 Cf. Bradley, "Appearance," p. 450, n. 
 
 3 V. VI. and L., p. 284. 
 
 * I should have expected that an adequate idea would be an 
 idea of a thing as it is in God, and therefore would involve its 
 existence. But this is not Spinoza's view. 
 
 ^ Cf. also " Ethics," II., Def. 5 : " Duration cannot be 
 determined by the nature of the existing thing." 
 
IV] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 93 
 
 revelation of God's power would have been held 
 to vary In individuals according to their essence, 
 for, after all, those two things are one.-' 
 
 And it seems to me of Immense interest that 
 Spinoza now and again shows signs of satisfying 
 this expectation. In the same early work from 
 which I have just cited his decided severance of 
 essence from existence, he also holds a language 
 regarding the connection of essence and constancy, 
 or stability, at least in the mind as subject of 
 knowledge, which sounds more like Plato than 
 anything else in his writings. I quote the passage 
 partly as a curiosity, for it derives the greater 
 stability of the better knowledge from that 
 passiveness of the Intelligence to which I referred 
 above (understanding being a passive fact) : " Si 
 quelqu'un, 6tant afFect6 par la totality de I'objet, 
 revolt tel forme ou tel mode de penser, II est clair 
 qu'il acquiert une autre perception de la forme ou 
 de la quality de cet objet que celul qui n'a pas 
 subl Taction d'un aussi grand nombre de causes, et 
 qui est d6termin6 a affirmer ou a nier par une 
 action moindre et plus 16gere, ayant pris connais- 
 sance de cet objet par des raoins nombreuses ou 
 des molns importantes affections. D'ou Ton volt la 
 perfection de celui qui est dans la verlte, au prIx 
 de celui qui n'y est pas ; I'un 6tant plus facile a se 
 lalsser modifier, et I'autre moins, 11 s'ensult que 
 celui-cl a plus de Constance et plus d'etre que 
 I'autre ; de plus les modes de penser qui convien- 
 nent avec les choses, ayant 6t6 d6termin6s par un 
 
 1 " Ethics," III. vi.-viii. : N.B. — " Res, quae Dei potentiam 
 . . . certo et determinato modo exprimunt." 
 
94 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 plus grand nombre de causes, ont plus de Constance 
 et d'essence ; et comme ils conviennent en tout 
 avec la chose il est impossible qu'en aucun temps 
 ils soient modifies ou soufFrent aucun changement 
 du cote de la chose, puisque nous avons vu que 
 I'essence des choses est immuable ; or c'est ce qui 
 n'a pas lieu dans le faux."^ Truth and stability 
 depend on completeness, and completeness, appar- 
 ently, on a resistant quality of mind, an inertia, which 
 is receptive only to the whole force of the object. 
 The thing, we remember, according to this treatise 
 affirms or denies itself But only some qualities 
 of mind, it would seem, can give it scope. 
 
 Even duration, here, is affected by essence, 
 " La dur6e d'une chose proc^de de sa perfection ; 
 et plus elle a en elle d'etre et de divinite, plus elle 
 est durable."^ We may compare with this the 
 difficult passage in " Ethics," II. viii. S. : " Earum 
 ideae existentiam, per quam durare dicuntur, 
 involvent"; and Professor Joachim's discussion, \ 
 pp. 2 22^, especially 228: "Temporal existence . . . 
 confers upon them additional reality — i.e., essence 
 includes a need to grow out into temporal exist- 
 ence."^ We have to note, as it seems to me, a 
 certain simplicity, if not crudity, in Spinoza's idea 
 of finite essence, which accounts at once for the 
 prima facie severance between essence and existence 
 and for the occasional recognition that it is really 
 bound to pass into existence, I have in mind a 
 passage from the " Cogitata Metaphysica," which I 
 will transcribe in full (I. ii. 7): " Quomodo distinclio 
 
 1 Janet, " Short Treatise " (tr.), p. 86. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 119. ^ Cf. p. 89, supra. 
 
IV] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 95 
 
 inter essentiam et existentiam facile addiscatur. 
 Denique si quis philosophus adhuc dubitet, an 
 essentia ab existentia distinguatur in rebus creatis, 
 non est quod multum de definitionibus essentiae 
 et existentiae laboret, ut istud dubium toUatur. 
 Si enim tantum adeat statuarium aliquem aut 
 lignarium, illi ipsi ostendent, quomodo statuam 
 nondum existentem certo ordine concipiant, et 
 postea earn ipsi existentem praebebunt." Here 
 there can be no doubt whatever either that the 
 " essence " is inferior to the individual thing in 
 reality, or that its nature implies need to pass 
 into it. It is simply the more or less imperfect 
 conception. I take it that in II. viii. (see 
 Joachim, /.f.) Spinoza is divided between this idea 
 of essence and one involving a higher concreteness 
 and individuation. 
 
 Elsewhere he seems to mention the very principle 
 we should wish for : " Quo plus realitatis alicujus 
 rei naturae competit, eo plus virium a se habere ut 
 existat" •} but then he is here only speaking of 
 substance, and expressly notes that what he says 
 has no reference to things which depend on 
 external causes. 
 
 Again, his political view is dominated by the 
 recognition that stability and persistence depend 
 on wisdom and organisation — that is, on the 
 character of the thought which forms the essence 
 of the institution ;^ and the political theory is 
 
 ' " Ethics," I. xi., S. ; cf. I. ix. 
 
 2 Cf., e.g., " Tr.Theologico-politicus," V. VI. and L., p. 410. 
 It is remarkable how Spinoza guards himself against attributing 
 a society's persistence to its own qualities. The real cause 
 must be God, acting "per causas latentes externas." 
 
96 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 grounded throughout on the fundamental concep- 
 tion of a law of Nature which is also a divine 
 right by which every singular thing expresses 
 God's power in an individual form " certo modo."^ 
 Here, it would seem, there can be no discontinuity 
 between essence and existence. And yet .even 
 here Spinoza seems to shrink from the full results 
 of such view (see note 2, p. 95). The essence of 
 the particular thing does not contain the secret of 
 its survival or non-survival among the other active 
 powers of the universe. And, of course, it does 
 not in and by itself contain the entire secret. But 
 their friendliness or hostility to it must depend, 
 one would think, on the nature in virtue of which 
 it is friendly or hostile to them, and, as Spinoza 
 constantly insists, to itself. 
 
 The idea, then, that even in finite things the 
 thought demands or guarantees the fact, was not 
 wholly foreign to Spinoza. What is the ground 
 of his general conviction, so strongly and uniformly 
 asserted, that the nature of a finite thing can 
 neither ensure its persistence nor determine its 
 direction ? I suppose its source is in some degree 
 of shortcoming not desired, nor, I think, admitted, ' 
 by him, in envisaging the finite conatus or essence 
 as an impulse springing from the full universal 
 spirit. For any such shortcoming has a two-edged 
 result. The finite conatus, thought, or essence 
 neither clothes itself in actual duration, grasping 
 the finite world and coalescing with its existence ; 
 nor — the same thing from the other side — does it 
 by inherent impulse transcend and terminate itself. 
 1 Ibid,, c. xvi., p. 552. 
 
iv] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 97 
 
 And, of course, it is true that a thing has these 
 characteristics only when taken as one with the 
 order of the universe, and not in isolation. And 
 when Spinoza insists that its determination depends 
 on other things and not on itself, that is probably 
 what he means to say. 
 
 Nevertheless, it does impress itself on' my mind 
 that we should see the whole problem of truth and 
 error in a better perspective if we started from the 
 unrestricted idea that the mind's nature is to 
 affirm truly of reality. Then we should be in a 
 position to allow for all determinable sources of 
 error, without raising in principle the insoluble 
 problem, " Supposing thought to begin in a world 
 divorced from truth, how is knowledge ever to be 
 come by ?" We should recognise that throughout 
 experience, and not in the central regions of 
 totality and self-evidence alone, there are signs of 
 thought producing inevitable affirmations. And 
 we should see that the restriction of the ontological 
 argument to the ultimate being on the one side, 
 and Kant's mocking estimation of it by the most 
 finite of objects on the other, spring from mere 
 traditional ideas of essence and an imperfect 
 sense of unity. 
 
 Even a remark of HegeP on Kant's criticism, ; 
 which, I will confess, for a long time struck me as 
 a mere . irrelevant retort, appears to me now to 
 have, from the present point of view, a valid : 
 meaning. If a man cherishes a thought of a 
 hundred pounds, Hegel said in effect, he had 
 better set to work and get it. What he meant, 
 1 "Hist, of Philosophy," III. 453 (E. tr.). 
 
 7 
 
98 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch 
 
 I suppose, was what I have tried to illustrate 
 above, that an idea or nature or essence is in 
 principle self-contradictory until it has given rise 
 to appropriate existence. I do not mean that 
 j everything can in the strict sense exist, but every- 
 thing, I suppose, has its reality in some degree by 
 controlling existence. 
 
 Finally, a certain view of inference seems to 
 gain support from these ideas. It suggests itself 
 that every alleged essence, every distinct thought, 
 carries with it, in virtue of its special nature, a 
 certain claim to find itself in reality. The task of 
 inference, then, would be to work out in detail the 
 necessity of this claim, along with the modifica- 
 tions which its systematic completion would entail 
 upon the initial conception. The degree in which 
 such a necessity could be made apparent, in pro- 
 portion as the relations demanded by the idea were 
 pursued by thought and traced throughout ex- 
 perience, would be the degree of presumption or 
 implication that reality — or, in the appropriate 
 case, existence — attached to the idea. The point 
 of principle is that to see reason in the finite series 
 and complication of causes, though difficult and in 
 some regions apparently hopeless, is yet not really 
 an isolated or self-contradictory adventure, as is 
 implied by the fundamental severance of essence 
 and existence in the finite world. Innumerable 
 degrees of presumption in favour of innumerable 
 conceptions are traceable in every phase of science, 
 and become better warranted from age to age. I 
 ventured to suggest long ago that the order of 
 natural knowledge to-day is a confirmation for us 
 
iv] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOTHY 99 
 
 in sober earnest of what for Greek philosophy was 
 a splendid intellectual hazard, whose audacity we 
 can no longer realise, just as the political and 
 ethical world-order — I do not fear to say it, look- 
 ing full at the significant crisis in which we stand 
 — is a confirmation of what in them was a miracle 
 of moral, social, and political insight. 
 
 I can imagine a critic remarking that this is 
 rather a prolonged argument and a lofty language in 
 which to recommend the principle that what one 
 says is true in so far as one makes no mistakes. I 
 could only answer, first, that it is not my fault if 
 an axiom so fundamental has not always been re- 
 cognised in what has passed for a theory of know- 
 ledge ; and, secondly, that a systematic method, 
 governed by the idea of establishing ordered areas 
 of experience in which coherence shall exclude 
 mistake, involves a conceptionrior non-syllogistic 
 inference which has not yet, to the best of my 
 knowledge, been completely and successfully 
 formulated. 
 
loo THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 7 + 5 = 12 
 
 I. Extremes of thought may meet in an error as 
 well as in a truth. And I now desire to approach, 
 in a short argument more abstract than those 
 before, the fundamental-^errflr, as I take it to be, 
 which the spirit of the age seems to impose upon 
 thought in many quarters. It is an important 
 error. It is the source, as I hold, of a wide- 
 spread superstition which sets up a bugbear called 
 " intellectualism," and thereby to a really in- 
 credible extent disorganises the classification and 
 appreciation of philosophical ideas ; and ultimately 
 it is operative in that one-sided preference for 
 the ethical as distinct from the religious attitude, 
 which Is the heart of what is most superficial and 
 most characteristic in modern progressism and 
 "ethical culture,"^ This consequence I shall 
 endeavour to trace and estimate in two of the 
 later chapters. In the present I shall try shortly 
 to expose its logical root. 
 
 2. All, round the philosophical horizon we 
 observe to-day, as I have already noted, the 
 
 ^ Here, such is the complexity of these currents of opinion, 
 I have with me Professor Alexander, though himself what 
 I call a progressist (Alexander, " Space," etc.). His wide 
 recognition of experience has in some degree counteracted his 
 progressism. See above, p. 67. 
 
v] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY loi 
 
 insistence on the objectivity of time and change 
 and the condemnation of a block universe. We 
 find it in the neo-idealist, in the neo-realist, in the 
 votary of duration, in the radical empiricist, in 
 the theorist of action. And this insistence and 
 this condemnation are, as a rule, accompanied by 
 a censure or suspicion of an attitude styled in- 
 tellectualism, which is held to be responsible for 
 a total denial of the reality of time and change, 
 and for the belief in a perfected and immobile 
 system of reality, which has been stigmatised as 
 a block universe. There are four kindred 
 motives, I believe, which are at work in this 
 suspicion, and are apt to co-operate with each 
 other. 
 
 First and simplest — if to know is to copy 
 reality, a pre-existing model, it is a useless dupli- 
 cation of. something already there, and moreover 
 implies that the model is immobile, for a change 
 in it would make the copy false. This I believe^ 
 to be an imputation arising by the common 
 custom of ascribing to an opponent the error 
 which you have just discovered in yourself. Of 
 course, it has no application in the region of what 
 is entitled to pass as speculative philosophy. 
 
 Secondly, by an illusion which is far too nearly 
 akin to that first naive illusion to be even prima 
 facie justifiable, the neo-idealists of Gentile's type 
 hold that to believe in a real universe which is 
 not immediately created and affirmed by the dis- 
 cursive thought of finite spirits is to accept a 
 transcendent kindred to the thing in itself, a 
 » "Logic" (2 ed.), II., p. 263. 
 
102 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch, 
 
 something which, not being identical with the 
 positive act of thinking, falls outside the activity 
 of the subject, and, once more, is a fixed and 
 given object, a dead reality, which is to living 
 and creative thought as a fetter and an incubus. 
 A curious importance is attached in this connection 
 to the law of Identity, as if it were a principle 
 of analytic Inference — an impossible thing — by 
 which Greek philosophy and Plato's world of 
 Forms was dominated as an immobile object, and 
 a self-creative development was rendered ex hypo- 
 thesi impossible for thought. 
 
 Thirdly, in the apotheosis of duration as against 
 the world of the intelligence, the same superstition 
 prevails. Here It Is the intelligence itself which 
 Is pronounced inherently defective, and the defect 
 is fundamentally the same, an adoption of the 
 law of identity — the law of repetition — linking 
 the same with the same, as the sole and central 
 principle of the intellect. 
 
 Fourthly, It Is, I presume, as a corollary from 
 this conception of the transcendent and Immobile 
 object of the intelligence — an object, however, in 
 this case admitted to be not a presupposition but 
 a construction — that we get the quite extraor- 
 dinary fantasies of William James about the " In- 
 tellectualist philosophies."* I must really call them 
 fantasies, for neither his characterisation of In- 
 dividuals, which is just as directly and .precisely 
 wrong as any characterisation could be,^ nor his 
 
 1 Watts Cunningham, "The Philosophy of Bergson," 
 p. i8i. 
 
 2 I feel myself here rather in a cleft stick, for I do not 
 want to emulate Boswell's feat of defending Johnson's 
 
V] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 103 
 
 conception of the approach to an idealist vision of 
 things, as the building of a classic sanctuary, has 
 any jot or tittle of resemblance to the personalities 
 or conceptions about which he was writing.^ In 
 the temper of Green's day, an idealist meant a 
 person who approached reality through the back 
 street and the elementary school and the dust and 
 heat of parties. Professor Watts Cunningham 
 himself seems to me to throw his whole argument 
 out of gear by addressing it to idealists qua 
 intellectualists. This is to destroy the unity — 
 the one spirit — in which they believe. 
 
 3. 7 + 5 = 12. I take for consideration this 
 simplest case, in which, as I believe, the whole 
 decision upon the ultimate reality of time and 
 progress, and the just criticism of moral per- 
 fectibility as a world-principle in opposition to 
 religious self-transcendence, can be shown to be 
 contained in principle. 
 
 We start from elementary logic. If 12 were 
 not the same as 7 + 5, the judgment would not 
 be true. If it were not different, the judgment 
 
 sincerity by proving the moral defects which he admitted. 
 But in fact, of course, anything but the imputation of tender- 
 mindedness and refinement was the general joke — e.g., against 
 Green, and especially in connection with his management of 
 affairs. A well-known saying of his day was, " The fellows of 
 Balliol are thoroughly good men ; they are not to be turned 
 from what they know to be right by any scruples of con- 
 science." I remember his condemning, or at least greatly 
 regretting, a friend being kept out of holy orders by scruples of 
 conscience. 
 
 ^ See especially "Principle," Lecture I., where I have 
 dvirelt on a striking example of this total divergence. 
 
104 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 would not be a judgment. There is no province 
 of knowledge over which the law of identity, con- 
 strued as the principle of tautology, bears sw?y. 
 There is no region of reality which can be inter- 
 preted by its aid. 
 
 What you have in this simplest example, then, 
 is an eternal novelty. It is the expression of 
 something which, parting from itself, remains 
 within itself, and which, being always old, is yet 
 perennially new. To consider the expression 
 impartially is to recognise in the simplest thought 
 this inherent connection. Here we have the open 
 secret, from which a hasty and one-sided philo- 
 sophy runs away. It applies its " either . . . 
 or " where they deny the foundations of reality. 
 ■^ So when we find a doctrine which judges of 
 ultimate reality on the basis that if novelty, 
 progress, difference are to be achieved, the iden- 
 tity of the whole as a whole and in its ultimate 
 character must be abandoned, we know where we 
 are. We are simply in the presence of a blunder 
 in elementary logic. We are confronted by the 
 belief that a whole complex, to affirm itself in 
 something new, must, as a whole, depart and 
 recede from something that it already was. 
 
 Thus we find that Gentile devotes the earlier 
 part of his "Logic" to a consideration of the logic 
 of identity, which he believes to be a way of regard- 
 ing reality peculiar to the cognitive attitude in- 
 volved in that law. It is, for him, a feature of 
 all consideration of the real universe as an object 
 of thought transcending the discursive thinking 
 of the finite spirit, and holding the place of a 
 
V] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 105 
 
 being to which that thinking has to adapt itself 
 and from which it has to learn. This he and the 
 neo-idealists who follow him hold to be charac- 
 teristic of Greek thought as a whole (not merely 
 of Parraenides^), and ultimately, by implication, 
 of all metaphysic prior to Italian neo-idealism. 
 Throughout his works, this is the distinctive con- 
 tention. If you accept spirit or nature or God as 
 a world uncreated by the activity of thinking, you 
 accept a fixed and finished identity, into which life 
 and change can no longer penetrate. 
 
 And, as I said, this second of the four points of 
 view distinguished above contimjally betrays con- 
 tamination by the first. The reality which is not 
 produced by thinking is easily supposed to be a 
 reality which dominates thought and is its fixed and 
 permanent model. And then we have the copy- 
 ing theory and the impossible and unintelligible 
 duplication of reality alleged in aggravation of the 
 vices of a pre-existent and transcendent universe. 
 
 The third and fourth attitudes referred to, 
 those of Bergson and James, though not obsessed 
 by the extreme idea of creative thinking, apply a 
 similar misconstruction of the meaning of identity 
 respectively to the capacity of intelligence and to 
 the meaning and nature of an absolute whole. In 
 the latter, I fear, the doctrine of the incompati- 
 bility of an absolute whole with the true significance 
 of time, I must hold that Professor Alexander 
 participates in the fundamental error. 
 
 * I do not think he really grasps even the doctrine of 
 Parmenides, whose greatness surely lay in taking thought as a 
 clue to reality, not, according to an obsolete interpretation, in 
 holding thought to be one with an immobile real. 
 
io6 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 4. There is, of course, a conceivable parry to the 
 imputation of this fundamental error which con- 
 founds identity with tautology. There is always 
 apt to be this difficulty in philosophy. I charge 
 you with an error. You retort : " The error is 
 not mine ; I do not make it, but impute it." 
 But then the rejoinder which we make in this case 
 is often justified: "You could not impute it, 
 unless you held it. You try to exhibit a 
 certain fallacy as covering huge areas of thought 
 and great conceptions of the universe, and 
 you treat it as a special and recognised logical 
 conception. You could not do this if you funda- 
 mentally grasped its nature. There is no such 
 logical conception, and the character supposed to 
 be attributed to the universe in virtue of it is not 
 so attributed. It is a mare's nest, due to the 
 critic's imperfect logic. The universe has been 
 regarded, since Plato inclusively, as a differentiated' 
 and self-differentiating reality throughout, which is 
 what the law of identity ab initio requires it to be." 
 
 To this, however, there is a possible re-rejoinder, 
 on which great stress is laid by all the progressist 
 thinkers from Gentile to James. It depends on a 
 conception which I will call the conception of 
 secondary or acquired analytic identity, and if I 
 can, as I believe I can, wholly explode it in principle, 
 I shall have done something to clear up our 
 thoughts on this question of the self- differentiation 
 of a real whole. The fallacy in question consists 
 in thinking that though 7-1-5 = 12 is certainly in 
 itself an embodied synthesis, or necessary novelty, 
 yet when once passed and admitted, or, as we say, 
 
v] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 107 , 
 
 made an object of knowledge, it is, so to speak, 
 killed and stufFed, and for the future is taken as I 
 a fixed whole. Thus it loses the living nexus of 
 its terms and is ranked as something whose novelty \ 
 is neutralised and exhausted, each of the terms 
 having acquired a permanent determination by the 
 other, which reduces their nexus to a tautology, 
 and brings the proposition under the law of 
 identity in the barbarous form offered by element- 
 ary logic, A is A. I will return to this notion 
 below, after referring briefly to the other con- 
 siderations alleged in the rejoinder which 1 suggested 
 as offered against the progressist imputation of a 
 tautology-theory of cognition and reality. 
 
 (i) Tautological identity could not conceivably 
 be imputed to Greek philosophy in Plato and 
 after on historical grounds. I am not treating of 
 the history of philosophy for its own sake, but 
 will remark on two points of logical interest. 
 
 (a) There is in Plato no fixed dualism involv- 
 ing a transcendent reality. The levels of reality 
 are fluid, and their descriptions and relations are 
 tentative. •'• The great forms are, as we should 
 say, the main categories of the universe, by help 
 of which its less perfect appearances can be and 
 are constantly being unified through knowledge 
 with its intelligible system, which is thus enriched. 
 Plato's astronomy, which is perfectly scientific and 
 rational, allowing no difference of kind between 
 earthly and heavenly bodies, Is decisive on this 
 point.* 
 
 1 C/. " Principle," 378/. 
 
 2 See Burnet, "Greek Philosophy," Part I., "Thales to 
 Plato," pp. ^^^ ff., 348-9' 
 
io8 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 (fi) The original and classical statement of the 
 law of identity or non-contradiction, which in- 
 volves at the same time the true account of 
 contradiction, even yet ignored by current logic, 
 occurs in the " Republic," ^ and runs thus : " If 
 the same system appears to behave in opposite 
 [' different ' would suffice : ' opposite ' is not a 
 term with a meaning prior to contradiction, but is 
 attributed by it] ways in the same part of it and 
 in the same relation, then there is not one part 
 (or one system) concerned, but more than one." 
 The several very felicitous examples given in the 
 context explain that the law always refers to a 
 complex system ; that in such a system there is 
 always a plurality of acting parts, whose distinct 
 behaviours produce an appearance of contradiction 
 if the parts so behaving are not discriminated ; 
 but the essence of the law is that when there are 
 two or more discernible behaviours within the 
 same system, there are two or more parts or 
 relations 2 concerned in the behaviours. It is 
 contradiction when two behaviours are ascribed 
 to the same element within the same system, 
 without ground of distinction. They then be- 
 come " opposites." It has always struck me as 
 very remarkable, and as a fact most strangely 
 ignored by modern and, I suppose, medieval 
 logic, that the first formal statement of the law of 
 identity or non-contradiction, and that on which 
 Plato relies in the very knot of his analysis of 
 the self, should so distinctly presuppose a system 
 including a variety of behaviours and relations, 
 * 436. 2 As, e.g., in relativity of motion. 
 
v] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 109 
 
 and explain how within such a system the con- 
 fusion which causes contradiction can be avoided. 
 Of course all Plato's philosophy works on this 
 principle, which his theory of judgment in the 
 " Sophist " explains more in detail. 
 
