CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 LIBRARY 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Professor 
 George H. Sabine 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924016877239 
 
ESSAYS ON 
 TRUTH AND REALITY 
 
 i 
 
 _-/: 
 
 J' 
 
 f; rif ^radley 
 
 LL.D. GLASGOW 
 FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 OXFORD 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 
 1914 ^., '.. ' 
 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK 
 
 TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY 
 
 HUMPHREY MILFORD M.A. 
 
 PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 1'?11 <^1R 
 
TO THE FRIEND 
 
 WITHOUT WHOSE UNFAILING SYMPATHY 
 
 ITS DEFECTS WOULD HAVE BEEN EVEN GREATER 
 
 THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The present volume consists mainly of articles 
 which have appeared in Mind. I have added a paper 
 first printed in the Philosophical Review, and there 
 are also some essays which have not before been 
 published. With three exceptions the whole belongs 
 to the last five or six years. The parts of this work 
 have been called chapters mainly for convenience 
 in reference, but also because most of them represent 
 more or less the chapters of a book which I once 
 intended to write. 
 
 The title indicates, I think, the principal subject 
 and aim of the contents. I am not offering a formal 
 treatise on the nature and criterion of knowledge, 
 truth, and reality, and yet this main problem recurs 
 and in some form is perhaps present throughout. 
 The imperfection and incompleteness, too evident 
 to the reader, may, I hope, be forgiven if these pages 
 serve to emphasize the need and possibly even to 
 stimulate the pursuit of the above inquiry. There 
 has seldom, I imagine, been a time when the general 
 question as to the criterion was more pressing, or 
 when the answer, attained or attempted, promised 
 better results. But I have myself little to contribute 
 here beyond that which I have urged in former years. 
 For the inner connexion which, I hope, unites the 
 various parts of this volume, I would refer to the 
 remarks appended to the closing chapter. 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 I have been unwilling to include so many pages 
 on Pragmatism. The subject certainly does not 
 occupy a corresponding space in my mind. But the 
 reader perhaps will recognize that, having been in 
 a manner forced here to write in self-defence, I am 
 no longer free merely to consult my own wishes. 
 He will find, I trust, that the discussion, if too long, 
 throws light on some points of interest ; and in any 
 case the remedy remains in his power. On the other 
 hand, I should be sorry if the examination of ' Radical 
 Empiricism ' were left unread. 
 
 It is a satisfaction to me, when approaching the 
 end of my own career, to note (whatever school or 
 tendency may from time to time be in fashion) the 
 increasing devotion amongst us to metaphysical 
 inquiry. There has been, I think, a rise in the 
 general level of English philosophical thought such as 
 fifty years ago might well have seemed incredible. 
 I am the more resigned to add that the best which 
 I can now myself expect to do is to collect some 
 other scattered writings, as well as perhaps to repub- 
 lish those early volumes which I can no longer hope 
 to re-write. 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 Introductory pages i-i8 
 
 Everything is subordinate to the Good, if that is taken in the 
 widest sense, but no partial aspect of life is good perfectly (1-4). 
 This shown, [a) of pleasure (5), (6) of practical activity (6-7), (c) of 
 beauty, {d) of intelligence (8), (e) of social and other unions of 
 individuals (9-10). 
 
 On the other hand, every partial aspect has its own sphere of 
 relative supremacy (10). This shown of philosophy with regard to 
 morality and religion (10-15). How philosophy must in a sense 
 rest on faith (15-17). 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 Faith 19-27 
 
 Faith, relation of to knowledge and doubt (19-20). It does not 
 always originate in action (21^2), and whether it must always 
 issue in action seems very doubtful (23-4). The above illustrated 
 in detail (24-6). Philosophy and faith (26-7). 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 On Floating Ideas and the Imaginary . . . 28-64 
 
 Object of this Chapter (28). I. Floating Ideas. An idea, what 
 (28-9). No ideas float absolutely. More worlds than what we call 
 our ' real world ', and to these worlds ideas are referred (30-2). 
 Explicit judgement not necessary (32-4). 
 
 Imaginary ideas (34-6). Ideas in imperatives and questions 
 (36-7), and in supposition. Hypothetical Judgement, what (37-40). 
 Ideas in Negation. On Contradictory Ideas (40-2). 
 
 II. Real and Imaginary, difference between them said not to lie 
 in content (43). This doctrine is untenable (43-6). The Imaginary, 
 what. It involves reference to the ' real world ', and that world 
 depends on content (46-9). No hard and fast line between ' real ' 
 and 'imaginary '. Degree of reality is degree of value (49). 
 
 III. Play, what, implies sense of earnest. Earnest, what (50-2). 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 But no hard division between the two. This shown in detail (52-7)- 
 Play and make-beheve — ^no necessary connexion between them (57). 
 The sense of restraint in play need not involve contrast with the 
 ' real world ' (58-63). General Result {63-4). 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 On Truth and Practice 65-106 
 
 Occasion of the following Chapter. Personal Idealism and 
 Pragmatism (65). Claim made for the latter (66). What Prag- 
 matism might have meant {66-7). Pragmatism and Humanity 
 (67-8). Pragmatism and Instrumentalism (68-9). On Will and 
 Knowledge. On idle truths and verification {69-70). 
 
 Bain's doctrine recalled. Professors James and Dewey repeat 
 Bain's mistake (70-1). Pragmatism and the Individual. Appar- 
 ently it has no principle here, and on the question of Instrumentalism 
 Pragmatists appear to difier radically (71-2). Pragmatism and the 
 genetic or historical view (72-3). 
 
 General character of Pragmatism (73). Truth is not in any case 
 the mere practical working of an idea (75-82). Practice, what. 
 Truth cannot consist in mere alteration of existence (82-5). What 
 practice for practice' sake really means {85-6). Relation of practice 
 to life. Truth and Beauty, how far practical. Though in one sense 
 subject to practice, they are in another sense free (86-92). 
 
 Attempts to subordinate truth to practice are of various kinds. 
 These stated and discussed in detail. Primacy of Will untenable 
 (92-9). General Result (99-101). 
 
 Note. On practical and non-practical activity (101-6). 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 On Truth and Copying ... . 107-26 
 
 Truth as copying. This idea is suggested necessarily, but is 
 untenable (107-9).. You cannot separate truth, knowledge, and 
 reality (no). Truth as mere external means {110-12). The identity 
 of truth, knowledge, and reality. This is a necessary claim made 
 by truth, but cannot be fully satisfied {113-15). Still, if truth 
 made good its claim, truth would be reality (115-18). 
 
 Partial truth contained in the copy -theory of truth. The more 
 complete view {118-22). On the ' subjective ' {119). 
 
 Note. On truth and working ideas. On Consistency (122-4). 
 On some questions as to Pragmatism and Humanism {124-6). 
 
CONTENTS ix 
 
 Chapter V. Appendix I. On the Ambiguity of 
 
 Pragmatism 127-42 
 
 I. Professor James. Pragmatism and practice most ambiguous 
 (127). Does Pragmatism degrade truth and beauty to mere means ? 
 Professor James now seems to say, No (128-9). And success as the 
 test of truth does not now seem to mean more than success ' on the 
 whole '. But the meaning of this with Professor James is doubtful 
 (129-30). And he appears also to teach an opposite doctrine. 
 A more consistent Pragmatism, what (132-4). 
 
 II. Professor Dewey. Instrumentalism, what (134). ' Prac- 
 tical ', ambiguity of (135-6). Truth may be practical in various 
 senses. Ambiguity of Professor Dewey's position (136-42). 
 