 The same is true in the main of Aristotle, 
 Leaving, as open to uncertain interpretation,^ the 
 law of identity as laid down in its abstraction, let 
 us go at once to the governing law of inference, 
 the definition of the syllogism, which, of course, is 
 only a more explicit judgment : " An inferencp is 
 a nexus of thought in which, certain things being 
 posited, something different from these positions 
 follows of necessity from their being what 
 they are." 
 
 Thus Plato and Aristotle clearly laid dovm the 
 central paradox of reality and cognition which 
 every philosophy has to face, and is judged by its 
 power to face. There is no inferential thought' 
 unless it presents a bona-fide difference limited by 
 a bona-fide necessity. If you scamp or slur either 
 of these factors you have no whole of reality and 
 no genuine cognition. No such law of identity as 
 the neo-idealists speak of as something which can 
 be embodied in a special view of a special type of 
 reality ever came into their minds. No such type 
 was ever dreamed of as established by them. No 
 one could dream of such a thing who was really 
 
 * This is always so, except when the statement is fully 
 elucidated in reference to a concrete system. See my 
 "Logic" (2 ed.), II., p. 210, and above, p. 107, on how the law 
 of identity is made to turn out = A is A, and below on the 
 refutation of this trick. 
 
no THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 grasping such a judgment as 7 + 5 = 12.^ The 
 imputation rests on the power of the fallacy over 
 the imputer's mind ; and so with Bergson's view 
 of the intelligence, and James's of the Absolute 
 and a block universe. 
 
 (ii,) But there is still the conception of acquired 
 analytic identity, the only point of view from 
 which for a moment the law of identity can be 
 represented by A is A. The notion is this: 
 Granted that your cognition, and the real which 
 it cognises, is all of it synthesis, and all the syn- 
 thesis necessary, still you may rejoin with Gentile, 
 Yes, but as thought (passive participle), not think- 
 ing, it has become a rigid structure and an eternal 
 datum, or pre-existent. It was once synthetic, but 
 now its synthesis, being known and taken for 
 granted, has become analytic and secondary, no 
 longer admitting of novelty or origination. And, 
 he may add, this must be so eternally ; what 
 springs by necessity from the given is itself as good 
 as given, and therefore with Bergson tout esf donni. 
 To suppose that the universe is ultimately a unity 
 whose nature, being all that is, cannot in itself 
 become other than it is, and finds expression within 
 itself, but not by advance or modification from 
 what it is to what it is not, is to suppose that all 
 is an eternal immobility, and there is no novelty 
 nor freedom. If the universe is immutable as a 
 whole, in the sense in which acknowledged 
 truth is, all its differentiation, being given and the 
 basis of what can be given, does not save it from 
 being a block universe. 
 
 ' See the suggested answers to " How many are 1 2 ?" in 
 "Rep.," I. 337. 
 
v] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY iii 
 
 In suggesting a different conception, I start 
 from a sceptical notion, suggested, I believe, by 
 Mr. Russell, How do we know that truth con- 
 tinues true, or that the laws of nature continue to 
 indicate what takes place ? We suggested an^ 
 answer to a similar question about the sun rising 
 to-morrow, which did not appeal to the mere fact 
 of past experience, but to the nexus of the 
 phenomenon in question with the continuing 
 \yliole. Why not? seemed to be the just and 
 natural answer, resting on the normal acceptance 
 of the ultimate unity of things, which can only be 
 impeached in detail on specific positive grounds. 
 
 The same answer, in principle, not only will 
 serve, but is necessary, to justify our cognition 
 that 7-1-5 = 12. We are in a certain degree repeat- 
 ing and affirming Gentile's own position, affirming 
 it with a difference, and in its only true meaning, 
 when we say that as an isolated proposition, which 
 we know to have been held true, it could not be 
 accepted as a truth. To know it, we must connect 
 it with the whole ; and to connect it with the 
 whole, in principle and ultimately, we must re- 
 vivify the whole in its connection with the living 
 present of thought. In the universe there is no 
 Aaron that can stand between the living and the 
 dead. The life of reality is one ; and the reason 
 why we expect our truth to continue true, if ever 
 it was true, is that it belongs inherently to the 
 universe which persists, and with which, as a 
 whole, our thought and activity are bound up, and 
 which our constructive thinking enriches in main-^ 
 ' P. 73, above. 
 
112 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 taining and maintains in enriching from moment 
 to moment. 
 
 In this last sentence I am reproducing Gentile's 
 contention, but the whole paragraph reproduces it 
 with a difference. The difference lies in the 
 assumption, which I reject, that the universe, in so 
 far as it is greater than finite thinking, and com- 
 mands us in and through it, fails to retain that 
 continuous life and unity in virtue of which it is 
 ever new in its synthetic determinations. Thus a 
 dialectic, a self-determination of thought, which 
 recognises the totality of the universe, and is 
 driven by the tendency to return to it, is contrasted, 
 as dead and finite, with a dialectic for which there 
 is no totality, and which a logically inexplicable 
 motive urges in an infinite progression. " From 
 the abstract to the concrete there is no path,"^ is the 
 principle he proclaims. " Every abstract tends to 
 return to its concrete " is the principle in which 
 totality is recognised as the mainspring. 
 
 When once for all the principle of the judgment 
 7 -f 5 = 1 2 is mastered, we grasp the paradox at 
 once of reality and of inference. The whole does 
 not abandon itself to give rise to difference ; it is 
 as a whole, and not as surrendering its totality 
 but precisely in virtue of its wholeness, that it is 
 ,the source of differentiation. The secondary 
 tautology, which we dream that we have found in 
 the reality whose syntheses we " know," does not 
 exist. It is only in the whole reality that the 
 syntheses hold good, and for every reaffirmation 
 the old syntheses rest upon the continuous life of 
 * "Spirito," p. 237. 
 
v] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 113 
 
 the whole. The whole reality is a source of syn- 
 theses, as our typical judgment shows us, at once 
 inexhaustible and necessary, and is as fertile of 
 " new " syntheses as continuous in the " old." The 
 difference is relative to us. Both are new as bona- 
 fide differences ; both are " old " as rooted in the 
 whole ; both are necessary because the whole lives 
 in its expression. The reason is that a true infinite, I 
 in being expressed through finite terms such as j 
 those of our experience, can never be adequately ' 
 expressed ; but being a true infinite, it is repre- 
 sented as a whole in each of its revelations, and 
 does not move from its character of totality to 
 enter into them. It has not a history of its own — 
 history could not represent it, as a simple analysis 
 of the narrative judgment demonstrates directly.^ 
 But it contains histories without number. 
 
 (iii.) There are progressists — I have coined the 
 name for shortness' sake — who seem to understand 
 this whole relation, and yet to be coerced by the 
 spirit of the age into an ethical approximation- 
 theory after the manner of Kant. Why not, for 
 example, have simply accepted the criticism of 
 Professor Watts Cunningham in his "Philosophy of 
 Bergson," where he excellently explains the true 
 account of reason offered by Hegel, in contrast 
 with Bergson's caricature ? I answer, vulgarly, 
 because the proof of the pudding is in the eating. 
 If you think that the ultimate real whole can and 
 must, in order to secure change and freedom, 
 change itself as a whole in real time — that is to 
 say, must fail to fulfil the conditions of being a 
 
 1 "Logic" (2 ed.), I., p. 199. 
 
 8 
 
114 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 whole — then you have not understood, such, at 
 least, is my conviction, the proposition 7 + 5=12. 
 I need not dwell on the principle of " creative 
 finalism," on which he relies to avoid the destiny 
 of Tantalus for God and man. He has himself 
 said, in my judgment, all that is necessary in 
 criticism of it,^ and I have dwelt elsewhere^ on the 
 self-contradictoriness of a finite teleology as a 
 metaphysical conception. I say a finite teleology, 
 for a teleology which is not a feature of a finite 
 being is inconceivable. How is the whole reality 
 to entertain in itself such an incompleteness that 
 it must alter itself — not merely expressing a side 
 of itself in the need of a finite being within it, but 
 altering itself as such, its fundamental nature, with 
 an eye to a perfection which so far has been denied 
 it .'' It is the old story. The progressist runs 
 from the paradox of reality. He will not under- 
 stand that the infinite whole, in its wholeness, Jj a 
 life and self-enrichment ; and to get the novelty and 
 irrational freedom he craves, he demands thaF tlie 
 whole, the all-inclusive universe, shall depart "from 
 what it is, and assume new characters, different 
 indeed, but not necessary, thus omitting one-half 
 the nature of a rational nexus. 
 
 5. It is not easy to know, I may observe in 
 concluding this chapter, the precise significance of 
 the term "intellectualist." It is on the whole, I 
 think, felt to be a dyslogistic epithet, and it is 
 interesting to find that Professor Watts Cunning- 
 ham is disposed to accept and defend it. He 
 
 * " Philosophy of Bergson," p. 169. 
 2 "Principle," p. 391. 
 
v] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 115 
 
 takes it merely to mean that the real is subject to 
 the categories of intelligence, and, in this sense, 
 given a wide interpretation to those categories, such 
 as he insists on against Bergson, the dyslogistic 
 significance would, I suppose, be removed, as it is 
 for him. 
 
 But in the current usage of the term, which he 
 also refers to, which applies it in general to Greek 
 philosophy as to post-Kantian idealism and its 
 successors, there is, I take it, as we see in James 
 and Bergson, a truncation of its meaning. It is 
 held that cognition is taken as the type of thinking 
 activity,^ and that cognition in part is analytic 
 ab initio^ as Bergson supposes, and in part lends 
 itself to the consequence which we have discussed 
 under the head of secondary tautology. That is 
 to say, the nature of the proposition 7 + 5 = 12 
 has been slurred, and neither its full synthesis of 
 differences, nor its essential implication in the life 
 of the universal spirit, has been taken into account 
 by those who apply the designation. No doubt 
 the so-called identification of will and knowledge 
 by Socrates had something to do with the origin 
 of the term. But those who know most of Greek 
 philosophy will be slowest to call intellectualists 
 the men for whom it was essentially a life and an 
 activity, and as regards so-called idealists, Mr. 
 Bradley's protest in the " Logic " against the identi- 
 fication of thought and reality is surely not yet 
 forgotten. 
 
 The fact is, if the one life of the real is 
 
 ^ Compare, for instance, Clarke among the English moralists, 
 who identified theft with falsehood. 
 
ii6 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 thoroughly apprehended, and the relation of 
 conation and cognition, and of both with the 
 aesthetic attitude, is fully conceived, there is no room 
 for the application of the term "intellectualist," 
 in a dyslogistic sense or any other. People who 
 disparage the ontological value of time^ do so 
 not because they overvalue cognition, but because 
 they apprehend the unityjjf reality. 
 
 * Watts Cunningham, p. 206. The superficial misconcep- 
 tion which accuses, e.g., Mr. Bradley of intellectualism and 
 a belief in a blocic universe is thoroughly illustrated in Ugo 
 Spirito, " II Pragmatismo nella filosofia contemporanea " 
 (Vallec'chi, 1920), pp. ii^ff. He gives no sign of appreciating 
 the position of cognition in reality. Cf. the best authority on 
 Green, "The central conception is that the universe is a 
 single eternal energy or activity of which it is the essence to 
 be self-conscious — that is, to be itself and not itself in one " 
 (Nettleship, " Biography of Green," p. 109). This, as we saw, 
 is involved in 7 + 5=12. 
 
vi] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 117 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 TIME, PROGRESS, MORALISM 
 
 I SAID in the Preface that when we began to deal 
 with ultimate problems it would be necessary to 
 insist on the most startling of all coincidences 
 between extremes in the modern philosophical 
 world. And in the third section of Chapter II. 
 I brought together some materials for forming a 
 preliminary conception of the attitude of neo- 
 idealism in comparison with that of Professor 
 Alexander, the neo-realist who has the greatest 
 sympathy with idealism. 
 
 But now we have to consider the influence of 
 the characteristically modern attitude, dating, I 
 presume, at least from what Carlyle would call 
 the Progress of the Species^ theories of the French 
 revolutionary period, which is asserting itself with 
 decided superficial resemblance in neo-realism and 
 neo-idealism alike. 
 
 The three naturally connected characteristics of 
 this position are the acceptance of time and change 
 as ultimate characteristics of (not "within") the 
 universe as such and as a whole ; faith in_the 
 progress and, in some sense, the perfectiHTity of 
 the human species, either as a possibility or as an 
 established law ; and the identification of morality 
 and religion with the faith in this law, or possi- 
 
 1 "French Revolution," i. 27 (ed. 3 vols., 1871). 
 
ii8 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 bility, and practical conduct directed to realising it. 
 Evil, therefore, is actual (on this point the idealists 
 in question differ from the realists at least in 
 expression), but is capable of being diminished 
 without limit. As the idealists accept this last 
 view in substance, it is plain that in some sense 
 they admit the actuality of evil. 
 
 The point, then, for the purpose of our present 
 comparison is this. The school of neo-idealists in 
 question, of whom Croce and Gentile may be 
 taken as typical, have, in the first place, thoroughly 
 admitted time and change into the core and basis 
 of reality. Reality is " divenire," " becoming "; the 
 idea of evolution in time is taken by them, in 
 conscious harmony with the trend of thought 
 throughout the philosophical and scientific world, 
 as the very spirit of their philosophy. They 
 have not yet, so far as I know, dealt theoretically 
 with the modern problem of space-time ; but I 
 do not think that this need affect their position, 
 and if it did, according to current ideas it would 
 be taken to confirm it. I do not think this a 
 necessary consequence, as we shall see when we 
 consider the philosophical bearing of relativity. 
 
 Arguments could be alleged in their case, as in 
 that of Professor Alexander, to prove that so 
 much of unity and wholeness is admitted — the 
 system of categories, the essence of truth, beauty, 
 and will, " the eternal ideal history," and the like 
 — that a change of reality, as distinct from changes 
 within reality, ought not to be taken as what 
 they contemplate. But there is no question that 
 in their minds this is what they intend to affirm — 
 
VI] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 119 
 
 viz., that in its very basis and meaning reality is a 
 history or an unending dialectical progression. 
 
 And the narrowness of their conception of pro- 
 gress is quite typical of the views which belong 
 to Progress of the Species theories. It is the 
 progress ad infinitum of the human species on 
 the surface of the earth. They speak of the 
 whole, but in practice the universe either dis- 
 appears altogether or is entirely secondary to 
 terrestrial history. Immanence is to be absolute. 
 There is no unity suclTas can be the object of 
 metaphysicj and though it is strikingly argued 
 that " all history is contemporary," this can only 
 refer to the nexus of events as seen by finite minds 
 from their position as a centre in time at any 
 moment. The passage on forgetting tells us that 
 much which has been real is to drop altogether out 
 of the content of the universe. It is, that jsto say, 
 to survive only in that, which follows it, not as in a 
 whole which includes the two. 
 
 The progress, being rooted in the ultimate 
 conception of reality as becoming, is conceived as 
 necessarily unending, but it is not admitted, as we 
 saw in Chapter II., to merit the disparaging 
 addition of progress ad infinitum. It is argued 
 that the continuous attainment of the end by the 
 continuous integration of the relatively evil into 
 a fuller solution removes the character of sheer 
 endlessness which implies total non-attainment ; 
 whereas in their conception a continuous attain- 
 ment is realised.^ Evil, again it is argued, though 
 present as fact, is never present as evil, because it 
 
 1 Supra, p. 57, 
 
120 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 is only realised to be evil as it passes into its 
 solution, and in that passage has ceased to be evil. 
 Thus the progress is held to be demonstrably 
 necessary, and to involve what may practically be 
 treated as the progressive extinction of evil.-^ 
 
 Religion, then, as we shall see directly, is 
 identified with morality — that is to say, with the 
 will and endeavour to realise fresh good by 
 extinguishing what in being extinguished is 
 identified with evil. This is the essence of 
 " ethical religion," which, in the general prevalence 
 of the Progress of the Species doctrines, is coming 
 to be more and more the current form of religion, 
 or, as one might ^ay, the popular substitute for it. 
 
 Now the striking point is that in all these 
 respects the neo-idealist revival has adopted the 
 same general attitude that is characteristic of the 
 neo-realist and kindred movements. We find 
 in these, meliorism, reliance on the future to 
 complete if not to compensate for the past ; pro- 
 gress of the human race as the central feature 
 of religious faith and duty ; " the good is to 
 be won by the race and for the race ; it lies in 
 the future, and can result only from prolonged 
 and collective endeavour."^ All this, again, is 
 shared by neo-realism with the pragmatism of 
 James and the instrumentalism of Dewey.^ The 
 essential matter for all these as for the neo-idealists 
 
 ^ Cf. Herbert Spencer's argument to establish the evane- 
 scence of evil. Bradley, "Ethical Studies," p. 84, n. 
 
 ^ Perry quoted by Hoernle, " Neo-Realism and Religioft," 
 reprinted from Harvard Theological Review, April, 1918, 
 pp. 148, 163. 
 
 ^ Hocrn!<f, op. rit. 
 
VI] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 121 
 
 is the repudiation of any view which can affirm a 
 perfection in the universe apprehensible through 
 religious experience and philosophical speculation, 
 not limited to the series of temporal events. 
 
 We may examine a striking connection of 
 thought which shows how conscious and decided 
 is the neo-idealists' choice in favour of moralism 
 in the sense of devotion to the abstract ought-to- 
 be {dover essere), and in opposition to the idea 
 of religion as the union with a whole beyond the 
 finite self, and self-realisation in and through this 
 union. 
 
 We go back to a citation from Gentile/ which 
 showed him arguing that if the reality lies outside 
 {fuori) the chain of temporal events, then ex 
 hypothesi all progress is impossible, because by 
 definition such a reality is incapable of it. This 
 conception we find further elaborated in his special 
 treatment of religion (the " Discorsi di Religione ") 
 with a definiteness which leaves its significance 
 unmistakable. 
 
 The argument is introduced by a sharp sever- 
 ance between Greek philosophy and the essence 
 of Christianity. Greek philosophy believes in a 
 whole which is, and by union with and inherence 
 in which the finite spirit finds self-realisation and 
 spiritual life. Now this is, for the modern idealist 
 (that is, for the theory we are considering), to 
 accept a reality which the spirit does not create. 
 Such a creed, in his view, can never rise to the 
 intuition of the moral life. For the ferment of 
 all modern civilisation, the originating intuition 
 
 1 Chap, ii., supra, p. 59. 
 
122 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 of Christianity, is that the world is ours, " because 
 we make it in the light not of what is, but of 
 what ought to be" {dover essere=sollen). Plato's 
 "good" is conceived as there naturally, ab initio, 
 as a given feature of the universe, and the love 
 for it, in Plato's eyes, is a universal natural 
 instinct, an impulse to conform to a pre-existing 
 and transcendent real. But all this, to the modern 
 spirit we are describing, is a dead block-universe, 
 which imposes itself as a fetter on the thinking 
 mind. " Love your neighbour " only becomes 
 moral when It refers to a moral act originating 
 in your own progressive impulse. " If the good 
 was originally, we could not make it (or, do it), 
 and the good which is not done (made) is not 
 good."^ 
 
 "This conception^ of an absolute new de- 
 parture in Christianity, culminating in Kantian 
 ethics and in the attitude of creative idealism, 
 though it lays emphasis on an important feature 
 of the creative modern mind, seems wholly to 
 ignore the mode of participation by which Gentile 
 has explained how the finite spirit is linked with 
 the group-mind, nourished by it, and embodied 
 in it. For this, the recognition of the human- 
 divine spirit in the communal life, is the golden 
 thread which links Plato to St. Paul, and St. Paul 
 to modern thought. And apart from such a 
 recognition, extended to the universe, we hardly 
 see how absurdity can be escaped when we insist 
 
 ' Gentile, " Discorsi di Religione," pp. 95, 99. 
 ^ I venture to cite a paragraph from my review of the 
 "Discorsi di Religione" {Mind, January, 1921). 
 
VI] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 123 
 
 on the truth that nothing is our self-realisation 
 which does not spring from our will."-*- 
 
 It all turns on the abstraction imputed in the 
 word " fuori " (see above, p. 121). We proceed to 
 the result. " Idealism must say that morality and 
 religion are antithetic terms, each of which is 
 the negative of the other ; mors tua vita mea " 
 ("Discorsi," p. 130). For religion, he urges, is 
 essentially mystical, the annihilation of the subject 
 before an unknown transcendent object, and its 
 attitude is essentially " where God is, we are not ; 
 in so far as He is, we are not" (p. 78). In this 
 account of religion, the true religious insight — 
 that if God were not we certainly should be 
 nothing — is ignored ; and the non-moral character 
 of religion, as concerned with a being outside the 
 progress which is the elimination of evil, and 
 incapable of entering into it, follows necessarily. 
 And so ultimately we find " that Christianity is 
 not solely a religion ; it is also a philosophy, and 
 therefore a moral doctrine ; and its greatness rests 
 on the philosophical and moral truths which it 
 proclaimed, and by which it succeeded in trans- 
 forming human civilisation, not on its sheer 
 religious element" (p. 129). 
 
 Surely all this leaves no doubt. We are back, 
 to our surprise, in a Kantian morality of the 
 " ought to be " as opposed to the " is," a morality 
 of endless approximation, according to which the 
 
 1 I have pointed out elsewhere that Mario Casotti comes 
 nearer to a true recognition of our right attitude to the 
 universe than Gentile or Croce does. See his "Pedagogia," 
 p. 99 : " una religiosa adhesione e sottomissione." 
 
124 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 injunction " be a whole or join a whole " has been 
 rejected by reason of being set in a false antithesis 
 to the law which, commands an opposition to what 
 is in virtue of what ought to be. 
 