 Chapter V. Appendix II. On Professor James's 
 
 ' Meaning of Truth ' . . . . . 142-49 
 
 Was Professor James a relativist, and in what sense ? His 
 doctrine is too ambiguous to warrant any answer (142-5). Some 
 critical remarks on his Meaning of Truth (145-9). 
 
 C«apter V. Appendix III. On Professor James's 
 
 ' Radical Empiricism ' . . . . . 149-58 
 
 Professor James identifies Reality and Experience, but what 
 Experience ? If actual experience — ^then how as to past and 
 future ? The dilemma which arises is not met by Professor James 
 (149-50). 
 
 Then — as to what is Experience — are terms and conjunctive 
 relations immediately experienced, as such, or are they abstrac- 
 tions ? Professor James seems committed to both these views at 
 once (151). A difficulty as to Change is not noticed by him (152). 
 He probably preferred the view that immediate experience is non- 
 relational, but is mistaken as to its history (152-3). It does not 
 follow, if immediate experience is the beginning, that it is also 
 the end, and is all reality (153). 
 
 What according to Professor James is knowledge ? View of 
 knowledge which he had ready to hand. Why he could not accept 
 this view (153-4). His own theory, what. Its inconsistency and 
 failure {154-6). 
 
 Professor James's view of Reality. The whole fact of the ideal 
 world is left outside his reality, or is included in it by something 
 which will not bear scrutiny. And in any case he cannot meet the 
 dilemma as to past and future experiences (156-8). 
 
X CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 On our Knowledge of Immediate Experience . 159-91 
 
 Immediate Experience, the fact of. But how can I make it an 
 object ? (159-60). The answer in general given (161). 
 
 I. Difficulty as to Attention. How, when I attend to a change, 
 can I ever know that the change was not made by my attention ? 
 This problem is uisoluble, unless you assume that apart from atten- 
 tion I can feel change, and that this feeling can be reproduced (16 1-6). 
 
 II. Introspection, problem of (166). Introspection is not mere 
 remembering, but is making an object of the actually felt. And the 
 felt agreement or jar of the object with what is actually felt is 
 here the main criterion (166-8). And the unity of the object and 
 the merely felt explains how the former can be further enlarged 
 from the latter (169). On the other side, if actual feeling cannot 
 be used as a criterion of the object, no sufficient account can be 
 given of the fact of Introspection, or further of the fact of know- 
 ledge in general (169-71). 
 
 III. But how can immediate experience make an object of itself ? 
 Immediate experience in what sense unconscious or subconscious 
 (171-3). Was and is experience or feeling ever merely immediate ? 
 (173-4). Ill 3'iiy case immediate experience is no mere stage which 
 can be passed. However much transcended, it remains as funda- 
 mental (174-8). 
 
 (i) Immediate experience can serve as a criterion, because that 
 which is felt about an object tends itself to be objectified in the 
 object. And the object itself now can be felt to correspond, or not, 
 to immediate experience (178-81). 
 
 (2) How can immediate experience know about itself ? That it 
 does so is obvious, but how ? (181-2). 
 
 (i) We can form the idea of an object which is the all-inclusive 
 Reality (182-3). 
 
 (ii) We can perceive in actual experience how incomplete objects 
 change, and are increased — and that the sources of the added 
 element differ. And in some cases, by exclusion of other possible 
 sources, we are led to derive the addition made to the object from 
 what was previously only felt in me (183-8). Illustration from 
 Volition (188-9). The recognition of immediate experience, or 
 feeling, is all-important for metaphysics (189-91). 
 
 Chapter VI. Appendix. Consciousness and Experi- 
 ence . . ig2-8 
 
 Consciousness is not co-extensive with experience (192). Con- 
 sciousness is inconsistent with itself (192-4). And it is based on 
 
CONTENTS xi 
 
 Feeling (194). Feeling is not a stage of mind which passes, but it 
 remains throughout as a necessary foundation and background. 
 Importance of this doctrine, and necessity of recognizing and 
 discussing it (194-8). 
 
 Chapter VI. Supplementary Note . . . 199-201 
 On the importance of the above for metaphysics (199-201). 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 On Truth and Coherence 202-18 
 
 Judgements of perception and memory are all fallible. The test 
 is system. What this means (202-4). 
 
 (i) Ultimate facts of perception and memory cannot be shown 
 to exist. You cannot put, as such, into your judgement the deliver- 
 ance of feeling (204-7). 
 
 (2) Nor is their existence to be assumed (207). My real world, 
 what (208). For this I depend on the world of sense, but still no 
 datum there is fundamental in sense of absolute. The test is relative 
 contribution to system (209-12). So with historical facts (212-14). 
 A possible objection answered (214-16). 
 
 Certainly some judgement or judgements might be infallible for 
 me in the sense that otherwise my personal identity would be 
 destroyed, but this infallibility is not absolute (216-17). Con- 
 clusion (217-8). 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Coherence and Contradiction . . . 219-44 
 
 The criterion is the satisfaction of a want, but of a special want. 
 Philosophy is not a mere collection of useful ideas (219-20). In 
 what sense I can philosophize with my whole nature (220-2). 
 
 Two characters of the criterion — are they aspects of one prin- 
 ciple of non-contradiction ? A possible answer not accepted, but 
 the answer is still. Yes. (i) Any object short of the whole can be 
 experienced as a defective appearance of a wider whole (223-6). 
 (2) How qualification of Reality by any predicate implies diversity 
 and contradiction, and a process aiming at harmonious and com- 
 plete comprehension (226-9). 
 
 No remedy for this to be found in ' And '. Judgement starts 
 with and in a sense rests on the immediate unity and totality of 
 feeling, but cannot completely reconstitute this whole ideall}^. 
 There is no completely conditioned, and therefore no absolutely 
 true judgement (230-3). 
 
xii CONTENTS 
 
 No theoretical remedy for the above is to be found in Designation 
 (233-6). Nor in Pluralism and external relations. This doctrine 
 seems based on a false alternative (237-40). Imperfection of our 
 ultimate ideas, such as subject and predicate, and again identity 
 (240-1). 
 
 Result — System has two aspects. In what sense we can say that 
 what satisfies us is real (241-4). 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 On Appearance, Error, and Contradiction . . 245-73 
 
 Introductory, on the Absolute and the finite self (245-50).. 
 Appearance, idea, and truth (250-2). Two main views of Error, 
 the absolute and relative view. The absolute view is to be rejected 
 (252). The difference between error and truth is in the end one 
 of degree (252-8). The absolute view involves Pluralism and is 
 indefensible, both with regard to abstract truths and to matters 
 of fact. The latter imply but cannot reach uniqueness (258-65). 
 
 The absolute view of error has relative truth, and must be used in 
 life and in the special sciences (266-7). O^i Common Sense and 
 consistency (268). 
 
 On the self-contradictory, how, being unreal, it can exist (269-72). 
 In what sense the Absolute really appears and has degree (272-3). 
 
 Supplementary Note I . . . . . . 274-6 
 
 Professor Stout's view of Error. It is hard to say how it differs 
 from that of Professor Bosanquet and myself, and further explana- 
 tion on his part is wanted. 
 
 Supplementary Note II .... . 276-88 
 
 I. Professor Royce argues that Number can be created a priori 
 and is self-consistent. But neither of these contentions is really 
 tenable (277-80). 
 
 II. Mr. Russell's fundamental principles. How are ' Unities ' to 
 be reconciled with Pluralism ? (28 1-2) . Difi&culty as to certain ide&i 
 (282), and especially Class (283-6), Negation and Zero (286-8). 
 
 SuppITementary Note III .... . 288-92 
 
 Mr. Russell's explanations seem unsatisfactory. On ' unities ', 
 ' facts ', ' implications ', related terms without diversity, extemaUty, 
 &c. (288-91). Are Mr. Russell's views really in accordance with 
 science and common sense ? (291-2). 
 