 In its bearing on self-realisation, the conception 
 of the self-creative thinking ego has proved no 
 less pluralistic than the particular visible self of 
 common sense ; more so, indeed, for the latter, 
 in obedience to common sense, is always treated 
 as a collective agent. Recent idealism in other 
 forms has adopted the same antithesis,^ and we 
 seem bound to note that the peremptory needs of 
 the pure ethical impulse, which is no doubt one 
 side of religion, but one side only, are asserting 
 themselves alike in all the extremes of contem- 
 porary philosophy.^ 
 
 I call special attention to the narrowness of the 
 humanism in which, as we saw above, the neo- 
 realist agrees with the neo-idealist, and both of 
 them with the other types of modernism, which 
 indeed would class themselves in general under 
 this very title of humanism. And it is remark- 
 able that to find a true interest in the unity and 
 destiny of the universe we must go to-day either 
 to the absolute idealist or to a few exceptionally 
 gifted members of the realist or analogous per- 
 suasions.^ 
 
 ^ Bradley, " Essays," p. 439, note on Royce's " opportunity 
 for an endless series of deeds": "As this, to some minds, 
 appears to be the evident condemnation of God and them- 
 selves to the fate of Tantalus ■" 
 
 2 See Hoernl^, " Neo-Realism and Religion," on the neo- 
 realist hostility to the mystical side of religion. 
 
 ^ Professor Alexander, Mr. Bertrand Russell, the exponents 
 of " Relativity "; cf. Professor Boodln in Arist. Proc, 1920-2 1, 
 
VI] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 125 
 
 What philosophical moral does the meeting of 
 extremes suggest to us in this particular case ? 
 In the instances which we had previously examined, 
 our tendency was to suggest that the more subtle 
 and impartial examination of phenomena on 
 which realism and the sciences pride themselves, 
 was by undesigned coincidences doing much to 
 strengthen the basis of speculative philosophy, 
 while readjusting the emphasis of its affirmations 
 as offered within the idealist tradition. Here the 
 general effect pf what is occurring is prima facie 
 more hostile to the necessary demands of that 
 ancient tradition. But the rationale of the whole 
 movement is fundamentally the same. It is the 
 assertion of the Immediate and the practical, of 
 the democratic element. It might be said. In 
 thought-^ ; just as Is the reaffirmation of external 
 being, and of all the forms of Instinct and emotion 
 which bring home to us ontologlcal and cosmo- 
 logical truth in a simple and coercive manner. 
 It tends to compel a restatement and a better 
 intelligence of the ultimate crux of speculation; 
 the place of time, progress, and change in the 
 universe. There is nothing so difficult as this 
 problem, and nothing so essential to reasonable 
 thought or conduct. A progress outside the 
 
 p. 116: "Worlds, like individuals, have their seasons of 
 budding springtime, summer bloom, multi-coloured autumn, 
 and grey winter ; but the cosmos has all seasons for its own." 
 Cf. " Appearance," p. 500 : " The Absolute has no seasons, 
 but all at once bears its leaves, fruit, and blossoms." Perhaps 
 Mr. Russell's views might be called a humanism reversed. 
 1 Cf. author's " Logic " (2 ed.), II., p. 268. 
 
126 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 whole, or a self-realisation to which the whole 
 is a stronger, is a conception which falls to pieces 
 at a touch. But the democracy of thought, so to 
 say, is resolute to have the phenomena appreciated. 
 It loves the direct consciousness typified by 
 common sense ; change, at all events, whether 
 progress or not, is an obvious fact ; and so is 
 its connection with my will, and that of my will 
 with evils to be extinguished and problems to be 
 solved. " If the whole cannot be made intelligible 
 in connection with this demand," experience seems 
 to clamour around its whole horizon, "we will not 
 tolerate the notion of it." Yet William James' read- 
 ing of the Absolute as a contrivance for repose is on 
 all fours with Gentile's " fuori " ; and for a balanced 
 statement the question demands the ideas of our 
 chapter, 7-1-5=12. The distinction at stake is 
 that between time in the Absolute and the Abso- 
 lute in time. A subsequent chapter will illustrate 
 this antithesis by dwelling on the distinction be- 
 tween the religious and the moral attitude. 
 
vii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 127 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 CRITICAL REALISM AND THE THEORY 
 OF THE ABSOLUTE 
 
 But I first take up the parallelism of recent realism 
 with such a doctrine as that of which Mr. Bradley is 
 the leading exponent to-day, from the point where, 
 as we saw, neo-realism sharply diverges from it. 
 In order to have a name for this doctrine, which 
 is not happily entitled either idealism or realism of 
 any type, I will refer to it in this chapter by the 
 term " absolutism," which itself comes rather from 
 enemies than from friends. 
 
 Absolutism, then, and that form of recent 
 realism which is spoken of as neo-realism, we 
 found to agree decisively against a corresponding 
 novelty, the theory which I have called " neo- 
 idealism," represented, say, by Croce and Gentile, 
 in regarding the external world of things, in the 
 current and popular sense, as a factor of the 
 universe having its own reality, and not a product 
 or creation of the mere thinking activity. Nature 
 in its concreteness and beauty is real, and is real 
 as we know and value it, and is not created by our 
 thinking. 
 
 This was as far as neo-realism and absolutism 
 went together, and so far they confirmed a 
 
128 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 necessary element of speculative philosophy against 
 neo-idealism. But when neo-realism goes on to 
 treat " things " as not merely actual and individual 
 elements of the real universe, but as existents 
 which unite in their own private existence, by 
 themselves and apart from connection with each 
 other and with percipients, all those features which 
 they present to thought and perception, then it parts 
 company with all and every idealism, not merely 
 with neo-idealism, but with absolutism. Absolut- 
 ism will never be brought to believe that things 
 exist as they appear, apart from the context of the 
 system in which we find them, whether in its 
 causal or in its apprehensive aspect. It does not 
 hold, as I understand it, that their esse is percipi, 
 jf that implies immediate presentation. It holds 
 that reality is what thought, operating on and in 
 the whole complex of experience, compels us to 
 affirm. Reality, therefore, as the object of thought, is 
 always mediate and transcendent of the immediate. 
 This is a fundamental principle, governing the 
 whole problem of transcendence, and I mention 
 this point to guard against misunderstanding at a 
 later stage. But my present interest is in the 
 parallel movement between absolutism and the 
 realism which is called " critical," which begins at 
 this point and continues for a space. 
 
 Critical realism is a realism in holding that there 
 are external existents, the physical objects of 
 science, which are in themselves what they are, 
 unaffected by the thought or perception of other 
 beings, and form the real world with which we are 
 aware of being in contact, and to which our efforts 
 
vn] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 129 
 
 and cognitions are directed. Thus, stated in 
 general language, its position bears some resem- 
 blance to that of neo-realism. But the difference 
 from neo-realism, and the relative agreement with 
 absolutism, appear in its attitude to the "things" 
 of everyday apprehension. Its criticism follows 
 the familiar idealist line, to the effect that the 
 things of normal apprehension cannot be regarded 
 as self-contained existents composed within them- 
 selves of the qualities which we find belonging to 
 them. Separation from the context of percipients 
 and of other things destroys their qualities, or, if 
 we insist on treating these as inherent, makes the 
 apparent group of them a mass of contradictions — 
 of inconsistent magnitudes, figures, colours, tem- 
 peratures, and the like. They cannot therefore 
 supply, as they stand for our everyday perception, 
 the physical objects demanded by science as the 
 members of an existent world. 
 
 Thus critical realism goes so far with absolutism 
 as to treat the members of the normal outer world, 
 other than physical objects, as something deter- 
 mined by intercourse with each other and with 
 intelligent organisms, and as shorn of all or a great 
 part of their appearance in so far as such inter- 
 course is ended or suspended. The thing, as we 
 perceive it, becomes more like a theory than a 
 self-contained existent. It is an enormous system, 
 developing ad infinitum^ of appearances responding 
 to the infinitely varying conditions of its context, 
 and coherent and intelligible only in connection 
 with these. And this, I may observe, is, I believe, 
 the true account of its character, and that from 
 
 9 
 
130 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 which it is in essential principle impossible to 
 depart.^ 
 
 The agreement, then, between critical realism 
 and absolutism is decisive and complete so far as 
 the criticism of the ordinary thing is concerned. 
 It is for both an appearance, and cannot subsist as 
 it appears apart from the context which conditions 
 its appearance. 
 
 But, further, there is a certain analogy, curious 
 but, 1 think, important and suggestive, between 
 the doctrines, even after the point at which, prima 
 facie, they sharply diverge. 
 
 Critical realism, I said, believes in a world of 
 existents which are in themselves what they are, 
 and are not affected in their nature as existents by 
 perception or cognition, but exist just the same 
 whether there is awareness of them or not. It is 
 in the relation of these objects of thought to actual 
 cognition that the analogy I speak of arises. It 
 is generally an error of method to mix criticism 
 with exposition, but I feel so uncertain of the 
 precise intent of the writers in " Essays in Critical 
 Realism,"^ and it seems to me so probable that my 
 uncertainty is at least not wholly my own fault, 
 but arises from a sliding scale introduced into 
 their doctrine by the difficulty of living up to its 
 fundamental paradox, that I will state it as I see it 
 in terms of such a sliding scale, giving references 
 by which my view, if erroneous, may easily be 
 elucidated and corrected. 
 
 "^ I do not know that Mr. Bradley has anywhere precisely 
 expressed such a view. 
 * Macmillan, 1920. 
 
VII] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 131 
 
 The point in question is the separation between 
 the what and the that of objects of thought which 
 takes place in cognition. In these terms everyone 
 recognises at once a feature of Mr. Bradley's 
 doctrine of the real in its connection with know- 
 ledge. Critical realism recognises the same 
 general fact, but naturally accounts for it by a 
 different hypothesis. 
 
 Critical realism, I said, believes in physical 
 objects as existents — the existents in themselves 
 to which our thought and conations are, as it 
 holds, really addressed, when we fancy we are 
 addressing them to the " things " perceived all 
 about us. These existents ex hypothesi transcend 
 our experience as such, not merely immediate 
 experience. Existents cannot, as such, be 
 " possessed " by our minds. To have them, 
 to " have the very independent existent itself open 
 to an immediate and penetrative inspection," would 
 need " instruments " — " which are not possessed 
 by the human organism."^ Ex hypothesis you 
 cannot "possess " or intuit the object known.^ 
 
 What, then, is knowledge? 
 
 I will venture to put the answer briefly and 
 dogmatically as it separates itself for me into steps 
 of a sliding scale. 
 
 I. The existent, the object of thought, is never 
 and in'-no degree identified with what we have 
 before our minds as the "content," or "essences," 
 or " quality group," which we perceive in the 
 thing of normal apprehension. The object is not 
 
 ' "Essays in Critical Realism," p. 201. 
 2 Op. cit., p. 32. 
 
132 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 the percept, and the percept is not the object ; and 
 no quality which is existent within the existent 
 structure of the object can be present in the 
 perceived datum or quality group. Many expres- 
 sions point in this direction, and the principle 
 strictly demands, I think, in their mode of sustain- 
 ing it, that the severance of the what and the that 
 should be absolute. Nothing of the " that " should 
 overflow into the "what." But you must, they 
 point out, be able to recognise which "that" 
 you are referring to. And this, I think, starts 
 the sliding scale.^ But this takes us to the 
 next heading, .for it departs from the strict 
 principle. 
 
 2. Certain special qualities of the existent, it 
 comes to be admitted, are known as inherent in 
 it, and therefore as identified with the existent and 
 existent themselves.^ One writer leans to finding 
 these in the " primary qualities"^ in general, others 
 to identifying them with qualities which I take to 
 be the physicist's determinations of the physical 
 object* In these the " that " "would seem to have 
 opened itself up for inspection as the " what." 
 
 3. Further, it comes to be held that any con- 
 stituent of the quality group or group of essences 
 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 96 J., 24, 32, 201. 
 
 ^ Op. cit., p. 21, n. : "It exists just to the extent to which 
 it is in fact the nature ... of the object known." 
 
 ^ Op. cit., pp. 22 [note the phrase "which we take to 
 exist, but which have no existence except as some of the traits 
 of the coinplex are actual traits (my italics) of the physical 
 object perceived"], 23-4: "primary qualities" of the visible 
 thing, not of the physical object ? 
 
 4 Op. cit., pp. no, 199, 218. 
 
VII] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 133 
 
 by which we recognise and suppose ourselves to 
 think of an ordinary " thing " may be considered 
 as one with the essence embodied in the physical^ 
 object. Here, as I understand, we are speaking 
 in a much wider sense ; not solely of the minute 
 determinations of primary qualities which consti- 
 tute the physicist's conception of the physical 
 object, but of any properties which are truly — in 
 accordance with science and common sense — 
 ascribed to the apparent thing or quality group, 
 which is merely a bundle of appearances due to 
 the causal operation of the physical object.^ It 
 ought, I should urge here, to be admitted that 
 when we think of these properties — e.g., the 
 " secondary " qualities — we are thinking of them 
 as integrated with the "object of thought" (the 
 "physical object"). That is to say, the funda- 
 mental division, by which essences or apparent 
 qualities are not the object of our thought when 
 we think of the thing,^ should be abandoned. 
 When we think of a friend, his moral and physical 
 qualities in the current sense should be admitted 
 to be part of the object of thought, which according 
 to the strict doctrine they cannot be.^ The object 
 of thought in the strict doctrine (Case i above) 
 is a mere existent, a bare that' which though sole 
 object of thought, presents to thought no features 
 
 ^ Op. cit., pp. 240-1. 2 Q^ np^ cit,^ pp. ^^ ff. 
 
 3 Op. cit., pp. 99^ They are treated as not the object, 
 but the means by which we think or perceive the object. 
 Thus, when we think of a friend, his physique and character 
 are not elements in the object of thought. This is strange 
 language, for obviously they are the main things we think 
 about in such a case. 
 
134 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 that can be thought about. I think the conclud- 
 ing essay modifies this attitude in general, and not 
 merely with reference to physical determinations. 
 
 Taking this conception without further criticism 
 at the moment, we see in it a very suggestive 
 analogy to the absolutist doctrine of truth and 
 reality. 
 
 The fundamental feature of critical realism is 
 its account of knowledge as involving the separa- 
 tion of the "what" from the "that." The 
 " what " is in the form of " essences " or quality 
 groups ; the " that " in the form of existents, 
 identified with physical objects. Knowledge con- 
 sists in qualifying the existent " that " by the ideal 
 "what." 
 
 This reminds us strongly of the familiar abso- 
 lutist theory of the relation between truth and 
 reality. It might seem, indeed, as if the two 
 theories differed only in words. They agree that 
 knowledge must always be discursive — an affair of 
 qualifying something real by a meaning dis- 
 tinguished from it. Thought deals with its 
 object by way of affirmation ; it is always about a 
 something which is not merely its own act. It 
 would almost seem that if we were to treat the 
 difference between existence and essence as in 
 principle relative and vanishing — as the one and 
 necessary modification in which reality expresses 
 its own nature and character in the medium of 
 ideas, we should possess in critical realism the 
 same fundamental conception of truth as the 
 revelation of the real which we were taught by 
 absolutism. Thus considered, all predicates are 
 
vii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 135 
 
 the qualifications of the concrete real under some 
 set or explicit conditions, and the object of thought 
 gains in nearness to reality as it gains in deter- 
 minateness, remaining always the whole with which 
 thought is dealing. 
 
 Many phrases in the work in question remind 
 us of such a view, and the concluding essay seems 
 almost to pass the frontier towards it — e.g., " if 
 the knowledge is true, the essence given is the 
 true essence of the object," " this logical or essen- 
 tial identity is thus the keystone of a correct 
 theory of knowledge." " If the essence is truly 
 the essence of the object, as it should be in order 
 that knowledge may be correct, the essence given 
 and the essence embodied in the object (my italics) are 
 not two but one."^ 
 
 I can hardly think that anyone who studies this 
 essay in connection with the ten pages or so 
 following p. 96 will find it easy to read their 
 doctrines as the same. It seems essential to the 
 earlier essay that while I think of the perceived 
 content of a house or a friend when I think of it 
 or him, yet the object of my thought is not, and 
 does not include, the content I think of, but offers 
 to thought as what it is to consider, supposing 
 that it considers its object, either nothing, or 
 certain physical determinations. 
 
 This latter view, as I said above, I take to be 
 strictly in accordance with the critical realist's 
 theory. He has grasped the principle that truth 
 cannot include the reality in its perfect character 
 of a completed concrete whole; but he applies 
 ' Op. cit,, pp. 239-41. 
 
136 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 that insight not to the growing synthesis in which 
 thought builds up the whole which from the first 
 has been its guide and object, and which is its 
 actual and genuine matter of consideration ; but 
 to a supposed existent, whose qualification for the 
 post of " that " is merely the negative one, that it 
 is held incapable of entering into experience, and 
 therefore serves as a mere peg or attachment to 
 which the real characters of being may, so to speak, 
 be moored. And yet, as we saw, the demand of 
 thought for an object which is not featureless was 
 so inevitable, that it was found to identify itself 
 with a nature which is a content of experience and 
 nothing else — viz., the determinations of a physical 
 object. 
 
 It is this hypothesis which destroys the possi- 
 bility of a progressive and intelligible reunion 
 between the that and the what. The necessary 
 expansion of the " thing " through appearances 
 ad infinitum has been interrupted by erecting into 
 an absolute existent what is merely one set of 
 these appearances, and we are faced with a " that " 
 which has in principle no "what," and a "what" 
 which has in principle no " that." The existent 
 is the object of knowledge, but it has nothing for 
 us to know. What we have before the mind is 
 not the object of knowledge, but it is all that we 
 can perceive or think. We have a complete and 
 not relative separation between facts and ideas, 
 and therefore, as Mr. Bradley has shown to be a 
 necessary consequence, we are left without either.^ 
 In other words, the existent is taken as particular 
 ' " Essays on Truth and Reality " p. 301. 
 
vii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 137 
 
 and as independent of being experienced ; while 
 the experienced " datum " is taken as a bare 
 universal and as mere " essence." But for abso- 
 lutism this analysis is a fundamental error. An 
 existent for it is not a particular — there is no such 
 reality in rerum natura — but an individual, the 
 synthesis of particular and universal. An essence 
 is not a bare universal— there is no such thing in 
 rerum natura — but is the universal aspect of an 
 individual.^ The critical realist agrees that essences 
 as such do not exist. But it is an extraordinary 
 thing that, to the best of my recollection, there is 
 not a word in the book about individuality. Its 
 place is taken by the alleged particularity of the 
 existent. But this is a glaring contradiction of 
 experience. Individuality comes of function and 
 qualitative uniqueness rooted in concrete system. 
 It belongs to a sphere of apprehension far above 
 the unity of the physical object, which may or 
 may not accompany it. 
 
 This, then, the absolute severance of truth and 
 reality as opposed to their relative identity, is the 
 point of divergence between Critical Realism and 
 Absolutism. We have noted the sliding scale, 
 into which, as we think. Critical Realism is driven 
 by the total impossibility of sustaining its con- 
 ception in its purity. It is only through this 
 sliding scale that the protest* against its existent 
 
 * On p. 231 occurs the expression, "an entirely concrete 
 universal, a universal of the lowest order." For me, at all 
 events, the more concrete the universal, the higher — the 
 nearer to reality — is its order. 
 
 ^ Op. cit., p. no. 
 
138 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 being identified with the Kantian unknowable 
 'Ding-an-sich can be sustained for a moment. In 
 principle there can be no doubt that after ac- 
 knowledging relativity for a certain tract of its 
 journey, the theory has yielded to the temptation 
 which made Kant seek an absolute substructure in 
 another world, and has, in part at least, eked out 
 its suggestion by reviving the old superstition 
 which takes " the primary perceptual qualities " as 
 " literal characteristics of objects."^ 
 
 The critical realist's view being motived as it is 
 by an absolute severance between essence and 
 existent, the existent comes necessarily to belong, 
 like the Kantian noumenon, to a different order of 
 being from the experienced content. It is held to 
 be something foreign, transcendent of experience 
 and not merely of immediacy, a term different 
 from the thing of common apprehension, con- 
 nected with it by causal relations, though these 
 only have a meaning for nexuses of objects and 
 events apprehended within the same ordered 
 world. And it has no content. For in principle 
 anything we learn about it from science at once 
 passes into the status of essence and takes its 
 place in the datum or quality group, pushing away 
 the existent, which never can be content, to further 
 grades of remoteness. 
 
 For the interest of the matter, and to show 
 more thoroughly why at this point the doctrines 
 
 ' Op. cit., p. 23. Apparently these as so taken are not 
 characters of the physical object, but of the visible object, 
 quite as incoherent as any secondary qualities, and as " sub- 
 jective." Cf. above, p. 132, note. 
 
vii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 139 
 
 must diverge which have so far gone hand in 
 hand, I will reproduce with some fulness a pro- 
 found and striking modern criticism of any 
 realism which takes up the position I have been 
 describing.! 
 
 First, if the supposed cause in any sense is, it 
 must in principle be capable of being apprehended 
 and experienced, if not by us, yet by other egos 
 which have better and deeper insight. This is an 
 essential necessity from the nature of the appre- 
 hension of things.^ 
 
 Further, it could be shown that such possible 
 perceptions, with essential necessity, would have to 
 be perceptions by means of appearances, so that 
 we should find ourselves in an inevitable regress 
 ad infinitum. 
 
 Again, an explanation of processes given in 
 perception by hypothetical causal entities (as of 
 planetary disturbances by a new unknown planet) 
 is different in principle from an explanation in the 
 sense of a physical determination of experienced 
 things through such physical modes of explanation 
 as atoms, ions, etc.^ 
 
 I will reproduce the following passage verbatim, 
 as it seems to me to go to the heart of the matter. 
 
 " Let us start from the position, which is easily 
 established, that in the physical method the 
 perceived thing itself,^ always and in principle, 
 is precisely the thing which the physicist investigates 
 and determines scientifically. 
 
 ^ Husserl, Jahrbuch, 1913, p. 97. 
 
 " Cf. author's "Implication," p. 79, referring to Husserl. 
 
 ^ Cf. Whitehead, "Concept of Nature," p. 31. 
 
 * Italics throughout are Husserl's. 
 
140 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 "This proposition appears to contradict the 
 earlier propositions, in which we attempted to 
 determine more precisely the meaning of current 
 utterances of the physicists — e.g., the sense of the 
 traditional discrimination between primary and 
 secondary qualities. After the elimination of 
 obvious misinterpretations, we said that the ' thing 
 experienced in the strict sense gave us the mere 
 this,' an ' empty X ' which became the bearer 
 of the exact physical determinations, which them- 
 selves did not fall within experience in the strict 
 sense. To be ' physically true ' was therefore 
 ' something in principle otherwise defined ' than 
 what was ' bodily ' given in perception itself. 
 This was present in sheer sensuous qualifications 
 which are just not physical. 
 
 " However, the two accounts harmonise well 
 enough, and we are not obliged seriously to 
 controvert the former interpretation of the physical 
 mode of apprehension. Only we must under- 
 stand it correctly. We must by no means get into 
 the pitfall of the fundamentally perverse portrait 
 and sign-theory^ which we considered above and. 
 refuted in radical universality without special 
 reference to the physical thing,^ A portrait or 
 sign points to something which lies outside it, such 
 as ' itself to be apprehensible through a transition 
 into another mode of ideation, that of dator per- 
 ception. A sign and portrait does not reveal in 
 itself the self which is indicated or portrayed. But 
 the physical thing is nothing foreign to that which 
 
 ^ Cf. "Essays in Critical Realism," p. 165. 
 * See p. 72 of Husserl's Jahrbuch, 1913. 
 
vii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 141 
 
 appears bodily in sensuous form, but is something 
 ■which primarily reveals itself in this latter, and, for 
 irrefragable a friori reasons of essence, in it only. 
 Therefore, too, the sensible determining content of 
 the X, which functions as bearer of the physical 
 determinations, is no foreign garment investing 
 the latter ; rather, it is only so far as the X is 
 subject of the sensible determinations that it is 
 also subject of the physical determinations, which 
 on their side reveal themselves in the sensible. 
 In principle a thing, and precisely the thing of 
 which the physicist speaks, in accordance with our 
 full discussions, can only be given sensibly, in 
 sensible ' modes of appearance ' ; and the identical 
 element which appears in the changing continuity 
 of these modes of appearance is what the physicist 
 subjects to a causal analysis, an investigation into 
 real nexuses of necessity, in relation to all con- 
 nections capable of being experienced (therefore 
 perceived or perceivable), which can come into con- 
 sideration as * circumstances,' The thing which 
 he observes, with which he experiments, which 
 he continuously sees, handles, lays on the balance, 
 places in the fusing-furnace : this and no other 
 thing becomes the subject of the physical predicates, 
 such as weight, mass, temperature, electric resist- 
 ance, etc. Just as truly it is the perceived pro- 
 cesses and connections themselves which are 
 determined by notions, such as force, acceleration, 
 energy, atom, ion, etc. The thing in its sensuous 
 appearance, which has the sensuous shapes, colours, 
 properties of smell and taste, is, therefore, anything 
 but a sign for something else, but is in a certain sense 
 
142 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 a sign for itself. Only one may say thus much : 
 the thing which appears with such and such 
 sensible characters under the given phenomenal 
 conditions is, for the physicist who has already 
 carried out in general the physical determination for 
 such things as a class, in nexuses of appearances of 
 the kind in question, the indication of an abundance 
 of causal properties of this very thing, which as 
 such reveal themselves just in interdependences of 
 appearances which are familiar according to their 
 kinds. What reveals itself in such cases is plainly 
 — just as revealing itself in intentional units based 
 on experiences of consciousness — in principle 
 transcendent. According to all this, it is clear 
 that even the higher transcendence of the physical 
 thing indicates no reaching out beyond the world 
 for consciousness, or for every ego that (by itself 
 or in a connection of empathy) functions as a 
 subject of cognition.^ 
 
 "The state of the case is, to indicate it in general, 
 that physical thinking establishes itself on the 
 foundation of natural experience (or of the natural 
 theses which that establishes), and, following the 
 motives of reason which the connections of experi- 
 ence offer it, is compelled to fulfil certain modes 
 of apprehension, certain intentional constructions 
 as demanded by reason, and to fulfil them /or the 
 theoretical determination of the sensibly experienced 
 things. It is just by this that there arises the 
 opposition between the thing of mere sensible 
 imaginatio and the thing of physical intellectio, 
 and for the latter side there grow up all the ideal 
 * Husserl, Jahrbuch, 191 3, pp. 99-100. 
 