CONTENTS xiii 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 A Discussion of some Problems in connexion with 
 
 Me. Russell's Doctrine .... 293-309 
 
 I. Mr. Russell's view of judgement and truth — difficulties with 
 regard to it (293-4) ■ 
 
 II. Relations without terms are not conceivable, and cannot 
 be inferred (295). Mr. Russell's arguments examined. Our con- 
 sciousness of universals involves negation. Its ultimate nature 
 (295-9). On analysis — its nature (299-301). Ideality, what (301). 
 How impossible ideas are thinkable (302-3). 
 
 , III. Multiple relations, (a) No whole can in the end be merely 
 relational (303-6). And (6) there really are no multiple relations. 
 Instance of ' between ' (306-7). Series, problem of (308-9). 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 On Some Aspects of Truth ..... 310-52 
 
 The general view (310). The method of inquiry. Axioms (311- 
 14). Truth, experience, and reality (314-17). The theoretical 
 criterion. It cannot be taken as satisfaction in general (317-21). 
 Darwinism and the Criterion (321-3). Meaning of ' Only ' or 
 ' Merely ' (323-4). Meaning of Qualification (324). 
 
 Does truth refer to something other than itself ? The question 
 is unanswerable if you take the soul or self as a separate thing 
 (325-8). The ' subjective ', what (328-9). Sense in which all 
 judgment passes beyond itself. Reality in the judgement, 
 how (329-34). 
 
 Has every or any truth been thought before I think it ? And 
 does knowledge alter reality ? (334-7). Can Truth be ' made ' ? 
 Does it depend on me ? (338-42). What is the relation between 
 reality and truth, and can truth copy reality ? (343-5). What is 
 the good of Truth ? This question rests on a mistaken view (346-9). 
 
 In what sense the view which I advocate involves ' subjectivism ' 
 and ' relativism '. A Note on Nature (349-52). 
 
 CHAPTER Xn 
 
 Some Remarks on Memory and Inference . . 353-80 
 
 Ambiguity of Memory (353-4). We think of the past by an ideal 
 construction, which involves the degradation of the present (354-7). 
 How, when we think forwards, we can remember backwards. No 
 merely successive Association (357-62). 
 
xiv CONTENTS 
 
 Difference between Fancy, Memory, and Inference. Defect of 
 internal necessity in mere fancy. Thought not always ' abstract ' 
 (362-5). How Memory and Inference agree and differ, but infer- 
 ence is implied in memory (365-70). 
 
 How is memory in a given case to be distinguished from mere 
 imagination ? There is no test which is not fallible (3 70-2) . Veracity 
 of memory— how far to be assumed (372-5)- On Memory and 
 Belief (376-7). On the meanings of ' matter of fact ' (377-8o). 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 On Memory and Judgement ..... 381-408 
 
 My present judgement must be taken as infallible (381-2). Some 
 objections answered (383). Memory has no independent validity, 
 and any such claim must lead to scepticism (384-6). Some mis- 
 understandings removed. Further explanation of the doctrine 
 that my present judgement must be treated as infallible (386-92). 
 
 What is a single judgement ? Unity of judgement (392-6). 
 Omission of irrelevancy permissible (396-7). Continuity of the 
 subject in judgement. Some difficulties discussed (397-402). The 
 question is not in the end psychological (403). Duration of a judge- 
 ment, what (403-6). 
 
 How far does a judgement, once made, remain true for me ? 
 Postulate as to memory's general correctness (406-8). 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 What is the real Julius Caesar? .... 409-27 
 
 The main point, what. Preliminary warning. Necessary distinc- 
 tions (410-11). Finite centres, their nature, duration, identity, 
 and plurality (410-12). Digression on transcending finite centres 
 (412-14). Soul, what (414-16). Self, what (416-18). How my self 
 is mine only, and its importance (418-20). Self and Soul — how 
 related (420-1). 
 
 Return to the main question. The real Caesar cannot be limited 
 to the Caesar as directly experienced (422-3). The individual is 
 real so far as he works in any sense, even in mere knowledge (423-5). 
 Ideal and real experience are not separable (425-7). Our main 
 result may be indefinite, but is necessary (427). 
 
CONTENTS XV 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 On God and the Absolute 428-47 
 
 The Absolute not God and why (428-9). Inconsistency in rehgion. 
 Attempt to avoid this by making God finite (429-30). But rehgion 
 has not to be consistent theoretically, and it has to use the ideas 
 which best serve its main interest (430-2). 
 
 The personality of God is certainly not necessary for all religion, 
 but is a valid idea (432-3). In personal religion the personality is 
 not all on one side (433-4). God has reality in the religious con- 
 sciousness, apart from which an Individual Person would not really 
 be God. Theoretical consistency must be sacrificed (434-8). 
 
 Continued personal existence after death is certainly not the 
 main interest of religion. But, if and so far as really demanded 
 in that interest, it may be accepted as true. Mere hope, fear, and 
 curiosity as to the spirit-world are not religious (438-40). 
 
 Morality and Religion — difference between them (441-2). This 
 chapter will not be satisfactory to the reader who holds to what he 
 calls Common Sense. The defects of this last. Are they irremedi- 
 able ? In general by Metaphysics, Yes. And otherwise ? (442-7). 
 
 Supplementary Note A. On the Reality and 
 
 Personality of God ..... 448-51 
 
 Supplementary Note B. On our Fear of Death 
 
 and Desire for Immortality .... 451-9 
 
 What I myself feel actually (45 1-2) . And generally the nature of our 
 interest in a future life is most ambiguous (453). Identity in feel- 
 ing is the basis, and, beyond this, memory seems implied in indi- 
 vidual personal interest (453-6). On this subject our imaginations 
 are confused. But fear of death is not wholly irrational (456-9). 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 On my Real V\^orld ...... 460-g 
 
 Familiar doubts as to dream and reality (460) . My ' real ' world 
 is the world of my " real ' body, and what is that ? Merely my 
 present waking body (460-2). But is this world more real than 
 others, as being more systematic ? The known facts do not show 
 
xvi CONTENTS 
 
 this conclusion, nor can we infer it otherwise (462-5). We are 
 right to call ' abnormal ' states irrational and their deliverance 
 unreal, if we make a certain assumption. This assumption we must 
 make, but still it is not true (465-7). How the above bears on 
 Death (467-8). General Result (468-9). 
 
 CONCLUDING REMARKS 470-3 
 
 INDEX ... ... . 474-80 
 
CHAPTER I 
 INTRODUCTORY 
 
 ^ Every aspect of life may in the end be subordinated to 
 the Good, if, that is, we understand the Good in a very wide 
 sense. Everywhere in hfe we seem forced, sooner or later, 
 to ask the question Why. And the answer to that inquiry 
 seems everywhere to be found in the fact of contentment and 
 absence or suppression of unrest. We may appeal from one 
 thing to another thing, but it is to this aspect of things, 
 and it is to things as more or less possessing this aspect, 
 that we are brought at last. And we are led to conclude 
 that, so far as anything in the above sense is good, there 
 is nothing else in the world which can pretend to stand 
 above it. 
 
 The claim of reason and truth to be an exception here will 
 not hold. For, if you ask what is truth, you are led to 
 answer that it is that which satisfies the intellect. The 
 contradictory and the meaningless fail to be true because 
 in a certain way they do not satisfy. They produce a special 
 kind of uneasiness and unrest ; and that on the other side 
 which alters this unrest into an answering contentment, 
 is truth. It is truth, we may say, where the intellect has 
 found its good. 
 