VII] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 143 
 
 ontological thought-structures which express them- 
 selves in physical conceptions, and draw their 
 meaning, and are able to draw it exclusively, from 
 the method of physical science. 
 
 " If reason in the logic of experience under the 
 title Physics thus elaborates an intentional correlate 
 of higher order, physical nature out of sheerly 
 apparent nature, it spells mythology to set up this 
 datum of rational insight, which is nothing beyond 
 the determination of nature as given to sheer 
 intuition, by the logic of experience, as an unknown 
 world of realities in the way of things in themselves, 
 which is hypothetically constructed as foundation 
 for p,urposes of causal explanation of appearances."^ 
 
 Thus the idealist's estimation of the position 
 seems to him quite simple and straightforward. 
 A thing is an individual, the object of thought 
 and perception, including all that we actually 
 think of as composing it. The quaint separation 
 between what we think of and the means by which 
 we think of it has no raison d'etre. A thing is its 
 properties which are determinable ad infinitum, 
 and its physical determinations are among them. 
 In knowledge, the what, though severed by its ideal 
 form, recovers and maintains its unity with the 
 that. Knowledge is a form in which the real 
 manifests itself through the ideal. The existent 
 is not beyond the quality group ; they are one 
 and the same thing — the actual concrete taken in 
 the whole wealth of its conditions and relations, 
 and not as an isolable abstraction. The alleged 
 difficulty of exhibiting a physical object disappears. 
 1 L.c. p. loi. 
 
144 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 In the physical aspect of the universe, each thing 
 plays its part and is " ingredient " everywhere, just 
 as in every other aspect under its special condition.-^ 
 
 This is the difference between the two positions, 
 the difference between a concrete real and a pair of 
 abstractions — existent versus quality group. But it 
 is the analogy that I wanted to insist upon. 
 Critical realism, it seems to me, has done the 
 work it claims to have done, so far as destroying 
 neo-realism is concerned. The group of determina- 
 tions ad infinitum cannot function as a single, 
 isolable, external, self-existent. It must be quite 
 differently regarded, and must be a whole which 
 lives in the life of its infinite context. Critical 
 realism recognises this, and treats it as a quality 
 group, a group of appearances relative to con- 
 ditions. So far so good. Truth is the qualifica- 
 tion of a real by ideas, by essences, if you will. So, 
 in a sense, we say too. 
 
 The point where necessary conflict between 
 idealism and critical realism begins is indicated by 
 the term " transcendence." A careful study of 
 Professor Pratt's argument on this head reveals a 
 state of mind which is really amazing.^ A new 
 and very unexpected meeting of extremes is 
 involved in it. Critical realism, that is to say, 
 maintaining the reality of the transcendent, under- 
 stands the term in the same manner as neo-idealism, 
 which rejects it — as the isolable, pre-existent real, 
 
 ' Whitehead, "The Concept of Nature," p. 158 ; (^ p. 
 145. I suppose our author's "physical objects" are his 
 " scientific objects." 
 
 * " Essays in Critical Realism," pp. 97 ff'. 
 
VII] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 145 
 
 inaccessible to actual thinking. And this error of 
 its own — a very simple one — critical realism 
 charges upon idealism as such, alleging it to be the 
 ground upon which idealists, along with other 
 thinkers, accuse critical realism of making know- 
 ledge impossible. And against this alleged 
 objection the author accumulates, as counter- 
 evidence drawn from fact, all the cases and types 
 of knowledge in which existents transcending 
 immediate experience are accepted as established 
 elements of the real world. This is what I 
 characterise as amazing, incredible if it were not 
 there in black and white. 
 
 I confess that I think the whole matter is per- 
 fectly plain. Every object of thought is real, and 
 every object of thought is transcendent of imme- 
 diate experience. The distinction of knowledge 
 of acquaintance and " knowledge about " is in 
 principle untenable. Knowledge of other minds 
 and of existence in the real world is knowledge of 
 the objects of thought, furnished by thought and 
 inference, which are in principle one and the same 
 thing and come under the general category of 
 implication. Another person's mind, a past event, 
 the real Julius Caesar, the inside of a solid and 
 opaque object which cannot so far be X-rayed, the 
 other side of the, moon, are all alike objects of 
 thought implied in our standing experience, and 
 accepted as real on the principle of thoroughgoing 
 conviction, " This or nothing." One would 
 almost think that the author had never heard of 
 thought, or considered the meaning of our belief 
 in the reality of what we cannot avoid thinking — 
 
 10 
 
146 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 of all that is implied in the given. This is tran- 
 scendence of immediacy, and there is no experience 
 of objects which does not presuppose it. 
 
 But critical realism seems to us to confuse this 
 with a very different thing — namely, transcendence 
 of experience, experience including all thought 
 and objects of thought. To reject this is merely 
 to reject the unknowable thing in itself ; and it is 
 not a question of evidence — it is a question of a 
 contradiction in terms. Every object of thought 
 is the subject of significant propositions ; the 
 alleged transcendent existent is not the subject of 
 significant propositions, for, ex hypothesi, no essence 
 by which it is characterised is one with it as object 
 of thought. The author's defence on p. no 
 cannot stand for a moment. In face of the 
 principle that the object of thought never includes 
 any determination which we can think of — and we 
 can and do think of all and any predicates or 
 characters which we affirm — it is futile to maintain 
 that it is not a Ding-an-sich. Plainly, too, solvitur 
 ambulando. Try to carry out the theory, and 
 where are you.'' Julius Caesar, as an object of 
 thought, is either nothing before our minds at all, 
 or, waiving the inaccuracy of ascribing some 
 peculiar predicates to the bare existent, he is a 
 dance of electrons. If we think anything further 
 of him, it is not he we are tjiinking of. He is 
 not existent in his characters, nor his characters in 
 him. He is not a constituent of the proposition 
 that describes him.^ 
 
 ' See Bradley, "Essays on Truth and Reality," with 
 reference to Russell, pp. 409 _^. 
 
vn] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 14.7 
 
 No doubt the critical realist's impeachment that 
 all transcendence is denied lies against some of 
 those he mentions. It has been worked out as 
 against William James in a masterly discussion, 
 which has much in common with a passage in 
 "Critical Realism."^ It is just the omission to 
 consider what is meant by the object of thought 
 which is the cause of the defect imputed, and this 
 cause the critical idealist shares with James, though 
 its result in the former is different — not a restriction 
 to immediacy, and so far it is well, but a jump 
 into pluralistic Absolutism, which is the Kantian 
 salto mortale. He starts boldly towards reality as 
 the whole, but is frightened en route and calls a halt 
 at a place where there is nothing but — a something. 
 
 All the argument from the consciousness which 
 goes with activities is irrelevant to the main point. 
 It is an interesting " meeting of extremes " with 
 analyses of the judgment in reference to reality, 
 just as are the modern arguments from religious 
 or social experience with abstract ontologlcal doc- 
 trines. But it all falls within the definition of 
 thought. When you have laid it down that 
 intelligent mind is inherently a centre of social 
 and scientific relations, you only need to trace 
 their gradual appearance in childhood and ado- 
 lescence to cover all that is said in this respect by 
 Professor Pratt. ^ It is all— gradual development 
 and all — made perfectly clear in Plato's " Re- 
 public" and Aristotle's "Ethics" and "Politics." 
 
 1 "Critical Realism,'' p. 41. C_/. Bradley, "Truth and 
 Reality," pp. lififf. Or see on "Transcendence," ibid.,^. 153. 
 
 2 "Critical Realism," pp. 94/". 
 
148 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 I will summarise the meetings of extremes 
 newly touched upon in this chapter. 
 
 Where neo-realism parted company with the 
 older idealism, critical realism joined the latter for 
 a space. Asserting, with neo-realism and against 
 idealism, that there could and must be self-existent 
 external objects, unaffected by the presence or 
 absence of percipience and intelligence, it yet con- 
 tended in agreement with idealism and against 
 neo-realism that such objects could not be the 
 quality groups familiar to us normally as " things." 
 Thus it was led into a very instructive polemic 
 against the naive acceptance of the sense world as 
 real per se, and took a long step in harmony with 
 idealism. 
 
 But this step, combined with the postulation of 
 external self-existent objects somewhere, if not in 
 the currently received thing or quality group, 
 brought it to the assumption of external existents 
 as objects of thought but not subjects of proposi- 
 tions, involving a separation in principle between 
 the that which was thought of as existent, without 
 being expressed in significant propositions, and the 
 what which was expressed in significant propositions 
 without being thought of as existing. This runs 
 parallel so far to the doctrine that truth pre- 
 supposes the severance of the what from the that, 
 and is thus a special form of reality. But it de- 
 parts from the further consequence of this doctrine 
 by making the severance absolute, and so denying 
 the presence of reality in the experienced group 
 of characters as a developing whole, which is the 
 growing but self-identical object of thought. 
 
VII] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 149 
 
 Thus the physical object, taken as the external 
 existent independent of thought and perception, is 
 treated as in a different dimension from the familiar 
 perceptible thing, whereas it is, according to ex- 
 perience, a set of that very thing's determinations 
 in the same world with it, and no less relative to 
 consciousness. 
 
 To sustain this Contention critical realism de- 
 fends transcendence, interpreting it as transcendence 
 of experience^ and in this interpretation joining 
 hands with extreme neo-idealism, which, however, 
 for the same reason, rejects transcendence. Their 
 common error is the confusion of transcendence of 
 experience and transcendence of immediacy, which 
 latter is the inherent character of thought, and 
 includes all the recognised cases of transcendence 
 on >yhich critical realism relies to establish its 
 doctrine. But its own special case is really a 
 transcendence of experience, and as such involves 
 the contradiction in terms which attaches to the 
 unknowable Ding-an-sich. Here the same necessity 
 — the refusal to find reality in the implications of 
 the whole of experience for thought — leads to a 
 meeting of extremes with all believers in the 
 Ding-an-sich, in the same abrupt expedient, the 
 postulation of a world of self-existent substantive 
 particulars, objectsofthoughtwithout being subjects 
 of propositions — a contradiction in terms. The 
 special argument from our instinct of co-operation 
 withareal world of existence is merely an application 
 of the conception of thought, forming a meeting- 
 point with other contemporary types of reasoning, 
 and familiar already from Greek philosophy. 
 
150 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 UNITY OF THE UNIVERSE, AND RELIGION 
 
 In the present chapter it will be necessary to 
 repeat the journey traversed in Chapter VI, only, 
 as it were, on the other side of the hedge. We 
 saw the strength and spread of the progressive 
 doctrine in to-day's philosophy. But we noted 
 by contrast indications which the philosophers we 
 spoke of share with other modes of thinking, to 
 the effect that their primary and explicit common 
 contention omits something of the truth in which 
 other thought converges with what they suggest. 
 
 I. I begin byobserving, merely to meet a plausible 
 idea which popular science might suggest, that the 
 philosophical bearing of the doctrine of relativity 
 is less certain than some of its language might 
 make us think. It might be held that the problem 
 of the ultimate reality of time had been finally 
 decided when it is admitted to be an element in 
 every experience of space, and that therefore it 
 could no longer be questioned in any sense what- 
 ever. It might be held, too, that the essential 
 progressiveness of ultimate reality — its incomplete- 
 ness and restlessness, to use a favourite phrase of 
 Professor Alexander's — was therefore established. 
 All that I venture to say on this point, while 
 passing to the fundamental problem of the unity 
 
viii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 151 
 
 of the universe as demanded by metaphysics and 
 by religion, is to recall a very simple and 
 primary analogy which I have appealed to else- 
 where/ in dealing with the alleged reality of the 
 time experience. The analogy in this seems to 
 me suggestive, if I am right in gathering that the 
 thoroughgoing relativity of space-time prima facie 
 indeed disintegrates the universe into individual 
 time-systems, estimated primarily from bases 
 within themselves, and entirely relative in their 
 character when determined ah extra; but that 
 when the matter is pressed home it seems evident 
 (such I take to be Professor Alexander's con- 
 clusion 2) that a common world is implied "in 
 which the worlds of the two [all possible] sets of 
 observers are unified." The world is a unity of 
 movements, but not a single movement (anticipated 
 by Bradley, "Appearance," pp. 210^). 
 
 I said above that this result might almost have 
 been anticipated from a familiar and commonplace 
 observation on a very much lower level of 
 experience and thought, which seemed to me to 
 bear on an analogous problem. 
 
 What I am referring to is the private or personal 
 experience of duration in comparison with the 
 standard or general time of the sun or our clocks, i 
 This time view^ is in the first place most com- 
 pletely relative. It is so relative as to be almost 
 
 ' In earlier writings on the subject of time. I have not 
 these or the references. 
 
 2 "Space, etc," I. 90. 
 
 ^ There is a well-known sermon of James Martineau's on 
 it, called " The Christian Time-View." 
 
152 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 absolute — isolated, unreferred ; we do not in the 
 least know what it is relative to. Wh^n we seem 
 to be waiting endlessly, racked by pain or anxiety, 
 what does clock-time matter to us ? There is no 
 time-experience more variable than this, and none 
 more relative to its conditions, if we knew what 
 they were. And certainly there is none more 
 real. Nothing you can think or say about time 
 can supersede this dui-ation or modify its actuality. 
 Now this, I take it, is our primitive sense of 
 time. At any rate, it is in one way prior to any 
 measured duration — lacks something in comparison 
 with it — though, as I say, it is by no means less 
 real, and persists beside the other. But beside it, 
 and gaining more and more extension and authority 
 as civilisation becomes more insistent, we have 
 uniform time, clock-time of some sort. We erect 
 a measure in some natural or artificial process, the 
 uniformity of which we think there is no reason 
 to doubt,^ and we believe, though to test our 
 belief is strictly impossible, that its successive 
 sections are equal durations, that if, per impossible, 
 they could be superposed, they would coincide. 
 We think this an advance. We have standardised 
 durations and made science and social co-operation 
 possible. It is clearly analogous to what happens 
 when we establish a general principle or theory, 
 
 ^ I do not know whether Professor Whitehead's remarks 
 ("Concept of Nature," p. 137) are meant to dispute this — 
 viz., the natural logic which relies on a process such that we 
 see no reason for it to change its pace. If they are so, I 
 should be obliged to differ, however rashly. See "Know- 
 ledge and Reality," p. 329 
 
viii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 153 
 
 or state the variations of secondary qualities in 
 terms of their primary bases. 
 
 But this " uniform " time does not supersede 
 the personal experience of duration. The latter 
 persists by the side of the standard time, just as do 
 the secondary qualities by the side of the primary 
 
 S[ualiiies to cases of which they are referred. It is 
 bolish to treat the uniform time as the reality or 
 the real time in any sense which implies that it 
 supersedes the other. We know what comes of 
 treating secondary qualities as unreal in comparison 
 with primary. The world is robbed of half its 
 beauty and interest ; if we persist, we land in 
 materialism. So it would be if we treated clock- 
 time as the time or the only time. Our lives, we j 
 may say, would be wiped out. 
 
 Our personal time-view then is relative, because 
 so wholly unstandardised, though for this very 
 reason in one sense absolute, comparable with 
 nothing else. The accepted uniform time is 
 " absolute " because, as we suppose, at a certain 
 stage it enables us to refer all durations to a single 
 standard. If I am to meet you, we must go by 
 the same time, and for that we appeal to "the 
 time," which we idealise as a uniform flow, as if 
 something apart, when it is really the . consensus 
 of all motions so far as corrected by comparison 
 and reasoning, and brought to an agreement, 
 deviations from which can be detected. I do not 
 know how any such account stands towards 
 Newton's absolute time ; but I am sure it is a 
 sufficient description of what Locke meant by it.^ 
 
 1 See " Knowledge and Reality," l.c. 
 
154 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 Now we see in this commonplace comparison 
 of primary experiences an analogue of the doctrine 
 of relativity in its philosophical bearing. In the 
 secondary world of advanced precision, we seem to 
 be playing the same game over again. You begin 
 with experiences, unique in themselves, but 
 variable ad infinitum as referred to each other, as 
 you did with the personal time-view. And this is 
 all real. You cannot modify the unique time and 
 space for the observer at rest in his space-system.^ 
 
 But it appears that in this secondary world of 
 extreme precision and complex theory you can 
 make a further step, as was done in the primary 
 world when man conceived uniform time. The 
 unique systems cannot be superseded, but they 
 can be brought into a common world. Then, so far 
 as I can apprehend, the spatio-temporal universe 
 would have to be conceived as a world whose 
 menlbers lived in or at related space-times, but 
 which had no single space-time of its own. As 
 absolute time connected personal durations, but did 
 not absorb and include them, so total space-time 
 would connect its unique embodiments, but would 
 not supersede them by a single progression of its 
 own. Life, motion, would be their way of being 
 within the whole, what Spinoza wbuld call their 
 proportions of motion and rest, but it would be 
 idle to talk of a motion or progression of the 
 whole as such. To what could it be relative ? 
 
 The moral which I am trying to point is merely 
 this. No one should ever have thought that by 
 connecting personal duration with a standard 
 1 Whitehead, "Concept of Nature," p. 178. 
 
viii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 155 
 
 which gave so-called absolute time, we were 
 superseding the former by the latter, or substitut-^ 
 ing a reality for an appearance. It might just as 
 well be interpreted the opposite way. And in 
 the same way no one should think that in con- 
 necting relative systems of space-time with a total 
 of their relativities, we are combining them into a 
 real time which supersedes their individual lives. 
 The total of connected time-systems is more 
 concrete than the single standardised time-flow, 
 but it is still a world of times and not a time. So 
 at least it appears to me. "^ 
 
 We have just seen that the principle of 
 space- time, as developed in the conception 
 of relativity, does not, at least in Professor 
 Alexander's hands, prove fatal to the belief in a 
 common world. It does, in fact, at least connect 
 with and develop doctrines familiar to the most 
 absolutist philosophy. -"^ 
 
 ^ I cite from Mr. Bradley's "Appearance" (2 ed.), 1897, 
 p. 598 : "A difficulty which might have been included in this 
 chapter [chap, v., " Motion and Change and its Perception "] 
 is the problem of what might be called the Relativity of 
 Motion. Has Motion any meaning whatever except as the 
 alteration of the spatial relation of bodies ? Has it the 
 smallest meaning apart from the plurality of bodies ? Can it 
 be called, to speak strictly, the state either (a) of one single 
 body or (b) of a number of bodies ? . . . The idea of the motion 
 of a single body may perhaps (I am ignorant) be necessary in 
 physics, and, if that is so, then in physics, of course, that idea 
 must be rational and right. But, except as a working fiction 
 of this kind, it strikes my mind as a typical instance of 
 unnecessary nonsense. . . . The whole idea [reference to Lotze, 
 " Metaphysik," Sectt. 164, 165, and Liebmann, " Zur Analysis 
 der Wirklichkeit," pp. 113 ff^ of a solitary sphere in space, to 
 say nothing of its rotation and centrifugal force, considered 
 
156 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 Now we are to proceed in considering the 
 points which give significance to the position 
 opposed to that described in Chapter VI., if not 
 including and superseding it.'^ 
 
 metaphysically, is, I should say, a mere vicious abstraction, 
 and from the first totally inadmissible. . . , That in philosophy 
 any man should use the idea of a single moving body as if it 
 were a thing self-evident and free from difficulty, this really 
 surprises me." Mr. Bradley, of course, is here sustaining his 
 own argument that the contradictions of space and time point, 
 to a higher mode of being. The interest in the context of 
 my argument is that relativity enforces it upon us that we 
 must go at least as far as the whole experienced system. 
 Then, in what manner this can really be is a matter for 
 further enquiry. Such words, say, as " whole " and " system " 
 (see Whitehead, " Concept of Nature," p. 146) are good ones ; 
 and science evidently means to make full use of them. But 
 they do not tell you by themselves how far they may carry you. 
 ' An obvious recognition of the inseparability of space and 
 time in the region of everyday experience is, of course, to be 
 found in the expressions which indicate measures of time or 
 distance. The passage in Herodotus (I. 72) is typical : 
 firJKOi 6S0V ev^u>v(ji dvSpl ircvre ij/zepai dvaurifMyVTai [" the 
 length of the journey (the road) is five days for a good 
 walker"]. I do not know whether "Stunde" first meant 
 time or distance. As our means of travelling came to vary 
 very greatly, the relativity of time and distance, which I take' 
 it was in early experience drawn from current usage based on 
 the usual mode of travel, comes to be commonly insisted on, 
 space-denominations being absorbed into time, which is the 
 practically important feature. " We live an hour from 
 London." "An hour from London by rail." "An hour from 
 London by express." No doubt we shall soon say how far by 
 aeroplane. A curious case is one in which the name of the 
 distance is retained, but indicates diiFerent lengths according 
 to the time (or exertion) [Morse's "Trade and Administra- 
 tion of the Chinese Empire," chap, vi., " Measure of 
 Distance": "A theoretic unit is the li, measuring 1,800 of 
 the land foot (the foot differs in length for different purposes). 
 
viii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 157 
 
 We will begin by attempting to estimate the 
 depth of the unanimity which we pointed out as 
 existing between the neo-idealists and the neo- 
 realists, especially such a neo-realist as I*rofessor 
 Alexander/ and will then attempt to develop 
 and complete the indications which the enquiry 
 will bring before us, that some further modifica- 
 tion of their common ideas is inevitable. 
 
 Everyone knows there is time and change in 
 the universe. It is the first lesson of experience, 
 and the question for philosophy is whether it is 
 also the last. We observed that the latter con- 
 viction has come upon the modern philosophical 
 world like a flood, and that in the regions prima 
 facie most removed from each other. The 
 universe is history through and through, say 
 Professor Gentile and Professor Alexander alike. 
 For the neo-Idealist who thinks with the former, 
 reality is one with the pulse of thought. Its 
 growing-point is in the dialectic contrasts, one 
 side of which is necessarily and endlessly, in 
 an ever self-reflecting circuit, evolving the others. 
 