 Whatever a man is engaged in, whatever he feels or does 
 or apprehends or pursues, this, so far as it satisfies him, is 
 
 ^ This chapter was written, in December 1906, as an introduction to 
 a book which I then had in contemplation (see the Preface), and, though 
 with some hesitation, I venture now to publish it. It has been altered by 
 certain additions and by much larger omissions, but on the whole it 
 remains in its original character. 
 
 1574 B 
 
2 INTRODUCTORY chap. 
 
 good in itself. 1 It possesses what you may call, if you please, 
 the ultimate quaUty of goodness. So far as anything satisfies, 
 there is no possible appeal beyond it, and nothing has any 
 rational claim against that which in itself is fully satisfied. 
 With regard to philosophy, for example, it is now an old 
 saying that it must presuppose the will to think, and that 
 if any one is ready to contradict himself, philosophy can 
 have no concern with him. 
 
 All thinking, in brief, rests on the agreement, tacit or 
 expressed, to accept a certain test. It consists, in other 
 words, in the pursuit of one kind of satisfaction, and its 
 arguments appeal to no one except so far as he is engaged in 
 this pursuit. And, as in philosophy, so everywhere through- 
 out life the same principle holds. Whether it is an affair 
 of mere enjoyment and liking, or a matter of moral and 
 religious conviction and preference, or again of aesthetic 
 perception and taste, throughout these differences we find 
 everywhere in one point the same thing. So long and so 
 far as that which occupies you is able to give you rest and 
 contentment, that thing, whatever it is, has goodness. 
 And there is nothing which from the outside has against 
 this thing any claim upon you. So long as remaining there, 
 wherever you are, you find yourself satisfied and at one with 
 your own being, so far, apart from mere violence ^, you 
 
 ' Goodness, worth, and value, are of course all the same thing. The 
 definition of the Good given in ray Appearance I have now for some time 
 ceased in one point to consider correct. I do not think that desire should 
 be included in the definition. Wherever, and so far as, I feel myself 
 positively affirmed, there, so far, is goodness. Desire, at least in the 
 ordinary course, will necessarily supervene, but it is wrong to take it as 
 being from the first essential ; and indeed so much as this was admitted 
 in my volume, pp. 403-4. We can realize this truth perhaps most plainly 
 if we consider the case of beauty. As to the inclusion of pleasure in the 
 Good, I will say nothing here. And the question, how far, and in what sense, 
 an idea is implied there, I wish at some time to reconsider. Perhaps at 
 a future date I may be able to deal inore fully with the general nature of 
 Goodness. 
 
 ^ I do not here enter into the question whether in the end there can 
 be any raere external force. But, so far as the individual is concerned, 
 this, for practical purposes, obviously exists. 
 
I INTRODUCTORY 3 
 
 are secure in yourself. Here, if in the camp there is no 
 division, the enemy will not penetrate. A man, we all 
 know, should not be shamed out of his reason, and he cannot 
 rationally, we also know, be argued out of his feelings. 
 
 But on the other hand it is an old experience that nowhere 
 is perfect good. Goodness does not really reside where 
 perhaps we tend first to place it. There is nothing, in other 
 words, in hfe which, taken in and by itself, completely 
 satisfies. Our life has several main aspects, and, even 
 within each aspect, we are led for ever in some point to desire 
 something better and beyond. And we find in the end that 
 no one aspect by itself can have goodness and be unmixed 
 good.i Everything in hfe is imperfect and seeks beyond 
 itself an absolute fulfilment of itself. And thus everything 
 in life, we may say in the end, is subordinate, and subordinate 
 to the Good. 
 
 We have been led in the above reflection to a twofold 
 result. On the one hand every side of life, so far as it is 
 good, is justified in itself, while on the other hand the 
 perfect good is found in none of them. We are hence mis- 
 taken when we attempt to set up any one aspect of our 
 nature as supreme, and to regard the other aspects merely 
 as conducive and as subject to its rule. And it is worth 
 while perhaps to deal at some length with this error. 
 
 The Good, we agreed, was satisfaction ; and satisfaction, 
 wherever found, we agreed was, so far, the Good. But if 
 any one goes on to urge, ' Well then, here is satisfaction ; 
 I have, for instance, found it here in my practical activity. 
 And therefore this is the supreme good to which all else 
 
 ' With regard to anything which claims to be good we may ask these 
 questions, (i) Does this thing possess nothing but goodness ? Is its 
 goodness in this sense unqualified ? (ii) Does it, so far as it is good, 
 possess goodness simply in its own right, or through a qualification more 
 or less external to itself ? Is its possession in this sense unqualified ? 
 (iii) Does it possess all goodness ? Is anything else good ? The above 
 three questions are to my own mind different aspects of the same question, 
 i. e. Is the thing of which we speak identical with the Good ? 
 
 B 2 
 
4 INTRODUCTORY chap. 
 
 is subordinate,' we cannot accept this. Such an argument 
 would illustrate the error we have mentioned. For, in the 
 first place, what has been found is certainly not altogether 
 and completely good. And in the second place, beyond 
 this, there certainly are other aspects of hfe, where satisfac- 
 tion and the Good are no less to be found. The perfect 
 Good resides in each, but in each it exists imperfectly, and 
 none therefore is supreme. On the one hand we can experi- 
 ence and feel our nature as a whole, and, as against this 
 whole, we can realize the inadequacy of any one side of hfe. 
 And, because this is so, we cannot identify our whole being 
 with one of its aspects, and take everything else as subject 
 to a one-sided supremacy. On this point the verdict of 
 those who know most of Ufe has been passed long ago, and, 
 later or sooner, this finding must at some time have come 
 home to us as true. We can feel that life has failed if it is 
 all inactive pleasure or contemplation, or if it consists solely 
 in moral struggle or religious emotion, or again in mere 
 labour or in any activity without rest and enjoyment. We 
 can be sure that our truth is not the full possession of reahty, 
 we can know that there are ends beyond aesthetic achieve- 
 ment and joy, and something again of value beyond life 
 in society and in the family. Such things, we feel, are good, 
 but there is not one of them which includes all the rest. 
 There is none of them which possesses unqualified goodness, 
 and hence there is not one of them to which all the others 
 can be subject. 
 
 I will go on from this to consider briefly the various 
 aspects of life, and to show the imperfection inherent in each.^ 
 
 {a) If first we take pleasure, we are impressed at once 
 by its claim to be the Good. From whatever source it comes, 
 so long and so far as it is intense and pure, it seems to give 
 us a sense of absolute reality. But on the other side, apart 
 
 • In what follows I am to some extent repeating what has been said in 
 Appearance, pp. 458 fi. 
 