 Based on a foot of lo'l English inches it would measure i 
 705 yards, or ^ of a statute mile. In practice it is one- 
 hundredth of the distance a laden porter will cover in a day 
 of ten hours' marching ; on the plain this would represent a 
 third of a mile, a half-kilometre, more or less, but in hilly 
 country it varies considerably. By Chinese reckoning, if it is 
 50 li to the top of Mount Washington/ returning by the same 
 road to the same point it may be 25 li. A mountain may be 
 spoken of as 100 miles high — by road"]. Everyone is aware 
 that you don't know what a distance is till you know what 
 kind of going it is. 
 
 * Professor Watts Cunningham, who follows Bergson on 
 the reality of time, occupies an interesting middle position. 
 
158 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 For the other, and I take it M. Bergson so far 
 goes along with him, the reality of time, "creative 
 time," is the mainspring. 
 
 The fundamental problem, common to both 
 attitudes, is stated effectively in the quotation 
 from Gentile which I used in opening up the 
 comparison which I am now developing.^ It 
 turns, in his phrase, on the word "fuori" (out- 
 side). If your philosophy places true being 
 outside history or things, progress, which is the 
 realisation of the true being of things, is ex 
 hypothesi impossible. In other words, we might 
 say, the universe is cut in two. The real is not 
 rational, and the rational is not real. The series 
 of events does not touch the true being of 
 things ; the true being of things is not revealed in 
 the series of events. 
 
 Very well, then ; our two extremes, creative 
 thought, we may say shortly, and creative time, 
 meet in the demand that true being — ultimate 
 reality — must somehow engage in history and 
 in progress. It must not be behind them or 
 beside them. The changes which form the suc- 
 cession of events must be changes in the real 
 
 ) system of the whole universe. It, itself, must be 
 first one thing and then, another. It must cease 
 
 I to be what it was, and become what it was not. 
 What I want to do is to see exacdy, so far as 
 I can, how much this signifies for each of the 
 thinkers concerned, and how far they respectively 
 go towards recognising the universe as a unity. 
 What I suggest by anticipation as broadly and 
 
 ' Chap. II., p. 59, supra. 
 
viii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 159 
 
 roughly the truth is that Professor Gentile has 
 recognised the unity without the universe, and 
 Professor Alexander the universe without the' 
 unity. 
 
 (a) In order to determine the real attitude of 
 neo-idealist and of neo-realist to the unity of the 
 universe, let us consider their respective modes of 
 dealing with the problem of transcendence. If 
 the reality of things is embodied in an actual 
 succession of events, how is the connection be- 
 tween the members of this succession and one 
 another, and also between each of them and the 
 whole of finite experience, exhibited and main- 
 tained.'' How is a past event accessible from the 
 standpoint of present experience ? And, if the 
 series by itself constitutes the whole and sole 
 reality, and passes beyond present experience, how 
 is any identity of characteristics guaranteed to the\ 
 universe as a whole .'' 
 
 In face of such questions as these, there is no 
 doubt what the neo-idealist would answer. Of 
 all things he most decidedly rejects the tran- 
 scendent. " Nothing pre-existent, nothing tran- 
 scendent," is his watchword. Nothing enters into 
 his real world which is not created, produced in 
 vital coherence with all else, by the pure act of 
 thinking. So far, one might say, the whole 
 system is founded on the vital oneness of the 
 thinking spirit, , which is the whole and the 
 universe. 
 
 And the thinking spirit is explicitly declared 
 not to mean the finite subject of thought. The 
 theory is not a subjective idealism. To identify 
 
i6o THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 thought and reality would be absurd, if thought 
 were the thinking of the empirical ego. The 
 thought, whose thinking is reality, self-creating 
 reality, is the thought which lives in the " we," 
 the group life, the social unity of fact and will. 
 Metaphysic, the study of reality, is for them the 
 " Metafisica della Mente " by contrast with the 
 superseded " Metafisica dell' Ente."^ 
 
 Reality, then, is historical througli and through. 
 It is the progression which is moved by the dial- 
 ectic of finite mind according to the ultimate 
 structure of the spirit. And nothing outside this 
 progression — nothing transcendent — is real. 
 
 If we ask now about the members of the pro- 
 gression itself, say, a past event, the primary 
 answer is not wanting. *' All history is con- 
 temporary." The past, if I understand rightly, is 
 implied, as we might say, in our given present.^ 
 It is all of one tissue, and the reality lives in our 
 experience, as amplified by all that is implied as a 
 living outgrowth from our present. Still more to 
 unify the world, we are to realise that the history, 
 which is thus, while a progression, a single real, is 
 also — I had almost said — an appearance of a real 
 in a different form. But that language would not 
 here be accepted. All that we can say, I believe, 
 is that the historical progress is the same thing 
 with the "ideal eternal history," and, in short, 
 that history is one with philosophy, and, if we will 
 speak of an absolute, is in this sense one with the 
 
 1 "Spirito," p. 12. 
 
 " The doctrine is so far one with that of Bradley, " Essays,'' 
 pp. 147-8, 426. 
 
viii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY i6i 
 
 absolute. For the absolute does not fall outside 
 the progression. It is, I gather, the term applied 
 to the circle of categories, which, reproducing each 
 other in the rotation of an unceasing dialectic, 
 form the very being of the self-creative thinking 
 which is reality. It would not be fair, I think, to 
 suggest that in identifying history and philosophy 
 they pronounce the concrete world-process one 
 and the same thing with the rotation of abstract 
 terms which constitutes the dialectic movement. 
 As I understand, philosophy stands with them for 
 the concrete culmination of all living and thinking ; 
 and so, if we concluded that the absolute is finite 
 experience at its both fullest and most intelligible 
 pitch ; that this is philosophy, history, and the 
 realisation of the ideal eternal history, which is 
 eternal in recurrences, but not repetitions — we 
 should be doing our best for their argument. 
 
 Out of this intention of theirs we can gather a 
 good deal that makes for the unity of the universe. 
 
 The dialectic process, indeed, is endless. The 
 "Tutto" is spoken of; but there is no whole 
 which is the spring of the dialectic in the sense 
 of the return of abstractions to the concrete which 
 completes them. " There is no path from an 
 abstraction to a concrete," . 
 
 Still, there is a conviction that the character of 
 the Tutto is permanent. The categories o f the 
 rotation, attitudes of the spirit^ are' apparently in 
 principle immutable. The values, in connection 
 with them (as beauty and truth are two levels of 
 the relatively apprehending spirit), are also eternal 
 features of the universe. The eternal history is 
 
 II 
 
1 62 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 the realisation of the " immanent and eternal 
 victory of man over nature."^ The conflict is 
 endless, but not indecisive. Evil becomes known 
 as evil, in and through its rejection, and therefore 
 the succession of events is inherently, and by 
 definition, an advance, and the perfectibility of 
 man (by approximation, I take it we must under- 
 stand) is an axiom. We may speak of God,^ but 
 purely as immanent in man ; and of Providence 
 which guides history, but simply in the sense of 
 the reasonable spirit active in man. We noted the 
 idea of aunity linking the steps of the series together, 
 the form of a nisus or dream, prophetic of the 
 phases of development yet to come, and inspiring 
 man in his endeavour towards them. Here the 
 coincidence with Alexander is remarkable, and we 
 seem also to receive suggestions of a spirit which 
 transcends human thinking, and lives no less in the 
 growth of "nature" than in man. Insistence on this 
 aspect of the theory would, as it seems to me, trans- 
 form it. "The Spirit, infinite possibility overflowing 
 into infinite actuality, has drawn, and is drawing 
 at every moment, the cosmos out of chaos — has 
 effected the passage from animal to human life,"® etc. 
 ()8) What we have mainly to set against these 
 indications of a realised unity of the universe, 
 besides the fundamental difficulty of the endless 
 progression itself as the nature of ultimate reality,^ 
 
 ' Gentile, " Spirito," p. 214. 
 
 2 Croce, "Pratica," p. 181. Gentile, "Spirito," p. 237: 
 " teogonia eterna," said of" il mondo." Cf. with Alexander. 
 
 ' Croce, "Pratica," p. 179. 
 
 * The spirit conceived as infinite possibility seems at once 
 discrepant with this. 
 
VIII] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 163 
 
 are the paradoxes which arise out of the identifi- 
 cation of the ultimate real with human, or at least 
 finite, thinking — the act of thought — in its form 
 of history and philosophy. We saw how, for 
 example, the transcendence of the past is over- 
 come. But it does not appear to be overcome 
 completely. What is not unified with present 
 experience is forgotten, and what is forgotten, as I 
 understand, is clean gone from the universe, and 
 rightly so, except in as far as its effects survive, 
 apart from consciousness of them.-^ Again we 
 have noted the narrowness of the conception of 
 progress. We are told of the thinkers who, in 
 preparing for the true modern standpoint, 
 " pioneered the course of thought towards the 
 human and the terrestrial {terreno) as the exclusive 
 reality {come unica realta)."'^ This really drops 
 back into a progress-of-the-species theory, as in an 
 ordinary neo-realist.^ The same excluslveness 
 appears in the estimate of the values and problems 
 of philosophy. Sociality, religion, metaphysic, 
 are all of them forms for which the system can 
 find no place.* There is no central or funda- 
 mental problem of philosophy, such as the distinc- 
 tion of reality and appearance, which might form 
 the object of metaphysic. 
 
 Thus the statement made above seems to be so 
 far justified.'' For these thinkers there is a unity, 
 
 ^ P. 54, supra. 2 Croce, "Teoria e Storia," p. 137. 
 
 ^ Say Perry in Hoernle, Harvard Theological Review, April, 
 191 8, pp. 147-8. 
 
 * "Estetica," chap. viii. "Teoria e Storia," pp. I'iJ ff. 
 ^ P. 159, supra. 
 
1 64 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 for thinking is the essence of unity, and what they 
 found their doctrine on is the act of thinking, 
 taken as the self-creative reality. But it seems 
 not to develop into a universe. The rejection of 
 transcendence seems to be applied not to transcend- 
 ence of experience, but to transcendence of 
 immediacy. And with the repudiation of tran- 
 scendence in this latter sense, the transcendence 
 which belongs to every object of thought, the 
 objective and differentiated universe becomes a 
 blank, and there is nothing to sustain the endless 
 progression, to unite it with a whole, and so to 
 guarantee its nature and character. Unity is 
 affirmed, but not substantiated ; not exhibited in 
 differentiated detail, nor in the mainspring of the 
 dialectic, the return of the abstract to the concrete. 
 And we saw in the previous chapter the special 
 result in the preference of a moral to a religious 
 attitude, an attitude of meliorism and conflict to 
 one of religious faith. 
 
 In turning to attempt an analogous estimate of 
 the features in Professor Alexander's theory which 
 mark how he conceives the unity of the universe, 
 I should, if my estimate were to be thorough and 
 adequate, be embarking on an enterprise of greater 
 range than the former one, and, strictly speaking, 
 beyond my competence. Nothing justifies me in 
 attempting it but my confident belief that, even 
 to my comparatively uninstructed gaze (for the 
 modern theory of time is almost altogether out of 
 my reach), there are considerable elements of value 
 to be drawn from points in which a really great 
 and philosophically minded realist may be com- 
 
viii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 165 
 
 pared with a somewhat passionate though brilliant 
 and suggestive idealist. 
 
 (a) The evolution of the universe is, in Pro- 
 fessor Alexander's view, rooted, not in the 
 dialectic of thought, but in the inherent restless- 
 ness of time. Everything in his system depends 
 on the inherent nature of space-time, which, as I 
 understand, is a real system of motions, arranging 
 themselves in patterns, which are the actual essence 
 of things. 
 
 Now, according to the ordinary view of time, 
 in its separation, Alexander would say, from 
 space, nothing could be less suggestive of the 
 unity of the universe than an identification of it 
 with a progression in time. If time is ultimately 
 real, we commonly say, this means that the past is 
 really gone, is no more anything. Time is the 
 scythe-man, the aspect of negation in succession. 
 Alexander's conception is different. If time is 
 real, if it is taken seriously — he admits a consider- 
 able debt to Bergson — it follows that the past is 
 real. It does not exist to-day ; that • is true. 
 But its reality is to have existed when it did.^ 
 For time is not a mere negative aspect. In its 
 conjunction with space it is a creative being, and 
 in a complete view of space-time, as I gather, any 
 past event would appear within a single whole 
 which centres in the present, and placed and dated 
 with reference to it. 
 
 Now, whatever difficulties one might venture to 
 find in Alexander's scheme, one must admit that 
 in it the structure of the universe is broadly and 
 1 " Space," etc., I. yz. 
 
1 66 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 impartially laid out. To start from human 
 experience is an intimate and attractive intro- 
 duction to reality.^ But it is obviously narrow 
 and impotent unless some doctrine of implication 
 or differentiation widens and confirms its founda- 
 tion. It is a strange experience in the cases before 
 us to turn from the idealist to the realist. With 
 the idealist, however noble and brilliant his 
 inspiration, everything was passionately human. 
 We really seemed to forget "the spacious firma- 
 ment on high," of which it was a merit in our 
 early religion perpetually to remind us. With 
 the realist — extraordinary reversal ! — we move in a 
 larger air. We are with Meredith, the poet of 
 the stars, of motion, of colour. 
 
 And in all this the underlying unity is not 
 indeed mind ; but it is not wholly heterogeneous 
 to mind. There is something in the restlessness 
 of the universe — its time — which is akin to mind, 
 or at least to soul. "Time is the soul of space"; 
 and, as I gather, in the special qualities which 
 emerge in the course of evolution from the com- 
 plications of space-time, there is at every level an 
 analogue of what time is to space, and our own 
 psychoses to our own neuroses. 
 
 Then, further, the relation of deity to the 
 universe is full of suggestion. What is actual 
 in it, as I understand, is the universe with 
 its nisus and its dream, which rather remarkably, 
 as I said, reminds us of Croce. But here we 
 have something which the neo-idealists repudiate 
 in principle. We have the second and inde- 
 ' Cf Bradley, " Essays," pp. 14.2-3. 
 
VIII] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 167 
 
 pendent root of religion, over and above the 
 demand of moral law, in the sense of an emotion 
 which demands a something that can be worshipped. 
 This sense, while founded in something very primi- 
 tive, yet has in it the beginnings of that identity 
 of the finite self with the greater being which 
 includes it, which is perhaps the principal and 
 most inspiring feature of the unity of the universe. 
 To reject religious faith — that is, identity In will 
 and belief with a supreme power and good — is to 
 take the heart out of the effective oneness of the 
 world, and of humanity with the world. In spite 
 of Alexander's peculiar theory of deity, of which 
 the little that I have to say will be in place at 
 another point, the universe is clearly marked for 
 him as affording an object of worship, and exer- 
 cising an influence upon man which leads him to 
 the attitude of worship. And this is a principal 
 element in the unity of the universe, as he clearly 
 recognises : " The world as a whole in its forward 
 tendency acts upon our bodily organism, and the 
 religious sentiment is the feeling for this whole." ^ 
 The action upon our bodily organism may be 
 doubted ; it belongs, I suppose, to the doctrine 
 which places the one reality of the universe in space- 
 time. But the religious emotion as an emotion 
 " towards the whole of reality in its nisus towards a 
 new quality " seems a solid fact of experience, eluci- 
 dating and elucidated by such a conception as that 
 of James that in religion " the conscious person is 
 continuous with a wider self through which saving 
 experiences come." 
 
 1 "Space, etc.," II. 376. 
 
1 68 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 ()8) After these few words of reference to 
 Alexander's real universe, it is necessary for our 
 purpose to indicate how far its unity is secured by 
 the system he ascribes to it. It would be a 
 fascinating task to study the connections in detail, 
 and endeavour to estimate their necessity, or their 
 coherence ; for the word " must " he is inclined 
 to reject from philosophy. But it is not our task, 
 at all events, in the present work. We must 
 confine ourselves to the humbler and simpler 
 function of indicating how far, in principle, the 
 fundamental paradoxes of a realistic and successional 
 point of view have been overcome. 
 
 If we had analysed the entire work — we pre- 
 suppose the reader to be familiar with it — we 
 should have observed that the foundation in 
 space-time necessarily draws out into a succession 
 of features which we should have expected to be 
 intimately interdependent in a whole. The most 
 original and extraordinary of these dissociations is, 
 of course, the position of deity itself. But this, 
 as the author constantly insists, is only in line 
 with his whole principle of emergents — the suc- 
 cessively higher qualities carried by complications 
 of space-time. The point is, however (and the 
 author makes no attempt to conceal or to blunt it), 
 that " we still raise our altars to the unknown 
 God." "The infinite God is purely ideal or 
 conceptual. The individual so sketched is not 
 asserted to exist." " As actual, God does not 
 possess the quality of deity, but is the universe as 
 straining to that quality."^ The quality of deity 
 1 Op, cit., II. 361. 
 
viii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 169 
 
 is always future in the evolution ; it is what the 
 world is dreaming of and reaching towards. What 
 we actually worship is the universe as straining 
 towards that quality, itself unknown, but superior 
 to mind and spirit, and analogous in the law of its 
 emergence to mind as compared with life, and to 
 life as compared with physico-chemical relations. 
 Always there is a specialised complex of space- 
 time which " carries the new emergent quality, 
 itself unknown until it appears, but holding the 
 place of deity to the previous quality." 
 
 Alexander frankly raises the question of a 
 " possible objection to this notion of a variable 
 God, which is, as it were, projected in front of 
 each successive level of existents. How can we 
 declare him to be the whole universe ? Must not 
 God be different at each level ?"^ 
 
 His answer is clear ; and, for good or evil, it 
 must decide our question of unity. The unity is| 
 space-time. This is the absolute, for the author. 
 It iS-the lowest expression of the universe, not, as 
 the absolute for absolutists, the highest. The 
 variations of deity fall within this. " It is always 
 the one universe of space-time which is God's 
 body, but it varies in its empirical constitution 
 and its deity."^ 
 
 This pronouncement must, I think, decide our 
 question, though it may decide it differently for 
 different readers. The unity of the universe lies 
 in space-time, which is an all-inclusive though 
 creative being ; it is the whole, though through 
 the creative incompleteness of time, inherently 
 1 Op. cit., IT. 366. 2 ihij^ 
 
170 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 incomplete. It is, however, the whole in a very 
 important sense. It is not within any further 
 space or time. It is all the space and time there 
 can be. This will perhaps affect the question of 
 its ultimate progress or motion as such or as a 
 whole. 
 
 But in the meantime, for us, the question is 
 j decided in the negative. Where there is no 
 ; universal mind, no all-inclusive experience, there 
 I is for us no unity of the universe. The whole 
 ' set of connections — e.g., those of the empirical 
 qualities with space-time — is arbitrary, and there 
 is no whole in which the past is apprehended as 
 an enlargement of our present experience, spring- 
 ing, through implication, from the whole which 
 is immanent in that experience. There is no 
 universal mind ; no common mind either in 
 family, society, State, or the religious experience, 
 such as the facts of a general will, or a will shared 
 in religion by God and man, seem to most of us 
 to affirm. I do not know that argument is help- 
 ful here. It seems a case for Professor Alexander's 
 own method. If we attend to the common sub- 
 stance of particular wills in the family and the 
 State, and yet believe that it can be reduced to a 
 similarity of particular finites between which there 
 is no objective identity, it is impossible, perhaps, 
 to establish the contrary. All we can do seems to 
 be to point out what we take to be the confusion 
 which treats the irreducible unsharableness of the 
 immediate experiences of finite minds as an objec- 
 tion to finding a fundamental identity in the syste- 
 matic ideas and purposes which they constitute, 
 
vm] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 171 
 
 by participating in them ; not by way of repeti- 
 tion, but by way of complementary co-operation. 
 It seems to us to express an atomistic superstition 
 and nothing more. Every mind is, for this attitude, 
 a thing among things ; a complex of qualities, 
 including consciousness, carried by a special com- 
 plex of space-time within the pattern which 
 constitutes an organism. 
 
 Further, the aspect of unity which seemed to 
 be so appreciatively handled in the account of 
 religious emotion, seems here to have its founda- 
 tion destroyed. God is not, as such, of the nature 
 of mind or spirit, and therefore He cannot be 
 united with man in any such kind of being. 
 Nevertheless, it is possible to push this criticism 
 too far. One cannot but note that our leading 
 thinkers are more and more inclined to insist on 
 the metaphorical character of the phrases in which 
 we express the identity of consciousness between 
 God and man.-"^ I do not say that a recognition 
 of this kind justifies Alexander's removal of deity 
 in principle beyond the present of experience. 
 But the account of the universe as it is an actual 
 object of worship — as a whole straining towards 
 deity — goes far to compensate for the rejection,- in 
 this one reference, of such special terms as mind 
 and spirit. 
 
 For us, however, when all allowance is made, it 
 is enough to say that, for this doctrine, the unity of 
 the universe lies, completely, in space-time alone, 
 its lowest expression. It plays a part, in spite of 
 
 1 Bradley, " Essays,'' p. 436, n. Stout, " Syllabus," II. 
 13, 16. 
 
172 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 the real qualities supposed to inhere in it, ana- 
 logous to the existent objects of thought (the 
 physical objects) of critical realism. Individuality, 
 identity, significance live in a higher world than 
 these. It is not an infinite or individual unity, 
 one in which the whole inspires every member. 
 If infinite in a sense, it is an infinite of a low order. 
 Yet Alexander's recognition of the specific religious 
 experience must not be slurred over. 
 
 (y) We saw that Alexander gives full weight to 
 the special religious experience, the emotion towards 
 a something which demands our worship, and in 
 which we come to feel a greater than ourselves 
 with which we are one. This gives us a deeper 
 view of the universe than that which treats the 
 religious experience as mythical, and restricts the 
 good which we seek to grasp and realise to the 
 strictly progressive attitude of morality. Alexander, 
 indeed, disagrees in many respects with the criti- 
 cism which Mr. Bradley has launched at the purely 
 moralistic attitude ; and if I were treating his work 
 completely and for its own sake, it would be 
 necessary to explain my attitude to these disagree- 
 ments. But I do not think that he either could 
 or would repudiate the distinction between religion 
 and morality which seems to me fundamental. 
 Morality represents, as he says, the solution of a 
 problem.* Moral goodness is a new reality whose 
 internal coherence is its goodness.^ Now for these 
 reasons it is essentially progressive. The multi- 
 tude of desires and of conditions necessarily de- 
 mands perpetually new solutions, and leaves on 
 the individual the impression that he can never be 
 1 Op. fit., II. 274. 2 i^ii 280. 
 
viii] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 173 
 
 wholly equal to the occasion. To some extent in 
 the social world a standing solution has been 
 established ; and so far we have a relatively satis- 
 factory whole with which we can identify ourselves 
 up to a certain point and so far be at home and 
 have a good conscience.-' But this social satisfac- 
 tion is essentially incomplete, and so far as it has 
 completeness, and functions as a whole, is nearer 
 to religion than to morality. TMorality is essen- 
 tially the growing-point of goodness, at which we 
 find our best coherence to be but incoherent, and 
 a new coherence, like a new theory In face of new 
 facts, to be demanding realisation. This is what 
 the progressive theorists, neo-idealists and neo- 
 realists alike, insist upon. The failure of solutions 
 is the motive of their progression ad infinitum. 
 The end, it is said, is realised progressively ; but, 
 it is the old criticism of Kant, this seems to say 
 that it is never realised at all. 
 
 Here Alexander, whether accepting or rejecting 
 any such criticism levelled at the essence of moral 
 good, has, as we saw, emphasised another experi- 
 ence. In religion we find "saving experiences " — 
 he quotes the phrase from William James^ — ^in 
 continuity with a wider self We are one with 
 the whole by faith and not in works. Here our 
 inadequacy is done away. This is the very mean- 
 ing of "saving experiences." We throw ourselves 
 upon the grace of the universe and find in oneness 
 with it an adequacy which is self-contradictory for 
 us as finite agents. 1 daresay Professor Alexander 
 would not subscribe to all this explanation ; but he 
 
 1 Bradley, " Ethical Studies," " My Station and its Duties." 
 
 2 Op. cit., II. 376. 
 
174 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch.viii 
 
 recognises, as other realists do not, the experience 
 and its main significance. And so far there is a 
 meeting of extremes between him and the other 
 idealists (the so-called absolutists) which the neo- 
 ;; idealists do not share. It comes of his taking 
 \ so seriously the differentiations of the universe. 
 Religion, as he sees, is, so to speak, a special 
 differentiation in experience addressed to and 
 uniting the finite being with the universe in a 
 special aspect and character — that of a unity which 
 thrills and grasps the finite soul. 
 
 I shall now attempt, in two concluding chapters, 
 to concentrate, in their true terms of agreement 
 and antagonism, the motives which make for a 
 belief in alteration and advance, or again in eternity 
 and conservation, as more ultimate and funda- 
 mental characters of the universe. When their 
 significance is thoroughly weighed, and their 
 appearance, in the different quarters in which they 
 appear, is duly estimated, it seems to me that the 
 issues raised will be more instructive, more con- 
 crete, and more applicable to experience than the 
 customary attitude of aloofness permits. Every 
 disputant will find, I think, that he has important 
 problems to recognise, not only in his opponents' 
 views, but in his own ; and that you cannot 
 marshal in their order such indications as we have 
 been tracing without revealing necessities which 
 will bring into each other's presence questions 
 more fully explained and more carefully discrimi- 
 nated than has been customary in those regions 
 where, I should say, the issues as a rule do not 
 really meet. 
 
CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 175 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 UNITY OF THE UNIVERSE AND CHANGE 
 
 I WISH now to attempt the completion of the chain 
 of thought suggested by the various meetings of 
 extremes in the previous chapter, and to bring it 
 to a reasonable issue, in which the considerations 
 are really relevant to one another. 
 
 I start, for the sake of clearness, so to speak, 
 from the other end of the argument, as compared 
 with the previous chapter. We were there com- 
 paring the recognitions, on very various sides, of 
 the facts and demands by which life impresses 
 upon us the truths of change and of unity. I 
 now desire to take my stand, to begin with, at the 
 most simple and abstract thought concerning the 
 universe, in order to state the total burden of my 
 conception in a very few and plain sentences. 
 But I do not propose to neglect the good and 
 wise habit which we noted as a meeting of extremes 
 in modern philosophy — the habit of amplifying 
 and reinforcing the insight of ontological thought 
 by a careful and comprehensive survey of practical 
 and emotional responses, such as are evidence for 
 the general drift and orientation which are natural 
 and inherent in our mind. After trying to make 
 clear in general the conclusion which I mean to 
 suggest, I shall, therefore, go back over points in 
 
176 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 the special observations we have traversed, and 
 endeavour to present a sketch of an attitude which 
 is, if I may use the phrase, at once rational and 
 reasonable ; justified by argument, and by com- 
 parison with the demands and reactions of life. 
 In welding together the two sides, or two stages, 
 of my argument, I shall not admit, and shall 
 attempt in passing to discredit, the language of 
 disparagement which is now not infrequently held 
 towards definite thought in general. What 
 governs thought and finds utterance in its coher- 
 ence is, as 1 hold, simply the nature of things. 
 When we read, in distinguished thinkers ^o-day, 
 of mere logical coherence,^ or of the vice of going 
 to thought and not to things for the standard of 
 contradiction,^ I feel for my part that to such 
 language no clear ideas can be attached. There is 
 no special logical coherence that I ever heard of ; 
 there is no special contradiction called a contradic- 
 tion of thought. The coherence is the coherence 
 of ail that there is ; a contradiction Is an impasse 
 which not all the experience available can resolve. 
 If you impeach my coherence as narrowly founded, 
 or my contradiction as omitting elements which 
 might resolve It, bring out your additional or 
 underlying elements and let us see them, and see 
 how and why they make a change In the situation. 
 No one denies that they may do so ; but the 
 question is if they do. 
 
 I begin then with my simple statement. The 
 
 ^ Haldane, p. 322: "mere logical coherency apparently 
 contrasted with " concrete experience " ! 
 '■' Alexander, II. 372. 
 
IX] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 177 
 
 whole cannot change. The whole I take to mean 
 the universe ; all that in any sense is. It cannot 
 change, because any change introduces something 
 that is, and this, ex hyfothesi, falls within the • 
 whole. The whole, if it changes, was not the 
 whole, but something less. All that is includes 
 all that can be ; there can be nothing more than it. ,, 
 
 Now I am perfectly well aware of the dialectic 
 of being and becoming that might be applied to 
 any such determination as this. The little novelty, 
 if it is even a partial novelty, of my treatment is 
 that I want to work it out in the suggestions of life 
 and experience, and not in the language of abstract 
 speculation. This latter, though really, if precisely 
 used, it utters the controlUng nature of things, yet 
 does not, by itself, exhibit the eccentricities and 
 onesidednesses which attach to the defective points 
 of view. It does not " place" them at once in the 
 concrete context of life, where their weakness and 
 its pervading grounds strike the eye directly. I 
 will begin by reminding the reader of what sort of 
 subject-matter we are talking about, and try to 
 enforce my point of view at starting by some 
 remarks on possibility. 
 
 (a) As in most places where a true philosophical 
 problem is in question, we have here, in the atti- 
 tude to be taken towards the universe, some help 
 from Professor Alexander. We cannot be content 
 with his definite account of it as space-time,^ the 
 lowest expression possible, but we note his repudia- 
 tion of certain determinations of it, as not a whole 
 of parts (at least not such a whole as can be relative 
 
 1 " Space, etc.," I. ^^')ff. 
 
 12 
 
178 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 to other wholes of parts), not a one, such as can 
 descend into the field of number, but, if we like, 
 the one ; and not a substance related by causality 
 to other substances. This way of speaking, though 
 it implies matters with which we do not agree, 
 such as the absence of a universal mind, yet ex- 
 hibits a complete and valuable grasp of the main 
 thing about the universe which seems so fatally 
 hard to apprehend. This is, that it is simply 
 everything, and the theatre of all that happens. 
 Thus, when you begin to talk about it as you 
 would about one finite being, or organism, or 
 society among others, you are always at least on 
 the brink of the unmeaning. We will speak of 
 time below, but with reference to the ordinary 
 experiences of change, progress, and decadence, it 
 is clear that it is one thing to attribute them to 
 units of a number of finite beings, interacting 
 causally within a theatre of common features and 
 endowments, such that creatures in all stages of 
 evolution are continually impinging upon one 
 another, and supplying to each other new con- 
 ditions, grounds of possibility, materials, and inter- 
 ferences of all possible kinds and directions — 
 directions being determined, to use the phrase 
 fashionable to-day, by systems of reference offered 
 by and within the universe itself. But it is another 
 thing to ascribe them to the total itself of all that 
 is, whose nature is, ex hyfothesi, the unique and 
 only source and foundation of all that in any way 
 comes to pass. 
 
 When you bind yourself to apply such a mode 
 of consideration to the system of all that is, the 
 
IX] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 179 
 
 scene is surely changed. You are bound to furnish 
 a distinction between a movement or advance 
 within it, relative as between the elements which 
 are its subordinate members, and a movement or 
 change of it — of the all, the totality of the 
 real, of the ultimate base and foundation of being 
 as such. Now I should be absurd on my side if 
 I said that a change of the whole coulci have no 
 meaning so long as anything in it at all were 
 persistent, that there was no change of the whole 
 short of a substitution, in which nothing remained 
 the same. But, on the other hand, in face of a 
 living and seething entirety, prima facie cross- 
 currented in all conceivable directions, you are, I 
 think, bound, if you say that all that is has a 
 movement as a whole, and not merely movements 
 within itself, to explain how you differentiate the 
 two things from one another, bearing in mind that 
 it can have no external relations. Of course, to 
 contrast your view with such an idea as a totum 
 simul^ or as a static, pulseless, and rigid block 
 universe^ can have no bearing of any kind on the 
 question when thus stated. We are trying to see 
 what can be meant by the movement of all that is 
 as a system, or as a whole ; ceasing to be one 
 thing, we must suppose, and becoming, in the 
 main and in its profound character and founda- 
 tions, something altogether different. I shall 
 argue, according to the method I am adopting, not 
 so much that this is impossible in rerum natura, 
 though I am of that opinion ; as that, when its 
 range and significance are plainly seen, no one will 
 1 Watts Cunningham, pp. 206-8; and see Haldane, 317. 
 
i8o THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 be found to believe it for a moment ; no one, that 
 is, will be found who shows, when we come to 
 survey his view in its bearings and precise impli- 
 cations, that he does, in fact, believe it for a moment. 
 
 Let us consider first the relation of the universe 
 to possibilities. It sounds a simple rejoinder to 
 our formal arguments to say " Yes ; the universe 
 is all that is ; but then, over and above all this, 
 there are the possibilities ; there is all that may be 
 and that is to be. This is how the whole can 
 change. It is within another and a further world ; 
 the gates of the future are wide open ; besides 
 what is, the universe is in relation with what 
 may be." 
 
 But we are driven to reject any such reasoning. 
 It will not stand before a direct logical enquiry 
 into the conditions of possibility. Possibility is 
 within the real, not reality within the possible. It 
 rests on a positive foundation, and indicates a 
 determinate condition which, if completed in a 
 certain way, which we do not know to be excluded 
 by the nature of things, would carry a certain 
 consequent, which is then, as so hypothetically 
 conceived, an actual possibility. 
 
 Possibility, therefore, does not help you to 
 bring alteration into the totality of what is. Its 
 possibilities are rooted in itself. They can derive 
 from nowhere else ; there is nothing else from 
 which anything can derive. As I have argued 
 elsewhere,^, a being that has a purpose, a career, an 
 alteration in time, is a different sort of being from 
 the universe. It is one among others, a finite, a 
 ^ "Principle," chaps, iv. and x., Appendix II. 
 
IX] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY i8i 
 
 partial nature which, in the conditions which meet 
 it in the world of all there is, finds stimuli, ends 
 to attain, defects to make good, positive but 
 partial conditions calling for completion. The 
 universe is the raison d'etre of all this. It is the 
 ultimate real in which lies the fact that anything 
 at all is and can be, and the ultimate characters 
 which are, in virtue of that fact. Starting from the 
 common ground that the universe is full of change 
 and movement, we have staring us in the face the 
 problem whether it can be described as, taken 
 altogether, a movement or engaged in a move- 
 ment. That would mean, as 1 understand, on any 
 reasonable rendering, whether it was, to put it 
 quite roughly at first, more like the ocean,^ or more 
 like a river ; whether it is, in its entire and 
 fundamental being, engaged in a passage and 
 departure from one type or determination of being 
 to another which succeeds the former and ex- 
 cludes it. 
 
 Let us pause here for a moment and consider 
 what we are about. We are speaking of the all- 
 inclusive being. And our imagination is con- 
 tinually inciting us, so it seems to me, to treat it 
 on the model of the "things " which surround us, 
 giving the preference, no doubt, to those examples 
 of them which have the ampler foundations in our 
 world, and make the greater display of being 
 something like self-contained — a social whole, 
 European civilisation, the human race, the earth 
 
 ' Or, say, taking a suggestion from Warde Fowler's ex- 
 planation of " Hie mihi magna domus " (said by the Tiber), 
 the whole connected water-system of the terraqueous globe. 
 
1 82 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 on which we live. Any one of these objects 
 tqnds to run a course which we can describe under 
 conditions which we can to some extent and with 
 some plausibility lay down. We can estimate — 
 empirically, perhaps, but by empiricism on a 
 grand scale — within what sort or kind of limits 
 their variations are likely to be restricted and their 
 course to be laid out. We quite understand that 
 they have respectively lines of evolution, each 
 unique and individual, and dependent on the part 
 of the universe with which they have to do, on its 
 responses, its reactions, and its impulses. Now 
 even with them there seems to be an element of 
 , stability as well as an element of alteration. The 
 world of values seems to use the various temporal 
 series of events to bring into existence and appre- 
 ciation something which is fundamental and 
 supreme within the whole agitation of the uni- 
 verse, and which is not prima facie tied down to 
 any single line of advance, but rather reveals in an 
 infinity of features an infinitely complex order in 
 which the whole — the entirety^ — maintains its 
 general nature in infinite directions at once. 
 
 Thus, if we hold ourselves able to treat the 
 entirety of it on such a model and on such an 
 analogy, we should surely be talking without 
 rhyme or reason if we did not attempt to assign in 
 some tolerably definite sense the limits or principles 
 of its self-alteration, so as to have some conception 
 what sort of thing is likely to maintain supremacy 
 as its primary character. It is nothing relevant to 
 
 * To use the novel phrase which Lord Haldane has 
 introduced with advantage. 
 
IX] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 183 
 
 urge that in fact and in our expectation it contains 
 within it certain developments. The decisive 
 question must surely be whether it is altering as a 
 thing within it does when it "runs a course," 
 when it follows, that is, some narrow track or 
 fibre of the universal life, variously conditioned by 
 the remainder, ceasing to be what it was and 
 becoming what it was not ; or whether we are 
 rather forced to conceive the whole as - a unity 
 which in its infinite life, without narrowing itself 
 to a single line of advance selected from among 
 all the characters of which its life is capable, rather 
 reveals itself through infinitely diversified resources 
 as in all directions an inexhaustible fountain of 
 values. The point is, it seems to us, that its' 
 evolution and self-revelation need not proceed by 
 any one of what are called progresses or advances, 
 which involve moving away from its own nature, 
 and diminishing itself on one side as it intensifies 
 itself at another. That is the growing of a finite , 
 creature. An infinite whole, it seems to us, must , 
 live out alike to all its sides and aspects, must, 
 expand into and live itself out in all values, but 
 constrict itself into a history in respect of none. 
 
 (y8) Let us resurvey from the standpoint we 
 have now reached the actual ideas which are 
 offered us as expressions of an ultimate reality 
 which has time and change at its inmost heart. 
 
 1 will begin with a cry of hope and aspiration 
 from a quarter where not everyone is aware that it 
 could be found. " Strive upwards to the sun, my 
 friends, that the salvation of humanity may soon 
 be ripe ! What matter for the hindering leaves 
 
1 84 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 and branches ! Struggle through to the sun, and 
 if you grow weary, never mind ! You will sleep 
 all the better!" This is Hegel, in 1795, at the 
 age of twenty-five, writing to Schelling, and quot- 
 ing from a well-known writer to utter his heartfelt 
 faith and hope.-' Identified in spirit with this lofty 
 ardour, and confidence in human destiny, there 
 was springing up at this epoch, over the old world 
 and the new, a victorious humanism, about to find 
 doctrinal utterance in its strictest anti-metaphysical 
 form through the Positivism of Auguste Comte 
 and his Religion of Humanity. Through wide- 
 reaching influences of the nineteenth century, in 
 many ways akin to this great conception, the 
 interests of the human race and the destinies of 
 the earth on which we live became the central 
 object of philosophical thought, and connected 
 themselves in principle with the repudiation of 
 an other-worldliness which seemed, in its traditional 
 shapes, to be a fraud upon the aspirations of man- 
 kind by offering them a shadow for the substance. 
 Hear Croce's language when he is tracing the 
 sources of his own views, which identify philo- 
 sophy with the methodology of history^ — " the 
 opposition in which the idea supported by us is 
 found to be against the ancient and widespread 
 notion of philosophy as resolutrix of the mystery 
 of the universe, as cognition of ultimate reality, as 
 revelation of the noumenal world, taken as beyond 
 the phenomenal world in which we pass our 
 
 * Hegel's "Briefe," p. 16, quoting Hippel's " Lebenslaiife 
 nach aufsteigender Linie." 
 
 2 " Teoria e Storia," pp. \l-] ff. 
 
IX] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 185 
 
 ordinary life and in which our historical research 
 is occupied. This at least we must say : that its 
 origin [that of the ancient notion, etc.J is religious 
 or mythological, and that it persisted even in the 
 philosophers who most effectively directed thought 
 towards the human and the earthly as the exclusive 
 reality^ and initiated the new philosophy as a 
 methodology of judgment or of historical cognition. 
 It persisted in Kant, who admitted it as a limit of 
 his criticism; it persisted in Hegel, who included 
 his exquisite researches in logic and the philosophy 
 of spirit in a sort of mythology of the idea." Then, 
 he continues, positivism in the nineteenth century 
 carried on this conflict with idealism (he is referring 
 mainly to the last generation of thinkers in Italy) ; 
 and his own idealism, while rectifying the errors 
 of positivism, maintains on the whole the same 
 conflict which it was waging, and with the same 
 adversary — that is, with the idea of a transhuman 
 world. 
 
 It is plain, surely,^ that he identifies any object 
 of metaphysic, conceived as an enquiry into ulti- 
 mate reality, with the thing-in- itself in its vicious 
 sense ; and confuses, as any commonplace empiri- 
 cist might, the universe of experience with the 
 Immediate concerns of the human species on the 
 surface of our globe.® 
 
 In alliance with this point of view, we find the 
 insistence on the perfectibility of man, and the pro- 
 
 ^ My italics. The words obviously express what Croce 
 holds the right direction. 
 = E.g., ibid., p. 141. 
 3 Croce, "Teoria e Scoria," pp. 137-8. 
 
1 86 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 , nounced ethical stkndpoint — the endless progres- 
 sion — on which we commented above in him and 
 in Gentile.'- 
 
 Now all round the |iorizon, what we have, 
 wherever this meeting of extremes occurs, is in 
 principle just the same, I quote Perry, the neo- 
 realist : "The good is to be won hy the race and 
 for the race; it lies in the future^ and can result only 
 from prolonged and collective endeavour ; and the 
 power to achieve it lies in the progressive know- 
 ledge and control of nature."^ " [Neo-realism] 
 shares the belief in the perfectibility of the world 
 ('Meliorism') with the Pragmatism of James and 
 the Instrumentalism of Dewey. In eliminating 
 from religion all supernatural elements and identi- 
 fying it with the hope of and the endeavour for a 
 more glorious future for mankind, it presents the 
 same marriage of Naturalism and Philanthropy 
 which was characteristic already of Comte and 
 Mill and the 'religion of Humanity.'"* Every- 
 where, in fact, we have a popular movement as 
 of the ethical societies. And this I take for an 
 important symptom. Those who have had actively 
 to do with institutions of this type know how 
 simple and how attractive their attitude to life can 
 be made to appear. You admit that there is duty 
 and happiness,and a world tobe made better,it is not 
 necessary to decide how far — and, voila tout. All 
 can co-operate, all can sympathise, up to a certain 
 point. And I call their frequency and the general 
 
 ' Cf. supra, chaps, ii. and viii. ^ ^y italics. 
 
 ' Perry in Hoernle, " Neo-Realism and Religion," p. 163. 
 
 * Hoernle, ibid. 
 
ix] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 187 
 
 appeal of the moralistic attitude an important 
 symptom of the onesidedness of the spirit it 
 represents, because, as Professor Alexander's acute 
 insight informs him,^ it does not supply a really 
 adequate solution of the problem. The passions 
 for nature, or beauty, or, morality, or truth " may 
 be happiness enough in the lives of some and 
 serve them in place of religion, but they are not 
 the religious passion and only simulate it."^ It 
 seems to me quite plain that this verdict covers 
 the whole of the neo-realistic and neo-idealistic 
 pretension to a religious attitude, excepting, so far 
 as we have seen that it recognises the special relevant 
 experience and its speculative foundation. Professor 
 Alexander's own. The point is that for the ethical 
 attitude man's perfectibility is taken as realised in 
 the unending series of events. This is an obvious 
 contradiction, which no conception of endless 
 approximation is able to remove. 
 
 The same fundamental character of popular 
 philosophy in the refusal to face the ultimate 
 paradox of the universe appears to me to disclose 
 itself in the creative finalism of Professor Watts I' 
 Cunningham,^ and to betray its dangerous attract- ' 
 tiveness in the influence it appears to have exercised 
 even on Lord Haldane's attitude. In Professor 
 Watts Cunningham this is the more significant 
 that his criticism of Bergson's creative evolution® 
 in comparison with the genuine principle of 
 Hegel's notion seems adequate by itself, and is in 
 
 1 " Space, etc.," II. 407, n. i 
 
 2 " The Philosophy of Bergson " (Longmans, 1916). 
 ' Ibid., chaps, iii. and iv. 
 
1 88 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES. IN [ch. 
 
 harmony with the views developed above in our 
 chapter "7 + 5 = 12." His further ascription to 
 the universe and to ultimate reality of a movement 
 and self-alteration for which the type and evidence 
 are drawn from the development of finite creatures 
 and sets of creatures within the whole ^ seems to 
 be of the same character and to reveal the same 
 onesided modernity which we have noted through- 
 out in our survey of to-day's philosophy. It 
 does not seem to take seriously the idea of the 
 infinite whole, or to recognise any obligation to 
 distinguish a partial construction of thought 
 within it^ from a recognition of a change or 
 movement, in which it, the whole of what is, 
 should move away from its foundational nature 
 and become other than it was. To my thinking 
 — prejudiced in my own favour, no doubt, but 
 I hope sincere — the argument which I have ad- 
 vanced elsewhere on the nature and conditions of 
 teleology has not been answered, has not indeed 
 been seriously noticed.' Ic is closely connected with 
 his criticism which Lord Haldane has to some 
 extent adopted, of what has come to be known by 
 the name of the "coherence theory."^ But if we. 
 start from this latter, as those do, I presume, 
 who accept it, not as a criterion adopted by 
 arbitrary preference for use in logical discussion, 
 but as a simple and necessary corollary from our 
 conception of experience and of the universe when 
 
 * Op. at., p. 157. 
 
 2 Cf. Bradley, " Appearance," p. 499. 
 
 ^ " Principle," chaps, iv. and x., Appendix I. 3. 
 
 * Cf. Lord Haldane's " Reign of Relativity," chap. xiv. 
 
IX] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 189 
 
 seriously taken, we should not, I think, accept the 
 conceivability of an end immanent in a finite 
 creature, unstimulated and unsupported by the 
 nature which it shares and the contacts which it 
 endures with the entirety of what is. There is no 
 creature that is not partly modelled by the whole ; 
 there is none that in partly modelling itself does 
 not give effect to the operation of the whole 
 within it. If one compares a serious discussion 
 of the relation of coherence and comprehensiveness 
 to experience as a whole, ^ with such a criticism as 
 is cited by Lord Haldane from Professor Watts 
 Cunningham, 2 it seems tolerably evident that the 
 principle has not in the latter been considered in 
 its total nature, as an expression of the unity of 
 things. To us it seems clear that the teleological 
 character of thought or consciousness is simply a 
 sub-case of its nisus to the whole. But an end 
 which is not a response of a nature inspired by the 
 whole and working, out its adjustment to it is, I 
 believe, a contradiction in terms, and a novelty, 
 which is not a revelation of the synthetic character 
 of the whole, is both a superfluous and a self-con- 
 tradictory conception. 
 
 Let us now return to the sentence we quoted 
 from Hegel,^ and compare it with the neo-realist 
 and neoTidealist doctrines of progress, perfectibility, 
 and meliorism. " Strive upwards to the sun, my 
 friends, that the salvation of humanity may soon 
 be ripe." The mood and attitude are plainly the 
 
 ^ E.g., Bradley, "Essays," pp. r\off. 
 2 "Reign of Relativity," p. 31S. 
 ^ P. 183, supra. 
 