I INTRODUCTORY 5 
 
 from any doubt as to pleasure's purity, it is the commonest 
 experience that hfe cannot be taken as included in one 
 moment, or comprised within a single feeling. And, again, 
 mere pleasure is an abstraction which we make from what is 
 pleasant. Hence we seem unable in the end to say anything 
 about pleasure, unless the pleasant, unless, that is, other 
 things, are brought into the account. And it seems impossible 
 to show either that, or how, these other things are really 
 dependent on and subject to pleasure. And if any one 
 replies that he for his part has chosen so to take them, that 
 is no proof, I apprehend, that his choice need be considered. 
 We are forced in reason to distinguish between pleasure and 
 that which is pleasant, and, so far as I see, we cannot in 
 reason make the second of these to be subject to the first. 
 We may put it otherwise by saying that, where pleasure 
 exists, it is the whole man who feels the pleasure, the whole 
 man with all his practical and other activities and the 
 complete range of his emotions. The Hedonist puts on one 
 side this rich complexity, and on the other side he puts 
 pleasure by itself, and he tells us that the entirety of the 
 first exists for the sake of the second, and that nothing 
 in the world excepting pleasure is good at all. But this 
 assertion, unreasonable and arbitrary in itself, would appear 
 to lead in the end to a further consequence. For if everything, 
 as we have seen, in the end is subject to the Good, the Good 
 (it seems to follow) must be the one and supreme Reality, and 
 there will therefore be in the end nothing real but pleasure. 
 But to any such consequence the ordinary Hedonist is 
 bhnd. He has not seen that, in denying value to all other 
 aspects of life, he is from the first in collision with common 
 sense, and he does not understand that to make the whole 
 of life subordinate to pleasure as the Good, results in the end 
 in a position which is incapable of defence.^ 
 
 ' Cf. Appearance, pp. 373-4, and Chap. XI of the present volume. It 
 will, of course, be understood that the remarks in the text do not apply 
 
6 INTRODUCTORY chap. 
 
 (6) In practical activity, to take that next, a man may 
 feel that certainly here at last is both goodness and reaUty. 
 But the attempt to take practice in itself and by itself 
 as good, must lead us once more to an untenable consequence. 
 Practice clearly is the alteration of existence by me, and 
 this alteration, taken by itself, is an abstraction which, I 
 suppose, no one could desire. To make the Good consist 
 in mere doing, or in the bare quantity of mere doing, indepen- 
 dent of and without regard to any quality in what is done, 
 or to anything which accompanies the doing, is a position 
 which, when understood, can hardly be maintained. Life, 
 I presume, we all feel to be in some sense a qualitative 
 whole, and we therefore cannot subordinate life to the aspect 
 of bare alteration of existence.^ 
 
 There is again inherent in practice a well-known incon- 
 sistency. Practice I take to imply and to depend on an 
 unrealized idea. It contains the idea of a ' to be ' and 
 a ■ not yet ', a something which has to be carried out in fact, 
 but which, as soon as it is carried out, has ceased forthwith 
 to be practical. Practice is the perpetual undoing of the 
 condition which is imphed in its own existence, and it 
 cannot therefore offer by itself a satisfaction which is 
 ultimate. The inconsistency is plainly visible from the 
 side of the idea. The idea, since it is taken as a " not here ', 
 does not qualify ' my world ', but on the other hand, since 
 after all an idea qualifies something,^ the idea is real in 
 a world which is other than mine. Either then there is 
 a world outside practice, and practice does not cover the 
 whole of things, or on the other side practice is somehow 
 a passage and a transportation between two worlds which 
 
 to the Hedonism which contents itself with using pleasure merely as the 
 mark by which to discover goodness, without denying that other things 
 really are good. 
 
 ' For further explanation on this point see Chap. IV of the present 
 volume. 
 
 ' This point is discussed hereafter in Chap. III. 
 
I INTRODUCTORY 7 
 
 seem to have no real unity. This difficulty is brought out 
 in a striking form by the postulate made in religion, in any 
 religion, that is, which is not imperfect. The Good, which 
 in rehgion is the complete Good and the supreme Reahty, 
 must be carried out in practice, and yet, in order to be made 
 real, it is presupposed. The Good, that is, cannot in religion 
 be taken as unreal or as merely real elsewhere ; for, if so, 
 the Good would be no longer supreme. The Good therefore 
 must be taken by faith as already real here. But, with this, 
 it has become clear that, while practice consists in altera- 
 tion, the alteration which it makes does not, as such, qualify 
 the reality. In other words, if you regard the Good as 
 entire or supreme, the Good ceases before your eyes to be 
 merely practical. It is idle here to reply that a Good, 
 however inconsistent with itself, may after all be complete 
 if it satisfies me fully. For internal inconsistency is sure 
 by the nature of things to work out into practical discrepancy 
 and dissatisfaction. And that which really satisfies in the 
 inconsistent process, so far as it satisfies me, is not the mere 
 process. It is the realization of ends which, while entering 
 into the process, are also above and beyond it. 
 
 (c) And to seek in the beautiful for perfect or unqualified 
 good leads once more to disappointment. A man may 
 feel assured that, in one form or in many, beauty, as he 
 would say, is all the world to him. And yet it is too plain 
 that all the world, if so, is but a part of the reality. The 
 beautiful, even when attained, is not all beauty, and again 
 there is toil and anxiety in the pursuit, and the pursuit may 
 and even must entail more or less of disappointment. And, 
 if beside beauty there is no other end and joy in life — and 
 other ends and other joys there surely must be — there is 
 at least together with beauty more or less of ughness and 
 of care and pain in existence. In short there undeniably are 
 things which are not beautiful, and life has aspects which 
 are not beautiful and cannot become so. There is perhaps 
 
8 INTRODUCTORY chap. 
 
 nothing which cannot be made beautiful in art, and m the 
 artistic vision which abstracts from the crude whole which 
 it perceives. But in any case the art and the vision, even 
 if perfect themselves, must leave something outside, and 
 there are elements which refuse persistently to own their 
 supremacy. It is only in ' some world far from ours ' 
 that the consummation is reached, and ' music and moon- 
 light and feeling are one '. And the lover of beauty, like 
 the lover of morality, is condemned to fall back on faith. 
 To him the whole after all, if we could see it, is certainly 
 beautiful. But since on the other hand to be beautiful is 
 to be an object for some sense, some sense which is other 
 than that which it perceives, this all-inclusive and ideal 
 beauty could nowhere be realized. Or, if it is at once real 
 and supreme, it has ceased forthwith to be merely beautiful. 
 
 (d) With regard to intellect and the intelhgible world 
 we do not need many words. Science in its widest sense is 
 a pursuit, and it never becomes wholly an attained object. 
 It is but one side of life which is entangled with other sides, 
 and again, as a pursuit, it has a practical aspect, and it 
 therefore itself is burdened with the inconsistency of practice. 
 In any case, its object, even so far as that is attained, is the 
 world of mere truth, and does not include all reality. To 
 understand, as it is given to us, or given to any one, to under- 
 stand, is not wholly to possess even in apprehension, and 
 still less is it the same as to enjoy and to do. 
 
 Knowledge, taken apart from being, has no goodness or 
 reality at all, and, further, a mere knowledge of being cannot 
 satisfy by itself. For, if it is not to pass beyond knowledge, 
 it is forced to leave being more or less outside. It is in -short 
 one thing to know and another thing to be; -and hence our 
 knowledge cannot satisfy even itself, and much less the 
 whole man. 
 
 For faith it is true once again that complete knowledge 
 is reahzed. What is sought can be found, and it is itself 
 
I INTRODUCTORY 9 
 
 waiting there to be found. But, with this, since the pursuit, 
 as a pursuit, has lost ultimate reality, and since it is in the 
 pursuit that philosophy lives, with such an end there is 
 also an end of mere philosophy. ^ 
 
 (e) When we dismiss these abstractions we may be led 
 finally to place our ultimate good in some higher totality 
 of life. In the love and friendship between individuals, 
 and in the social union which we find in the family and 
 in wider wholes, we may claim to have reached at last 
 the concrete and all-inclusive good. But, though in this 
 position there is much truth, it seems impossible to accept 
 it as final. For, if we judge by what we can perceive, the 
 individual members, in whatever higher unity, are more or 
 less the sport of change and accident. And the whole, in 
 which they are united, has itself the defects of finitude. 
 Its existence seems more or less precarious and subject to 
 chance, and on the other side its inward being more or less 
 suffers from narrowness. When you consider even our 
 human aspiration in its breadth and in its intimacy, it is 
 difficult to set this down as owned entirely by any common 
 life that we know. And it is hard to see how its satis- 
 faction could be merely the fulfilment of any known 
 higher unity. And hence our common life and our supreme 
 good escapes once more to take its place in an invisible 
 world. It is in some city of God, in some eternal church, 
 that we find the real goodness which owns and satisfies our 
 most inward desire. But on the other side such a reality 
 exists only for faith. This does not mean that we cannot 
 know at all the supreme good and reality. It means that we 
 are ignorant as to the variety of those forms of finite soul 
 which may make part of its life, and it means that in the 
 end we do not know how they, together with all their 
 inward and outer diversities, reach harmony within it. 
 I am therefore forced to deny that the chief good is merely 
 
 ' Later on, p. 15 and elsewhere, I shall return to the above point. 
 
10 INTRODUCTORY chap. 
 
 social. 1 Or, from the other side, if I take the Good as the 
 extension of any common Hfe that I know, I am driven 
 to admit that the extension is only for faith. And I do not 
 know, at the point where the desired consummation is 
 reached, what will, at that point, have become of the 
 starting-place. I am ignorant, in other words, as to how 
 far the individuals themselves may have been essentially 
 modified and transformed.^ 
 
 We have seen that every aspect of life has goodness and 
 realizes the Good, and we have seen, on the other hand, 
 that no one aspect has goodness by itself and that none 
 is supreme. The various sides of our nature appear to be 
 connected, and more or less this connexion everywhere shows 
 itself. But the complete truth as to this connexion seems 
 not to be within our grasp. And hence the main aspects 
 of our being must be allowed, each for itself, to have a rela- 
 tive independence. If I could think that I understood our 
 essence, throughout and from the bottom upwards, I might 
 conceivably follow those who judge otherwise here. But 
 for me, as I am, every aspect within its own realm is in 
 a certain sense supreme, and is justified in resisting dictation 
 from without. I do not, however, propose to develop this 
 main result except in reference to philosophy. 
 
 The supremacy of philosophy within its own field might 
 be assailed from various sides, but I shall confine myself 
 here to the attack made on behalf of morality and religion. 
 The claim of practice, it may be said, will apply to the 
 whole of life, and must hold good therefore in the case of 
 
 ' Here to my mind is the objection to taking love as ultimate. There 
 is no higher form of unity, I can agree. But we do not know love as the 
 complete union of individuals, such that we can predicate of it the entirety 
 of what belongs to them. And, if we extend the sense of love and make it 
 higher than what we experience, 1 do not see myself that we are surejsf 
 preserving that amount of self -existence in the individuals which «eems 
 necessary for love. 
 
 Cf. here my Ethical Studies, pp. 200-3, ^nd Appearance, p. 415. 
 
I INTRODUCTORY ii 
 
 philosophy. But this claim, we must reply, though it is 
 well founded and though it covers the whole of hfe, is subject 
 to a very serious limitation.^ Wherever we have to do with 
 non-practical activity or enjoyment, the regulation of this 
 by practice must be external. Morality, that is, can dictate 
 to me within what limits I am, for instance, to. pursue art 
 or philosophy, but within those limits it cannot dictate 
 to me the nature of the pursuit. Religion and morality, 
 we may say, are so far in no better position than are choice 
 and caprice. You may choose or not choose to philosophize 
 or to paint, but you certainly cannot altogether paint or 
 philosophize as you choose. Whether and how far you will 
 do these things, you may from the outside determine accord- 
 ing to what you think moral. But it is only from the inside 
 that you are able to learn the right method of doing them, 
 and that method is independent of anything which may 
 count as right outside. My will and my conscience can in 
 short no more tell me how I ought to pursue truth, than they 
 can show me how to ride a horse or to play on a piano. 
 
 It is difficult for morality, and it is still more difficult 
 for religion, to recognize its own limits with regard to art 
 or philosophy.^ I can enter here no further on this matter 
 than to express my opinion that to invade the region of 
 philosophy is contrary to the interest of a sound morality 
 or religion. Any such invasion is likely to lead to a disastrous 
 conflict within our nature. The independent pursuit of 
 beauty and of truth feels its own sufficient justification ; 
 and, if it is forced into a collision with duty and goodness, 
 there may be a revolt and a rejection of goodness and duty. 
 And we have seen that morality and religion are too incom- 
 plete, and too much weakened by internal defect, not to 
 suffer when such a contest has been provoked. 
 
 Philosophy aims at intellectual satisfaction, in other 
 
 ' For a further discussion of this matter I must refer the reader to 
 Chap. IV. 
 
 ' There is some further discussion of this point in Chap. XV. 
 
12 INTRODUCTORY chap. 
 
 words at ultimate truth. It seeks to gain possession of 
 Reality, but only in an ideal form. And hence it is the 
 realization of but one side of our being. Now among the 
 various aspects of our nature we have seen that not one 
 is supreme, but that each within its own limits has a relative 
 supremacy. And hence you cannot carry over conclusions 
 and results from morality or religion which, as admitted 
 results, are to be received and accepted by philosophy. 
 These results for philosophy can be no more than material. 
 It will recognize them as it has to recognize every species of 
 fact, but to judge with regard to final truth belongs to itself 
 alone. Certainly I agree that if philosophy were to contradict 
 either morality or religion, these, or either of them, would be 
 fully justified in refusing to give way. In such a case we should 
 have a conflict where there is right on both sides. But I do not 
 think, myself, that a true philosophy will conflict with 
 a sound morahty or religion. In my opinion a true philo- 
 sophy certainly does not contradict the postulates required 
 for conduct. It will or it may understand them otherwise — 
 as to this I do not doubt — but I cannot admit that to 
 understand otherwise is necessarily to deny. It is surely 
 possible to take a view as to the principle on which a man acts, 
 a view with which he would not agree, and yet neither really 
 to contradict him nor in action to dissociate oneself from 
 him. So much seems clear ; but whether on the other hand 
 a true philosophy will be able to guarantee and to justify 
 the postulates of conduct, is another question altogether. 
 What I desire to insist on here is that neither a different 
 understanding, nor even a failure to justify, need amount 
 to anything like a real contradiction. If a man is assured 
 on the part of philosophy that his religious belief is false, 
 he is warranted, at least formally, in replying that this is 
 so much the worse for philosophy. But the position becomes 
 different when, without any such assurance, and perhaps 
 even against a contrary assurance, a man insists that some 
 
I INTRODUCTORY 13 
 
 philosophy contradicts his moral or religious belief. He 
 may doubtless here be right, but, if he is right, it is because 
 he himself, so far, is the better philosopher. He in any case 
 has carried the question away from practice into the realm 
 of theory, and has so far left the limits within which theory 
 could have no hold against him. There are two questions 
 in short which it is common but most dangerous to con- 
 found. The first asks about the sense of a doctrine as 
 a working belief, while the second investigates the ultimate 
 meaning and theoretical guarantee of that doctrine. The 
 second inquires into the position of something in the 
 universe at large, while the first asks merely how it stands 
 to my heart and conscience. 
 
 In philosophy we must not seek for an absolute satisfac- 
 tion. Philosophy at its best is but an understanding of 
 its object, and it is not an experience in which that object 
 is contained wholly and possessed. It is the exercise and 
 enjoyment, in other words, of but one side of our nature. 
 I do not forget that philosophy has often been made into 
 a religion. From time to time it has been taken as the one 
 thing needful, as the end and rule of our lives, and as all 
 the world to its worshippers. But the same thing, we must 
 remember, would be true again of art and perhaps of other 
 pursuits. It must be an unhappy world where a man can 
 say that, if he had no philosophy, he would be left destitute 
 of practical belief. And the philosophy that is led to take 
 up such a burden must be weighted in its course, and tempted 
 perpetually to lose sight of its main end.^ A true philosophy 
 cannot justify its own apotheosis. Nay, from the other side 
 the metaphysician might lament his own destiny. His 
 pursuit condemns him, he may complain, himself to herd 
 
 ' It would be easy to enlarge on this theme. I will note one consequence 
 which may follow where a man turns his philosophy into a religion. A 
 difference in opinion in this case between rival philosophies may more or 
 less drift into the practical antagonism of conflicting creeds. And in the 
 interest of philosophy such a situation is not to be desired. 
 