1 90 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 same as in those. It is the cry of any enthusiastic 
 youth, viewing the world from the standpoint of 
 a definite partial evolution or revolution. Of 
 course the world is full of such advances, and 
 of retrogressions and deviations, inherent in the 
 very pulse of the advance. Whaf we know is 
 that in these courses and careers we have a world 
 of values revealed. The histories which are 
 within the universe bring an eternal world into 
 our experience.^ But are we to conclude from 
 this that the universe, the whole which is the 
 entirety and foundation within which all these 
 partial constructions are revealed to thought, 
 itself is occupied in the passage and a course in 
 which its whole nature passes, say, from worse to 
 better, from disvalue to value ?^ Surely this 
 would be a complete confusion of distinct 
 " systems of reference." " Shutting yourself up 
 in the region of practice, will you insist on apply- 
 ing its standards to the universe.''"^ It is all the 
 more instructive to see that for Hegel, as a 
 student of reality, time could not be ultimately 
 real, when we note how naturally and how passion- 
 ately the cry for a welfare to be achieved in the 
 future by our own right arm springs from him as 
 from all of us. And the cry is just and right. 
 No one ever denied that there is a world of 
 practice. But if we are to be either moderately 
 reasonable or to attach any weight to religion, we 
 
 1 Cf. Bradley, " Essays," pp. 4.68-9. 
 
 2 " From chaos to order," as Croce typically says : see 
 above, p. 54. 
 
 ^ Bradley, " Appearance," p. 500. 
 
ix] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 191 
 
 base our assurance, our perfectibility, or our 
 meliorism on what we hold to be irrefragably 
 revealed to us by the universe. If the basis of the 
 universe were changeable, the basis of our argu- 
 ment, whatever it might be, would vanish with the 
 stability of the whole. 
 
 What of those who hold a fundamental un- 
 certainty essential to the active and practical 
 mood?^ Is it true of them, as we said above, 
 that, considering their attitude from a standpoint 
 which is made clear, and in which issues are really 
 relevant to each other, they do not really hold 
 such a belief? This would appear, we said, if the 
 issues were stated with serious precision, and so as 
 to be relevant. There is nothing relevant to 
 affirming that the universe as such progresses, in 
 pointing to the French Revolution or the Italian 
 Risorgimento, or to my moral endeavour in an act 
 of will. It is nothing relevant in this connection 
 to say that the universe is an endless dialectic of 
 the spirit,^ or that it is composed of space-time, of 
 motion. If we read Professor Alexander's account 
 
 1 I hardly think this true of Professor Alexander. I shall 
 remark on his view below. It is on the whole, I suppose, 
 true of James. Yet cf. "Talks to Teachers," pp. 299 _^ : 
 " The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing. 
 ... In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those 
 philosophers are right who contend that the world is a stand- 
 ing thing, with no real progress, no real history. The 
 changing conditions of history touch only the surface of the 
 show." Is this so far from saying they are appearances ? 
 We do not say "mere appearances." "On my view there is 
 not, and cannot be, any such thing as a mere appearance" 
 (Bradley, " Essays," p. 272). 
 
 ^ A "storia ideale eterna," see p. 160, supra. 
 
192 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 of the Categories as the fundamental properties of 
 space-time, we shall see that the universe for him, 
 in its aspect of temporal passage, is not at all 
 departing from its eternal nature.^ We must re- 
 member that if in it any antecedent were different 
 some consequent would be different.^ The 
 universe is all that exists, and the question, 
 strictly stated, is whether we can attach any 
 significance to saying that this totality goes 
 fundamentally — I do not say in every detail — 
 from its character and assumes another. Its 
 nature reveals itself in changes, partial and corre- 
 lated ; but there is nothing to justify a suggestion 
 that the whole changes Its nature. But perhaps 
 Professor Watts Cunningham would say Its nature 
 Is to change. We may appeal here to his own 
 argument : Change without identity Is self-con- 
 tradictory. Change with identity, such as to be 
 the necessary basis of moral action, Is a determinate 
 character, and one who affirms it denies that 
 reality is undetermined, except for our Ignorance. 
 This, however, once more is nothing relevant. 
 No one, unless it were. Parmenides, has denied, 
 so far as I know, that the universe is full of 
 change, and that its changes reveal its nature. 
 
 Plato, for instance, was concerned not to deny 
 that the heavenly bodies move, but to ascertain 
 the true laws which express the real facts of 
 their apparent motions,^ The whole can be said 
 
 1 "Space," etc., I. 189. 
 
 2 Ibid., II. 330. 
 
 3 Burnet, "Greek Philosophy": From "Plato to Thales," 
 pp. 226, 348. 
 
rx] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 193 
 
 to change only if it departs from its unity of 
 character and value. But no one, so far as our 
 survey has shown us, appears content to abandon 
 the fundamental conviction that the whole of what 
 exists cannot move away from its fundamental 
 characters — say its categories — and^ values.-^ "^ 
 
 For Professor Alexander, it is true, the deity; 
 issues from the universe rather than the universe 
 from the deity. The coherence, which is to be the 
 good of the universe, is determined in the end^ by 
 the struggles of human beings. But surely this 
 " in the end " stands to his philosophy as Hegel's 
 aspiration to a future human welfare stands to his. 
 It suggests a future critical point and a decision 
 of what previously was uncertain. But for 
 Professor Alexander, of all thinkers, there can be 
 no "in the end.',' There is no " end," no critical 
 and decisive epoch at which a movement is wound 
 up, determining one way or another a character of 
 the universe which was undecided before. The 
 universe simply works itself out, in part through 
 the agency of finite minds. If we study Professor 
 Alexander's teaching on the non-existence and the 
 not coming into existence of the totality of all 
 that exists, the Infinite becoming,^ or on the unity 
 of the universe as the body of God,* we shall at 
 least be brought to see the seriousness and reality 
 of the distinction between the temporality and 
 
 ^ On genetic theories of logic, see my "Logic" (2 ed.), 
 II., chap. vii. ; cf. in "Reign of Relativity," pp. 194 f, 
 and 398. 
 
 2 " Space, etc.," II. 400. 
 
 3 Ibid., I. 337jf: * Ibid., II. 366. 
 
 13 
 
194 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 progress of any piece of existence, and the tem- 
 porality and progress of the whole within which 
 all progress and existence have their being. So 
 far as I can see, the progressiveness of the whole 
 as such might be disputed from the modern stand- 
 I point on the sole and single ground that there 
 'can be no system of reference from which it can 
 be judged, no intellectual as no physical irov cttw. 
 (Perhaps the nearest approach to a serious belief in 
 a wholly indeterminate career of the universe is in 
 Bergson's " Creative Evolution," on which Watts 
 Cunningham's criticism seems to me to be success- 
 ful. The question is, for me, whether the same 
 criticism does not apply to every view fbr which 
 the universe is in ultimate change. 
 
 It is impossible for me to deal at the length it 
 deserves with Lord Haldane's thorough and com- 
 prehensive revaluation of what has been called 
 idealism, and his effort, in a high degree successful, 
 to establish its essential significance on a plain and 
 stable foundation. But it would be improper, I 
 think, to leave it unmentioned ; and I must try to 
 indicate, however inadequately, the .direction in 
 which, over and above its solid and unmistakable 
 achievements, it has appeared to me in some 
 degree open to observations comparable with those 
 which some other forms of contemporary thought 
 have suggested. 
 
 As I understand, it is in the main an appeal to 
 the great fact of thought, as an entirety which 
 constitutes our universe and from which, as deter- 
 mining the standpoint and conditions under which- 
 all and every reality is felt, affirmed, or produced, 
 
IX.J CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 195 
 
 we cannot escape, and need not attempt to envisage 
 an alien world. The contention that thought is 
 foundational, that with its appropriate systems of 
 reference it is everywhere, and makes possible the 
 relative interpretations which not merely construe 
 but construct reality, appears to me, in the ample 
 and massive sense in which Lord Haldane develops 
 it, to be irrefragable, and to be exceedingly necessary 
 at the present day, when the pure productiveness 
 of thought on the one hand, and its pure and abso- 
 lute receptiveness on the other, are widely accepted 
 contentions which obviously demand mediation. 
 
 Agreeing that in this respect — the principal 
 respect — the argument of the work is substantial 
 and has a special value to-day, I will remark, in 
 the spirit of the survey I have been conducting, 
 on an important passage which forms the conclu- 
 sion of the chapter called " An American Criticism 
 of Bergson," and will compare it with other argu- 
 ments in the work. 
 
 The passage refers to* " that conclusion [the 
 author's] which treats reality itself, as well as our 
 knowledge, as disclosing itself at a variety of levels 
 which form intelligible stages in the logical process 
 of its self-development : and," it continues, " may 
 not truth lie rather in consistency in this develop- 
 ment of the continuity of the logical progress from 
 each level to the larger level beyond it, than in the 
 attainment of a goal^ which thought itself cannot 
 define, and which must remain for ever an ideal 
 that cannot be realised .'' If so, it is the striving 
 that contains the truth, the truth of quality. And 
 
 1 P. 327. ^ I take it, Mr. Bradley's absolute. 
 
196 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 the ultimate reality is just what is expressed in the 
 truth of this striving. It is in the world of ends 
 that we must seek our standards. Was Hegel 
 then far wrong when he declared that within the 
 range of our finiteness we could never see or 
 experience that the end had been really secured, 
 but that the consummation of the infinite end lay 
 in the removal of the illusion which made it seem 
 unaccomplished, an illusion which our finiteness 
 has created ? If this be the case, then, that there 
 should be progressive supersession of error is 
 essential to what is no static attitude, but a 
 dynamic progress." 
 
 I will very briefly suggest three points in con- 
 nection with this passage. 
 
 (i) Knowledge seems to me to be appealed to, 
 as in some degree throughout the book, rather as 
 a massive fact than in its characteristic affirmation 
 and aspiration. It is there, and in a sense is our 
 all. But If you ask : "What does it tell us; 
 what does it claim and demand.?" I miss the direct 
 answer. Indirectly, however, at least, as we should 
 expect from the author's proved philosophical 
 acumen, we get it plainly enough. Knowledge 
 tells us of transcendence^ and it claims to qualify 
 reality. When we omit to consider this, we speak 
 no longer of knowledge but of psychical fact. 
 Now if we look at other phases of Lord Haldane's 
 argument we find him, of course, quite alive to this 
 necessity. " If we would see God we must be 
 capable of ceasing to be as merely men."^ " Time 
 
 ' Transcendence of immediacy, not of experience. 
 2 Of. cit., pp. 194^, 311. 
 
ix] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 197 
 
 is included by mind, not mind by time" [shortened]. 
 " Universal and particular, thought and feeling, 
 mind as distinguished from nature, are phases in 
 a whole which in its self-completion is beyond the 
 order of time, and is spiritual in its inmost 
 character." I must not multiply quotations ; the 
 recognition may be taken for granted in such a 
 writer. 
 
 When we take knowledge in its essence and 
 spirit, then, we take it no doubt as a striving, but 
 a striving which cannot be experienced or under- 
 stood apart from the affirmation of a completed 
 whole. Call knowledge what you please ; but 
 you can call it nothing intelligibly unless you 
 begin by calling it a judgment. It is not itself as 
 it occurs in finite thinking. It is only itself as it 
 is endowed and invested with the reality and rela- 
 tions of things. No doctrine of thought can dis- 
 pense with its self-transcendence ; everyone knows 
 that his process of thinking is not where we look 
 for essential knowledge. Call it the Absolute, the 
 Real, the Universe, the ideal of completed thought 
 — what you please. It makes no difference. You 
 cannot possibly found a system on knpwledge if 
 you omit to imply its transcendent completion. 
 Take away this implication, and it is a dead- 
 psychical mass. Therefore I see no weight in the 
 arguments against the Absolute. For me they 
 rank with Croce's and Gentile's repudiation of the 
 Universe as thought (^pensato) in favour of think- 
 ing (pensiero pensante). It is, as I see it, simply 
 a loss of vital connection. 
 
 {2) " In short, thought must be said to have its 
 
198 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 habitat primarily in the objective order, and only 
 secondarily in the individual."^ This is a quota- 
 tion from Professor Watts Cunningham, with 
 which Lord Haldane reinforces his position. 
 I cannot think that Professor Watts Cunningham 
 appreciates his own attitude rightly. He considers 
 himself an intellectualist, and argues in favour of 
 the reality of time from the characteristics of finite 
 individual consciousness. But we who have 
 learned from Hegel and from the Greeks, do not 
 consider ourselves intellectualists ; and arguments 
 for time drawn from the teleological character of 
 finite consciousnesses leave us cold. I believe in 
 my own mind that the radical misapprehension of 
 English idealism which appears to me to prevail in 
 recent American writers is largely due to Royce, 
 who, using such a phrase as a to turn simul, passed on 
 a total misconception to James, and James, I think, 
 to current American thought.^ In fact, for example, 
 the passage here cited might well be a shortened 
 version of a well-known place in Green,^ and 
 expresses his fundamental contention. To regard 
 discursive thought, even the best, as instanced in 
 philosophy, as the thought which was one with 
 reality, was for him Hegel's one fundamental 
 error. Thought for him meant no subjective 
 activity, but precisely the objective order of things.* 
 " We shall never get a true idealism established," 
 Green here says in effect, " until it is made more 
 
 ^ "Reign of Relativity," p. 321. 
 
 ^ E.g., all the " tender and tough " distinctions ; see supra, 
 p. 102 note. 
 
 ^ Proleg. to " Ethics," Sect. 47. 
 * Green, "Works," III. 142/". 
 
IX] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 199 
 
 clear that the nature of that thought, which Hegel 
 declares to be the reality of things, is to be ascer- 
 tained, if at all, from analysis of the objective 
 world, not from reflection on those processes of 
 our intelligence which really presuppose that 
 world." 
 
 Thus, when we speak of knowledge as founda^^ 
 tional, we mean not the aggregate mass of stand- 
 points and judgments as it exists in the way of 
 fact in thinking minds ; but we mean that 
 completeness or completion of experience, apart 
 from the living demand for which the mass of 
 knowledge becomes a mere dead weight, and 
 which every genuine act of judgment affirms as 
 the objective order of the universe, transcending 
 in detail our finite intelligence yet in principle its 
 only significance. Transcendence, it must be 
 remembered, is the law of the world ; and as there 
 is a sense in which every conclusioii contradicts its 
 premisses, so there is a sense in which thought's 
 own inherent demand can only be fulfilled beyond 
 it. Repudiate the Absolute as much as we please, 
 we can never actually embody in finite experience 
 the thought which is the objective order and reality 
 of things. Grant, for argument's sake, that Mr. 
 Bradley has not expressed it right ; what must 
 inevitably be wrong is not to attempt to express it 
 at all. Yet to this reality there is no other path- 
 way than that which thought itself prescribes, and 
 realises in proportion to its completeness. 
 
 (3) The world of ends, then, falls within the 
 world of objective thought. An end is a partial 
 conception involving responses and counter- 
 
200 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 responses within a systematic whole. Our ends 
 are as often wrong as our judgments or our 
 aesthetic valuations — the latter, it should be noted, 
 are -nearest to reality of all our current experiences, 
 and have nothing to do with ends. The pro- 
 gressive character of reality as exhibited in striving 
 within the finite process is an aspect necessary to 
 finite being ; but as a mode of reconciling attain- 
 ment and non-attainment, it is precisely and 
 essentially the illusion to which Hegel refers — the 
 illusion by which the finite spirit's grasp upon 
 perfection is taken to lie in a perfectibility to be 
 realised within the series of events, which is thus 
 the essence of non-attainment. And the removal 
 of the illusion, of which Hegel speaks, is just the 
 direct assurance of a unity in which the finite spirit 
 is at peace, and raised above the moralistic contra- 
 diction, in faith by the religious attitude and in 
 speculation by philosophy. 
 
 This I believe to be the conflict of principle 
 which most profoundly divides the thinking world 
 to-day : on the one side the temper of the ethical 
 movement, the Italian neo-idealism, the humanistic 
 and neo-realist currents of life with all that are 
 akin to them ; on the other side all speculative 
 philosophy which penetrates and apprehends the 
 unity which is grasped by faith, and which, while 
 recognising the series of events as the vehicle of 
 revelation, is aware that the concrete perfection 
 which the finite spirit essentially needs to lay hold 
 of cannot appear in its full nature within the 
 succession of temporal events. The holding to- 
 gether the elements of this supreme paradox, the 
 
IX] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 201 
 
 realisation of the real because it is the only reality, 
 is, as I believe, the supreme crux and test of a 
 philosophy. Time is as real as the finite ; but the 
 infinite whole, as our authors seem plainly to 
 show us, is beyond it. The concluding chapter 
 will attempt to exhibit their union in the actualities 
 which normal life maintains and afHrms. 
 
202 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 A COMPARISON AND A CONCLUSION 
 
 We saw that it is a helpful modern method of 
 evaluating an ontological contention to estimate 
 and appreciate carefully and in the concrete the 
 characteristic emotion and behaviour which utter 
 and express it in the world of conduct and response. 
 We learn in this way its comprehensive orientation, 
 and can note how it agrees and differs in influence 
 and total direction from a principle which is 
 ontologically different. This, which is itself a 
 mode of enquiry predominant in many fields 
 where abstract ontology was once the guide of 
 research, I mean to appeal to in this concluding 
 chapter in order to procure a concrete and pene- 
 trating impression of the two antagonistic attitudes 
 to time and change in the universe in which we 
 have found so many philosophical traditions to 
 array themselves for conflict. It does not appear 
 to me to be generally seen either how little the 
 two time-views, reasonably construed, would differ 
 in outward appearance or, so to speak, in current 
 practice, or how profoundly their ultimate dif- 
 ference must affect the very roots of life and 
 will, and expand its influence over the whole of 
 expectation and aspiration ; how equally acceptable 
 to normal anticipation would be the view which has 
 
x] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 203 
 
 the very far higher ontological value. We have 
 seen that in the apparently technical question of 
 the ultimate reality of time, the ultimate change- 
 ability or progressiveness of the universe as such, 
 the modern meeting of extremes is concentrating 
 the whole conflict between the ethical and the 
 religious attitudes to life. Each of them, we may 
 say with probability ab initio, is incomplete in 
 itself, and ultimately needs the other for its perfec- 
 tion. But there can be no doubt that each . of 
 them is a primary impulse and instinct of human 
 nature, somehow inherent in its complex structure, 
 and sustaining itself on some principle which 
 unites the finite spirit with its world. 
 
 We saw that the assurance which takes the real 
 universe to be ultimately progressive in time rests 
 principally on the observation of finite conscious- 
 ness, finite history, and finite time-systems. Finite 
 consciousness, or something below it which we 
 may call organic unity, has the inherent character 
 of carrying within it adaptations to the demands 
 of the ultimate system within which it lives. 
 Finite history is the construction from a partial 
 basis of the continuous and unique career of a 
 given finite creature or group of creatures. Finite 
 time-systems, as I understand, are beings which 1 
 have no meaning, except as observed in reference 
 to one another within the universe which they 
 constitute, ~~ 
 
 And we have noted how narrpwly and un- 
 reflectingly this character of progress is ascribed. 
 For the most part,^ as we have seen, the universe 
 
204 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 drops out of sight, and the consciousness of 
 ultimate change and progress is referred to some 
 limited movement or aspiration in some fraction of 
 the human species on the surface of our earth, 
 or to some dialectic of discursive thought within 
 the intelligence of a philosopher. Now I maintain 
 indeed, and will not surrender the position,^ that 
 what thought ultimately reveals and expresses 
 through its necessity can be nothing less than the 
 nature of things. But it is quite another thing to 
 say that the sequence of the ideas which appear in 
 the discursive order of a finite mind's intellectual 
 process, is actually itself, and in this abstract 
 process, the ultimate concrete and total reality 
 which is one with the real and the universe. The 
 universe is a highly differentiated concrete ; the 
 finite course of thought is a partial and isolated 
 abstract. Thought which is reality, we saw,^ 
 is the objective order of things, not a course of 
 ideas in finite experience. 
 
 The ultimate reality, then, of which thought 
 and knowledge inform us, is what experience in 
 its ultimate and total coherence determining the 
 pathway to reality, compels us to affirm. This is 
 a wholly different thing from the actual process of 
 inference and affirmation in its temporal succession, 
 or from the activity of partial consciousnesses as 
 adjusting themselves by means of an ideal dimen- 
 sion, which is one form of their effort towards 
 totality, to the perfection which declares itself only 
 in the whole. 
 
 1 Contrast Alexander on "contradictions of thought"; see 
 p. 176, supra. 
 
x] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 205 
 
 I think that a reader who has followed my 
 survey of the progressist doctrines which prevail 
 to-day throughout the philosophical world, in 
 all its camps and quarters, must surely have been 
 startled by the extraordinarily restricted and 
 arbitrary type of evolution with which the ultimate 
 self-alteration of reality is identified by them. It 
 really rests on what we call the world- movement 
 of a certain epoch and complex of peoples, con- 
 centrated and represented in the spirit of humanistic 
 positivism. Such philosophy has ceased, we might 
 almost say, to speak about the universe or to be 
 interested in it as a whole. Even those among its 
 votaries who stand nominally in the idealistic 
 succession care, as we have seen, rather for the 
 massive and gigantic fact of thinking in its actual 
 process and aggregate, than for the affirmed unity 
 and ultimate totality without which its life has no 
 centre or mainspring and amounts to nothing, but 
 contradicts its own essence. 
 
 The working attitude of mind which attends 
 upon this philosophical position — the doctrine of 
 change as ultimate — is quite unmistakable, and 
 most plainly coincides with that which comes 
 naturally, as we saw in Hegel's case, to the normal 
 enthusiast or philanthropist as he confronts the 
 succession of events in which is the immediate 
 theatre of his action and aspiration. It is the 
 ethical attitude ; the individualism of the natural 
 man who, being finite, must necessarily, in every 
 actual achievement, fall short of perfection, 
 and whose progressive perfectibility, therefore, 
 being looked for in actual attainment within the 
 
2o6 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 series of events, must necessarily be a failure ad 
 infinitum. We criticised and rejected the attempts 
 of Croce, essentially the same with that of Professor 
 Watts Cunningham, to set aside the obvious con- 
 demnation of the Kantian moral progress ad 
 infinitum ; and we saw that all intelligibility of the 
 universe is here staked on a de facto sequence in 
 the future of a partial and arbitrary type ; a type, 
 indeed, which is, for the reason just explained, 
 self-contradictory. 
 
 The idea of progress which in the working out 
 of such a principle comes to fill expectation and 
 aspiration necessarily suggests something in- 
 creasingly intensified in character while contracted 
 in amplitude. The advance is to be that of a 
 special race ; it is to keep the line which has been 
 begun, so as to surpass, and to absorb, and 
 obliterate on its own ground and after its own 
 kind^ every value of the past. If progress is the 
 fundamental character and rule, obviously this 
 must be so. We think entirely of the future. 
 Men do not, under the influence of such pro- 
 gressism, admit that some one or more climaxes of 
 the finite may have been attained in the past, as 
 an inexhaustible source of values has revealed, 
 with all fulness possible to the finite, some several 
 sides of itself, and may in future reveal others to 
 infinity not competing with these ; whereas some- 
 thing is lost in the narrowing brought by every 
 mere progression and advance, as something — very 
 much, if we please — is also won in each given 
 
 1 I am taking Croce as my example. Note also the stress 
 which has been laid on a future lengthening ot human life. 
 
x] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 207 
 
 and maintained direction. They do not recognise 
 what seem to others the obvious indications that 
 an infinite source of values is bursting forth on 
 every side and in every direction ; and that in all 
 the advances in which the finite selects and con- 
 tinues this or that special career, something is 
 being abandoned by the selective movement of 
 finiteness which was essential to the total revelation. 
 For such a fulness of revelation cannot conceivably 
 be received in the constricted channel of a finite 
 history. Are we really to suppose that the future 
 of the human race is to surpass and absorb its 
 beginnings in every specific side and development 
 of value, so that we shall not add to Shakespeare 
 and Sophocles something different in kind as one 
 star differs from another star in glory, but shall 
 proceed straight forward on a high road which 
 will carry us away and beyond them, so that their 
 place shall know them no more ?^ Yet, if we 
 take it seriously, this standpoint is natural to the 
 idea of humanistic progress ad infinitum, which 
 merely enforces certain hasty postulates about 
 what we call civilisation, happiness, culture, and 
 never notes the warnings that such postulates are 
 subject, if taken as ultimate criteria, to great 
 and terrible reservations. If we will not hear 
 Rousseau, Edward Carpenter, and William James, 
 will we learn from tuberculosis and the great war ? 
 A revelation of spiritual meaning is another and a 
 larger thing than an accumulation of advantages 
 along the lines of humanism and philanthropy. 
 The protest against other-worldliness came, 
 
 ^ See p. 54, on Croce. 
 
2o8 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 indeed, not too soon ; but to mistake this-world- 
 liness for the superseding truth — and there can be 
 no doubt that it has been so mistaken — is a disas- 
 trous confusion. " Our minds and hearts are not 
 bounded to one among the phenomena of this one 
 among the bodies in the universe ; and to attempt 
 to set this finite phenomenon before us as an 
 object of worship^ is an attempt to turn the history 
 of religion backwards, and to close on us once 
 more those Jewish fetters which Christian civilisa- 
 tion, after so many efforts, has burst through. If 
 humanity is adorable, it is so only because it is not 
 merely the last product of terrestrial development, 
 but because the idea of the identity of God and 
 man is the absolute truth, because finite rational 
 mind (wherever it exist), is not merely such, but, in 
 another sense than physical or animal nature, is the 
 self-realisation of the spirit in which all moves and 
 lives, and so is an organic whole in that unity."^ 
 
 If then we ask ourselves how our expectation 
 and aspiration would appear in our lives, if, be- 
 lieving in the ultimate reality of time and change, 
 we should embody our belief in reasonable and 
 serious ideas, the greater part of these humanistic 
 notions which are the meeting of extremes between 
 so many philosophies would die away. 
 
 We should expect, certainly, that the temporal 
 universe would run a course ad infinitum, because 
 its cessation would appear unmeaning. Endea- 
 vouring to apprehend the significance of such an 
 
 1 The reference is to Comtism in particular, but we have 
 seen the connection with the total mood we are discussing. 
 ^ Bradley, " Ethical Studies": "Conclusion." 
 
x] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 209 
 
 expression as " all that is," we should not allow 
 ourselves to be drawn into identifying this course 
 with any of the limited histories of limited groups 
 on a single planetary body ; but we should find 
 ourselves more in tune with the large and reverent 
 considerations offered us by such a thinker as 
 Professor Alexander (I am assuming ad hoc the 
 standpoint of a believer in real time) and should 
 phrase our aspirations for the future in terms of 
 some great and splendid development for which 
 the unity and kinship of the infinite universe 
 should be a fitting foundation. We should not 
 bring down the universal evolution to the level of 
 movements of groups within terrestrial history. 
 We should endeavour to learn from the whole of 
 experience how human destinies can be exalted by 
 conception in the light of thought, in terms of 
 the ultimate necessities which it reveals as affecting 
 whatever is to be perfect or complete. 
 
 We should accept the warning of a student who 
 has learned of the Eastern mind. I venture to 
 repeat a citation which I have used before.^ "The 
 high Renaissance pride and glow are apt to leave 
 this bitter taste in the end. Absorption in man as 
 the centre of the iworld and the hero of existence 
 leads certainly to loss of that sanity and sweetness 
 which an openness to the abiding presence of the 
 non-human living world^ around us infuses into 
 life. It is not by that . absorption that we shall 
 find the full meaning or animating power of 
 
 1 " Principle," p. 370 ; citation from Laurence Binyon. 
 
 2 And I extend the principle to Meredith's sense of kinship 
 with the spatio-temporal universe ; cf. p. 166, supra. 
 
210 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 our Western faith that in man the divinity is 
 revealed." 
 
 Our expectation and aspiration, then, as evinced 
 in our hopes and our conduct, would be of an 
 ampler and freer kind than those which connect 
 a humanistic temper with the ultimate alterability 
 of reality. They would be more of the type 
 which I have indicated elsewhere,^ and would 
 principally turn on the revelation of the fullest 
 meaning of things through the varied and prima 
 facie contradictory experiences which the sequence 
 of events would afford. We should not suppose 
 ourselves to read off the lines of advance in the 
 nature of the whole from successions empirically 
 observed in the history of our planet If our 
 philosophy drove us, as we are assuming for the 
 moment, to the postulate of an ultimately pro- 
 gressive reality, this conviction would be the root 
 and source from which would spring our explora- 
 tion of the possibilities open to such an advance 
 and worthy of it, and we should not make our 
 progressist enthusiasm and aspiration the ground 
 for a philosophical conviction regarding the ulti- 
 mate nature of what is. 
 
 If now we turn our eyes to a working expecta- 
 tion and aspiration consistent with the opposite 
 view of ultimate reality — viz., the view that the 
 foundational nature of all that is, while containing 
 the infinite changes which are the revelation of its 
 inexhaustible life, not confinable within a single 
 direction or temporal career, is not itself and as 
 such engaged in a progress and mutation — we shall 
 1 " Value and Destiny," Lecture X. 
 
x] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 211 
 
 find, I think, that nearly all the current argument 
 directed against it on the ground of prima facie 
 temporal actuality is unintelligent and beside the 
 mark. 
 
 We should, to begin with, stand on the same 
 primary ground with the temporalist view as 
 regards the type of appearance which we should, 
 expect to continue for ever. The succession of 
 finite phenomena is for us the necessary utterance 
 of the infinite reality through finite spirits, and 
 we should anticipate that this would continue as 
 the normal routine of the universe. Comparing" 
 this conception with the second and higher version 
 which we suggested as compatible with temporalism, 
 we should not suppose that the two were empiri- 
 cally and externally distinguishable. We should 
 not think that a superficial success of humanity 
 was a proof of ultimate alteration in the real, nor 
 that events which might appear to us to mean 
 failure were a genuine metaphysical proof of a 
 reality that did not go forward. We should 
 submit ourselves to the universe and try to learn 
 its lesson, being convinced that in all its bewilder- 
 ing diversity a fundamental unity — a simple energy 
 and life — was revealing itself to us in the only 
 way in which anything could be revealed to and 
 through finite spirits. That the universe was full 
 of histories would not seem to us In the least to 
 suggest or to make plausible that the totality of 
 what is could be in movement away from Its 
 foundational character, and In course of trans- 
 muting the whole essence of its values, which we 
 take to be its realities. 
 
212 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 In our working expectation and aspiration there 
 would, however, I believe, be certain significant 
 differences of tendency, though I should not put 
 them on a level with philosophical demonstration, 
 I should not hold it probable that the visible 
 advance, due to the self-upbuilding of a self- 
 conscious real, would be an advance mainly sur- 
 passing itself in recognisable directions and could 
 be so without forfeiture. It might be, of course, 
 that Greek art is destined to be included and sur- 
 passed in what is yet to come on its own ground 
 and apart from a difference of kind ; but I should 
 not anticipate it as a necessity. I should start from 
 the idea of an infinite inexhaustible source, making 
 known its perfections through finite media, and 
 rather, so to speak, in rotation according as need 
 and occasion might arise, ^than advancing wholly 
 upon itself on lines defined ab initio; indicating 
 everywhere its abiding and underlying nature, but 
 not passing in ultimate reality from nature to 
 nature, so as at every point in its self-revelation 
 to supersede and extinguish a previous being of 
 itself^ I should take it as obvious that the whole 
 cannot be manifested as a whole at any point 
 throughout the finite sequence, and therefore, in a 
 sense, it is true that the revelation of its character 
 within this series can only exist — it is a tautology 
 — in a succession ad infinitum. But then, on this 
 ground, the appeal to the future must go. There 
 can be no point in the future at which such a 
 revelation can exist. 
 
 ^ It will not do to say with Croce that the past is absorbed 
 in the present. If change is ultimate fact, the past is largely- 
 dropped out and gone. See Bradley, " Essays," p. 153. 
 
X] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 213 
 
 And the difference of our emotion and response 
 would nevertheless be profound and fundamental. 
 It would lie in our absolute assurance that this 
 succession in existence was only a succession be- 
 cause, so to speak, its finite character admitted, as 
 essentially imperfect, of no other form in general 
 ♦and as a rule ; but that behind it, as many of its 
 features and our responses to them betray, there 
 lies a total perfection, which to approach and 
 apprehend through the finite and its essential' 
 nexus with the infinite is the very gordian knot 
 or crux and touchstone for a man, for life, and 
 for philosophy. And further, that in the world 
 of everyday conduct, and reaction in experience, 
 this perfection is augured and indicated by our 
 finding everywhere throughout the successions 
 of events, glimpses and pervading suggestions of 
 values, unique and splendid, universally distributed 
 and irrepressible, and in no way lending themselves 
 to the conception of a greatness lying essentially 
 in the future, and that future one which as such, 
 and as being the mere vehicle and promise of the 
 greater fruition which it is always foreboding, can 
 never come into present existence. 
 
 This, I urge, would be the feeling and response 
 towards the world of those who, like myself, are con- 
 vinced that change is hot the fundamental nature 
 of ultimate reality. But so far, though we should 
 be more attentive and sympathetic than are the 
 humanitarian and progressive philanthropist and 
 socio-political enthusiast, to the older and simpler 
 indications of value ^ — older forms of art, of simple 
 
 ^ It is only in a limited and indirect sense that we care 
 most about the future. Any extension of knowledge, e.g., is 
 
214 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 living, of faith, courage, heroism, and to the earlier 
 absence of many specific horrors and terrors of 
 civilisation, and of its enormous dulness — there is 
 nothing' absolute to divide us from the humani- 
 tarians and those who say that the end is progress. 
 There is a very noticeable difference of ethos and 
 valuation, and more love for great outlooks, and 
 for the whole rather than for the future. But the 
 two tempers might be combined in some degree 
 with each other and with the antagonistic philo- 
 sophical beliefs which in principle dominate them. 
 No one doubts the infinite sequence, or that finite 
 spirits,, here' or anywhere, have got to do their 
 best in the conditions which may befall them. 
 The empirical attitudes we have described do not 
 by themselves tell us with philosophical certainty 
 what the truth about time may be ; whether there 
 is or is not a principle of change at the very root 
 of the all. But " tarry a little, there Is something 
 else." We have seen how the very extremes of 
 philosophy, in so far asit assumes the character of 
 a philosophy of change, concentrate themselves 
 round the moral point of view. The moral point 
 of view is that in which man seeks his realisation 
 in an endless process, and so perpetually feels the 
 impulse to . transcend his existing reality. " So 
 we see that the moral point of view, which leaves 
 man in a sphere with which he is not satisfied, can- 
 not be final. This or that human being, this or 
 that passing stage of culture, may remain in this 
 
 equally welcome; it was future because zue had it not before; 
 but it need not refer to the future. This, I thinic, is very im- 
 portant. We care for " the whole," not for " the future " as such. 
 
x] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY ^15 
 
 region of weariness, of false self-approval, and no 
 less false self-contempt ; but for the race as a 
 whole, this is impossible. It has not done it, and 
 while man is man it certainly never will do it."^ 
 
 The point, then, to which we are brought is\ 
 this : that spatio-temporal existence must be a 
 succession of events ad infinitum is common 
 ground. Now thought furnishes us with an idea^ 
 of self-realisation, completeness, perfection, and 
 the succession of events ad infinitum is all the 
 actual existence we have hope of possessing in 
 which this idea of perfection could be realised. 
 And we have just seen that there is a view of life 
 from which the demand and this condition of its 
 fulfilment can be brought together. This is the 
 moral point of view, which translates perfection 
 into perfectibility. Nothing perfect can appear in 
 the series of events ; but if we read perfectibility 
 for perfection we may get a quasi-fulfilment by a 
 compromise. You never get perfection, but you 
 are always getting it. Nothing is or can be what 
 it ought to be, but it is always going to be what it 
 ought to be ; and this is a demand which can be 
 fulfilled in a series of facts. And thus, the moral 
 point of view can, it would appear, be satisfied by 
 a universe whose total reality is ultimately and 
 actually a succession. On such a view we should 
 take ourselves to live and have our being in the 
 sheer march of events ; we should always be 
 getting on towards the impossible perfection ; 
 and we should gain no reality but the successive 
 events. ( </ 
 
 ;5i Bradley, " Ethical Studies," p. 279. 
 
2i6 THE MEETING OF EXTREMES IN [ch. 
 
 ' For us, on the other hand, there is another 
 possibility. Let the series be the revelation, 
 springing from an infinite and inexhaustible source, 
 a series infinite because the source is inexhaustible, 
 but finite because conditioned by finite spirits. 
 
 j Then we can pass from the moral point of view 
 to the point of view of religion. Nothing is more 
 easily caricatured than this — we have seen examples 
 of such an attitude in James' treatment of the 
 Absolute as something to lie back on, or Croce's or 
 Gentile's as involving a something " transcendent," 
 " outside " the series of events, and consequently 
 ■prohibitive of progress. For us it is the living 
 source of the series, a source with which we can 
 identify ourselves by faith and will, and therefore 
 can unite ourselves with its perfection, although 
 not in factual existence transcending the temporal 
 series. Then the world of realities into which we 
 rise by faith and will, and which we find suggested 
 everywhere in the spatio-temporal region, and are 
 able in a measure to introduce there in so far as we 
 live for true values — this is not in ultimate reality 
 a universe of time and change. It does not move 
 from its nature, but reveals it ; and the riibral 
 point of view itself becomes another thing and 
 loses its self-contradictoriness when its constant 
 aspiration after an actual self-transcendence be- 
 comes the necessary consequence of a will, which 
 is in principle and assurance identified with the 
 supreme good in a stable universe, and is a form 
 of its self-utterance. 
 
 It is plain, I think, that if the issues are 
 stated thus, which is the only true and relevant 
 
x] CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY 217 
 
 way to state them, the current caricatures of the 
 views which subordinate time and change to the 
 unity and eternity of the universe, with their 
 question-begging epithets, are altogether beside 
 the point when we raise those serious questions 
 regarding time and change which really concern, 
 philosophy. If anyone asserts that he knows the 
 universe to be ultimately in change and in time, ' 
 he must face the question of the kind and degree \ 
 of its unity, or conservation of values, and when ' 
 he has given an account of this, it will be time 
 enough to ask whether the change he affirms is a 
 revelation of the unity he believes in, or a deroga- 
 tion from it. The problem, I repeat, is the 
 central crux of philosophy ; and that is why it 
 seems natural, that just as the more superficial 
 democratic gospel is to-day overspreading the 
 world, being the popular advance-guard, we hope, of 
 a persuasion deeper and more thoroughly spiritual, 
 so the simple philosophy of absolute and ultimate 
 progress in the real, an attractive evasion of the 
 fundamental problem, is growingly influential in 
 all philosophical quarters. It is, as I must believe, 
 related to the true doctrine as was Hegel's youthful 
 yearning to his mature vision of reality, and as, 
 through rude primary aspirations after future 
 peace and comfort and equality, there is dawning, 
 we trust and are assured, a deeper democratic 
 sense of spiritual oneness in the universe, as we 
 find ourselves compelled, by a widening and 
 deepening experience, to interpret and to value it. 
 
INDEX 
 
 The index is only intended to specijy important references. 
 
 Alexander, Professor S., Pro- 
 ceedings of British Academy, 
 19' 3-14. 9 n. ; "Space, 
 Time, and Deity,'' 9 n., 
 18, 24, 37 ; universe with- 
 out unity, 159, 169 ; re- 
 pudiates certain determina- 
 tions of space-time, 177 ; 
 on totality, 193 
 
 Appearances, mere, 191 h. 
 
 Aristotle, 109 
 
 Behaviourism, 19 n., 20 
 
 Bergson, 187 
 
 Block universe and neo-ideal- 
 ism, 2, 3 ; motives for' 
 suspicion of, loi. See 
 Gentile, Watts Cunning- 
 ham 
 
 Bonucci, Professor, on subject 
 in Gentile, 22 
 
 Boodin, Professor, 124 
 
 Bradley, F. H., 4; quoted, 
 21, 26, 32, 47, 48-50, 81, 
 155 n., 190, 208, 214 
 
 Burnet, Professor John, 107, 
 192 
 
 Burritt, Elihu, on reality of 
 characters in fiction, 45 ff. 
 
 Carlyle, 17 n. 
 
 Causation involves revelation, 
 
 81 
 Central conflict in modern 
 
 thought, 200 
 Christianity, its value ethical 
 
 not religious ? 122-423 
 
 Creative finalism, \%1 ff. 
 
 " Critical Realism," Chap. 
 
 VII.; how realism, 128; 
 
 the that and what, 131 
 Croce, Benedetto, quoted, 53 
 ff., 57, 184^, 206, 212, 
 
 216 
 
 Distance unit with varying 
 
 meaning, 156 n. 
 Duration, private v. standard, 
 
 151 
 
 " Enjoyment " and introspec- 
 tion, 26 
 
 Essence and stability in 
 Spinoza, 93 ; crude idea of 
 essence, 95 
 
 Essence in " Critical Realism," 
 Chap. VII. 
 
 Ethical individualism, 205 
 
 Ethical societies, Alexander 
 on, 186-187 
 
 Existence, of other minds, 
 true ground of belief in, 
 72 ; of God and particular 
 things in Spinoza, 92 
 
 Existent, transcendent in 
 critical realism, 131, 138; 
 not what I think about, 
 
 135 
 Experience, making more of, 
 
 6S 
 
 Finite things, and essence, in 
 
 Spinoza, 94 
 Future, appeal to, 212-213 
 
 and note 
 
 218 
 
INDEX 
 
 219 
 
 " Gegenstandstheorie," 3 3 
 
 Gentile, Giovanni, subject in, 
 2»f; future life (" Spirito "), 
 26; 32, 57, 59, 104, no, 
 121 ; unity without uni- 
 verse, 159 ; 163, 216 
 
 Greek philosophy, modern 
 confirmations of, 98 ; and 
 morality, 122 
 
 Green, T. H., 2, 35, 102 n., 
 198 
 
 Haldane, Viscount, 187-188, 
 
 194/"., quoted, 195, 196- 
 
 197 
 Hegel, G. F., 2, 97, 183 
 Hippel, quoted, 183 
 History, "ideal eternalj" 160 
 Hocking, Professor, quoted, 9 
 Hoernle, Professor R. A. F., 
 
 "Studies," 19, 32, 34, 47; 
 
 " neo-realism," 120, 186 
 
 and note 
 Holt, Professor, situation of 
 
 objects, 20 ; universe of 
 
 being, 29 
 Humanism in Croce, 55 ; in 
 
 Gentile, 60 ; Meredith 
 
 towards, 62, 205 
 Husserl, Professor Edmund, 
 
 quoted, 139-143 
 
 " Idealist " in temper of 
 Green's day, 103 
 
 Identity, tautological, not im- 
 putable to Greek philo- 
 sophy, 107^ 
 
 Illusion of finiteness, 196, 
 200 
 
 Imagination, categorical ele- 
 ment in, 44 
 
 Intellectualism, superstition 
 concerning, 100 
 
 Intellectualist dyslogistic epi- 
 thet ? 114/:, 198 
 Irrepressible ideas, 78 
 
 James, William, 65, 102 and 
 
 note, 173, 191 and note 
 Johnson, Dr., on piety, 68 n. 
 
 Kant on essence and exist 
 ence, 76 ; treatment of 
 ontological proof, 83 
 
 Knowledge as foundational, 
 199 
 
 Laird, Professor J., 25 
 Laurence Binyon, quoted, 
 
 209 
 Life after death, 28 
 Logic, unreflective, 73 
 
 McTaggart, Dr., xi 
 
 Marett on primitive spiritual 
 sense, 69 
 
 Meredith, 62, 166, 209 n. 
 
 " Metafisica della Mente — 
 dell'Ente," 160 
 
 Moore, Dr. G. E., " Refuta- 
 tion of Idealism," 3 ff. 
 
 Mystical insight. Gentile's 
 attitude to, 70 
 
 Nazzari, Sign. Rinaldo, quoted 
 
 64/. 
 Neo-idealism and neo-realism 
 
 \ff., 26, 62, 127 
 Nettleship, R. L., 116 n. 
 
 " Observers " and relativity, 
 
 IS 
 Ontological proof, 47 ; and 
 instinct, 67 ; and Kant, 
 83.90 
 
220 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Ontology, modern approach 
 to, ix, 67, Z02 
 
 Perfectibility and ethical atti- 
 tude, 186-187 
 
 Perry, Professor, in " New 
 Realism," 10, 186 
 
 Physical order, claims or, 1 1 
 
 Plato, 2, 107, 192 
 
 Point-track, Whitehead, 
 quoted, 16 
 
 Possibilities, in what sense 
 real, 42 
 
 Post-Kantians, the, 29 
 
 Pratt, Professor, 144 Jfl 
 
 Progress ad infinitum? 53^, 
 119/:, 207 
 
 Realist on grandeur of uni- 
 verse, 166 
 
 Reality as "divenire," 118 
 
 Religion as a natural emotion, 
 67 ; and morality antithetic 
 terms, 123 ; independent 
 root of, 166; of humanity, 
 184 
 
 Royce, Josiah, 9, 198 
 
 Russell, Hon. Bertrand, 30, 
 38-44, III 
 
 Sellars, Professor, 1 1 nn. 
 Sensa, a common world for 
 
 minds, 8 ; and physical 
 
 world, II. See Chap. 
 
 VII. 
 Situation of objects, 17^. 
 Social criterion of reality, 9, 
 
 71 
 
 Space-time, the lowest ex- 
 pression of the universe. 
 
 Speculative philosophy in- 
 debted to the neo-realist, 
 
 2, 3 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 120 n. 
 
 Spinoza thought as action and 
 as passion, 85 ; essence of 
 man and his numbers, 88 
 
 Spirito, Ugo, 116 n. 
 
 Stout, Professor G. F., Sylla- 
 bus II. to GifFord Lectures, 
 7 ; Ariit. Proc, 41, 72 
 
 Things and states of mind, 4 ; 
 compared to a theory, 19 ; 
 sensible content not foreign 
 to physical thing, 141 
 
 Time and reality, 155, 165 
 
 Totum simul, 198 
 
 Transcendence, of immediacy 
 only, 2-3 ; its two mean- 
 ings confused, 146 
 
 Universal, the, as an habitual 
 
 response, 66 
 Universe and finite thought, 
 
 204 
 
 Ward, Professor James, S3, 57 
 
 Watts Cunningham, Professor, 
 102 a, 113, 179, 187, 198, 
 206 
 
 Whitehead, Professor, " Con- 
 cept of Nature," iz ff.; 
 situation of objects, IJ ff. 
 
 Whole, the, principle of, 18, 
 212-213 n. 
 
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