14 INTRODUCTORY chap. 
 
 with unreal essences and to live an outcast from life. It 
 is three times more blessed, he may well repeat, to be than 
 to think. 1 But in such a mood the man would so far fall 
 away from philosophy. A true philosophy must accept and 
 must justify every side of human nature, including itself. 
 Like other things it has its place in that system where 
 at once every place and no place is supreme. The mastery 
 of that system in thought, however far we carry it, leaves 
 philosophy still the servant of an order which it accepts 
 and could never have made. 
 
 Certainly from its own nature philosophy must be con- 
 versant with the highest things, and, unless it is false in 
 itself, it must recognize these things in their proper character. 
 And such familiarity, it is clear, must have some effect on 
 the mind. But it is hard to anticipate in any given case 
 the amount of this force, nor is it easy to foresee its nature 
 and direction. Familiarity, here as elsewhere, may under 
 some conditions lead to contempt. And it cannot, I think, 
 be denied that even genuine philosophy may be practised 
 in a spirit which is immoral or irreligious. The same thing 
 will be true once again of art and of all study of human 
 nature either from the side of body or mind. If we take such 
 instances as the novelist, the poet, the painter or the anthro- 
 pologist, it is well known that any of them is liable to 
 immoral inspiration. All that need be said here is that, 
 while on the one hand every pursuit fixes its own limits, 
 on the other hand every pursuit is by the same principle 
 bound to sincerity and single-mindedness. No pursuit 
 can justify a lapse from its own code of honour, or a search 
 or a love for alien ends and effects. And thus an immoral 
 
 > I may perhaps illustrate this by transcribing one of those notes in 
 which, some twenty years ago, I used to attempt to fix my passing moods. 
 ' The shades nowhere speak without blood, and the ghosts of Metaphysic 
 accept no substitute. They reveal themselves only to that victim wjiose 
 life they have drained, and, to converse with shadows, he himself must 
 become a shade.' 
 
I INTRODUCTORY 15 
 
 spirit in the philosopher is, I presume, certain, unless kept 
 in check, more or less to injure his philosophy. But from 
 the other side the same thing holds of an unusual gift of 
 conscientious or religious feeling. Unless such a gift is 
 controlled and regulated, it may more or less injure or even 
 ruin the work of the philosopher or artist. 
 
 What I have been trying to say comes perhaps briefly 
 to this. Philosophy like other things has a business of its 
 own, and like other things it is bound, and it must be allowed, 
 to go about its own business in its own way. Except within 
 its own limits it claims no supremacy, and, unless outside 
 its own limits, it cannot and it must not accept any dicta- 
 tion. Everything to philosophy is a consideration, in the 
 sense that everything has a claim and a right to be con- 
 sidered. But how it is to be considered is the affair of 
 philosophy alone, and here no external consideration can 
 be given even the smallest hearing. 
 
 I will go on from this to add another preliminary remark. 
 Philosophy demands, and in the end it rests on, what may 
 fairly be termed faith. It has, we may say, in a sense to 
 presuppose its conclusion in order to prove it. It tacitly 
 assumes something in general to be true in order to carry 
 this general truth out in detail. And its conclusion, further, 
 is not, and never could be, carried out in detail actually and 
 completely. Thus philosophy stops short of a goal which 
 it takes nevertheless to be somehow reached. And, if 
 philosophy has to admit that in the end it fails to see and 
 to understand exactly how this goal is attained, the end of 
 philosophy is realized outside philosophy and, in a sense, 
 only for faith. The meaning and justification of this remark 
 I will not discuss further here, and we may content ourselves 
 with a more evident aspect of the same truth. Philosophy, 
 we saw, was a search, a search for that which in the end is 
 true. And we observed that, so far as a man stands outside 
 of this pursuit, it cannot in the end justify its existence 
 
i6 INTRODUCTORY chap. 
 
 against him. He may decline, to some extent at least, to 
 enter into the pursuit, and the decision, at least to some 
 extent, lies with his own choice or caprice. How far in the 
 end it is possible actually so to remain outside, I shall not 
 offer to discuss, though on this point self-deception, it is 
 clear, is both easy and common. I will content myself with 
 stating the doctrine, which I have to urge, in a hypothetical 
 form. A man may enter on the pursuit of truth, or he may 
 abstain from this pursuit ; but, if he enters on it and so far 
 as he enters on it, he commits himself inevitably to a tacit 
 assumption. 
 
 The want of an object, and, still more, the search for 
 an object, imply in a certain sense the knowledge of that 
 object. If a man supposed that he never could tell when 
 possession is or is not gained, he surely never would pursue. 
 In and by the pursuit he commits himself to the opposite 
 assumption, and that assumption must rest on a possession 
 which to some extent and in some sense is there. Naturally 
 I do not mean that at the start the philosopher has proposi- 
 tions which he lays down in advance.^ I mean that his 
 action has no sense unless he does assume, or, if asked, 
 would assume, that, when he has got propositions, he is 
 able to judge of them, and can then tell whether they do 
 or do not put him in ideal possession of reality. Negation, 
 we may remind ourselves, must presuppose and always 
 must rest on a positive ground.^ 
 
 » Cf. here Chap. XI. 
 
 " It may be replied here that a rejection need not, in psychology, start 
 from and presuppose any positive basis which is mental. Without offering 
 here to discuss the whole matter, I should answer that, at the stage of 
 reflection which we suppose above to exist, the objection will not hold. 
 When at this stage I reject an untruth, I feel that I am asserting something 
 positively, though I could not say what that is. The suggested idea does 
 not simply disappear after having first perhaps become unpleasant. The 
 idea, on the contrary, is banished, and in its banishment I feel that I gain 
 positive assertion, if only for the moment. My natural expression for the 
 process is not merely ' That is gone ', or, again, ' I will not have that ' My 
 natural expression here is something like ' I know better '. 
 
I INTRODUCTORY 17 
 
 Hence the only scepticism in philosophy which is rational 
 must confine itself to the denial that truth so far and 
 actually has been reached.^ What is ordinarily called 
 philosophical scepticism is on the other hand an uncritical 
 and suicidal dogmatism. For it undertakes to know and to 
 judge as to possible knowledge, while really itself assuming 
 the knowledge which it seeks to deny and to disprove. 
 This procedure is far too easy and too plausible ever to go 
 out of fashion, though in principle it has now long ago been 
 exploded. But, in speaking of philosophical scepticism, we 
 must remember always that this is a different thing from 
 mere scepticism about philosophy. The latter scepticism, 
 however rational it may be, stands outside of philosophy 
 itself. It addresses itself, we may say, and it appeals to the 
 human person, while for the philosopher, so far as he has 
 engaged himself in his special pursuit, it has no relevant 
 word. 
 
 Passing to another point I would end this chapter by 
 remarking on at least one advantage possessed by philo- 
 sophy. We should all agree that, except within limits, 
 doubt is an evil ; and one remedy against doubt, we know, 
 consists in its extrusion. This is the way in which, in 
 our lives, doubt is banished or controlled, and, while it is 
 a necessary way, in principle it is not satisfactory. The 
 doubt in itself and in its root may remain unattacked, and 
 all that perhaps has happened is that the ground has been 
 invaded and overgrown by something else. Certainly this 
 counter-occupation may in the end destroy the doubt 
 through inanition. On the other hand, being temporary, 
 it itself may die down, and the doubt, undestroyed in its 
 root, may appear as before. But in philosophy, so far as 
 philosophy succeeds, the case is otherwise. The doubt 
 here is not smothered or expelled but itself is assimilated 
 
 1 Cf. on this point Chap. V. 
 1574 C 
 
i8 INTRODUCTORY chap, i 
 
 and used up.^ It becomes an element in the living process 
 of that which is above doubt, and hence its own development 
 is the end of itself in its original character. And even if 
 philosophy fails partially, as it may fail, yet still it furnishes, 
 I think, something of a remedy against doubt. A scepticism 
 that has tried to be thorough tends, we may say, to weaken 
 doubt by spreading it and making it more general. The 
 doubt, if really it is intellectual and not a mere disease of 
 the will, loses strength and loses terror by losing its contrast. 
 By widening and extension it may have become so attenuated 
 and so feeble as in a particular application to have no 
 working force. But the reader may feel that I have indulged 
 myself now too long in preliminary reflections. 
 
 ' Though the case is not wholly parallel, we may recall here the difference 
 between attempting to combat a morbid fixed idea from the outside, and 
 its removal through internal modification under hypnotic suggestion. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 FAITH 1 
 
 The object of these pages is to inquire as to the meaning 
 of faith. They will be concerned, not merely with religious 
 faith, but with faith in general. I will endeavour first to 
 fix loosely and within limits the sense of the term, and will 
 go on next to state and to explain a narrower view which 
 has much to recommend it. I shall have, however, to point 
 out, thirdly, that this view is not in accordance with all the 
 facts. Unless, that is, we take it as a definition more or less 
 arbitrary, it requires modification. From this I shall proceed 
 to adduce by way of illustration a number of instances, and 
 will finally ask how philosophy and faith are connected. 
 I may, however, add that for myself the inquiry as to the 
 meaning of our term possesses no great importance. As 
 long, that is, as some definite sense is attached to the word, 
 I do not for myself much care how it is defined, 
 
 I. It is obvious that faith is in some way opposed to 
 knowledge proper, but it is obvious also that faith implies 
 some kind of believing and knowing. If you descend, that 
 is, below a certain intellectual level, the word ' faith' becomes 
 inapplicable. It is therefore not knowledge but knowledge 
 of a certain kind which is excluded by faith, or which, 
 
 ' This chapter appeared first in the Philosophical Review of March igii. 
 It was written, so far as I remember, some four years previously. The 
 reader will notice that the scope of the inquiry is limited. Faith is treated 
 here merely from what may be called the formal side. The aim has been 
 simply to define faith so as to enable one to ask, in any particular case. 
 Is this faith or not ? What may be called the material aspect of faith — 
 the question as to what truths of various kinds can, and how far they 
 should, come by way of faith — has been throughout ignored. 
 
 C 3 
 
20 FAITH CHAP. 
 
 to speak more accurately, falls outside of that which 
 constitutes faith's essence. Mere feeling (I do not ask here 
 if this is to be called knowledge) is certainly not faith. I do 
 not deny that a man may have faith in that which he feels, 
 but in any case his faith must go beyond mere feeling. 
 And the same thing must be said once more of sensible 
 perception. You cannot have faith in what you see, so long 
 as you have nothing but seeing. And again everything that 
 can be called intellectual perception must, as such, be 
 external to faith. The mere apprehension of a principle 
 or of a logical sequence is certainly not that which, taken 
 by itself, we should call faith. And we may go on generally 
 in the same sense to exclude all knowledge so far as that is 
 grounded in ideas or is verified in facts. 
 
 On the one side, the object of faith must be ideal. To 
 believe in a person, for instance, is, however vaguely, to 
 believe something about him. In order to have faith I 
 must, that is, entertain an idea. On the other side, not 
 every such entertainment is faith. For faith is limited to 
 that ideal region where, apart from faith, doubt is possible. 
 Its positive essence lies in the overcoming or prevention of 
 doubt, actual or possible, as to an idea. And the doubt 
 further, as we have seen, must be excluded in a way which 
 cannot in the ordinary sense be called logical. The non- 
 logical overcoming from within of doubt as to an idea, or 
 the similar prevention of such doubt, appears, so far, to 
 be the general essence of faith. 
 
 II. I will now proceed to state a meaning in which faith 
 may be more narrowly understood. We have here a. -view 
 which, except as an arbitrary definition, will not cover all 
 the facts, but which nevertheless is instructive and in great 
 part tenable. There are two questions which are naturally 
 asked as to the nature of faith. How in particular is faith 
 able to prevent or to overcome doubt, and what is the result 
 
II FAITH 21 
 
 of faith's presence ? I have spoken of these two questions 
 as two, because in the end, as I think, they must be divided. 
 But for the view which I am about to state briefly, no such 
 division exists. 
 
 Faith according to this view will exist so far as an idea 
 is a principle of action, whether theoretical or practical.^ 
 The doubt is not first removed or prevented before we act, 
 but by and in the process of our acting. And our state in 
 thus acting remains faith so long as and so far as the idea 
 is not verified. Thus, to take theory first, an attempt to 
 reconstruct the world ideally might, and, we may even add, 
 must begin in faith, but the process ceases to depend 
 on faith so far as it visibly succeeds. And, if our theory 
 ever became intelligible throughout, faith would have 
 ceased wholly to exist in it, since no further doubt as to that 
 theory's beginning or end would be possible. On the other 
 hand, apart from such complete verification, faith must 
 always remain, since your doubt, actual or possible, is 
 removed only because, and so far as, you resolve to act in 
 a certain manner. What overcomes your doubt, therefore, 
 is in the end action and not vision. And on the practical 
 side the same account holds good. For practical success 
 tends to banish doubt as to those ideas on which we act, 
 and therefore, so far as it goes, tends to remove the condi- 
 tion of faith. But because neither in theory nor in practice 
 is a complete success attainable throughout and in detail, 
 we are left, so far as this aspect goes, still dependent 
 on faith. 
 
 Even on such a view, the reader will have noticed, faith 
 is not essentially practical, if that word is taken (as above) in 
 
 ' The reader is not to identify this view with what is called Pragmatism. 
 Pragmatism, as I understand it, is merely a one-sided perversion of the 
 more complete view. Its essence consists in the attempt to subordinate 
 every aspect of mind to what it calls practice, the meaning of practice not 
 having been first ascertained. But, in reprinting the above, I should like 
 to qualify the statement as to the ' essence ' by the proviso ' if it has any 
 essence '. For the distinction between theory and practice see Chap. IV. 
 
22 
 
 FAITH CHAP. 
 
 its more ordinary sense. On the other hand, all faith both 
 in its origin and its result will (upon this view) be active. 
 Doubt, that is, will be overcome always by that which 
 I may be said to do,— to do, if not in practice, at least 
 theoretically. My contemplation even may be called 
 active, and must everywhere, so far as doubt is removed 
 by action, imply faith. So that, if we like to use ' practical ' 
 in the widest sense as equivalent to ' active ', faith (on this 
 view) will be essentially practical. But the view, however 
 much truth it contains, cannot in my opinion be defended. 
 It does not throughout answer to the facts. Even in the 
 widest sense of practice I cannot find that faith is always 
 practical in its origin or even always in its issue. 
 
 («) The origin of faith, it seems to me clear, may be what 
 we call emotional ; and, even perhaps apart from emotion, 
 faith can arise through what may be termed a non-active 
 suggestion. The reason why I have come to believe in an 
 idea must in some cases be said to be aesthetic, and in others 
 sympathetic and social ; or again it may be found in the 
 magnetic force of a commanding personality. To maintain 
 that in every one of such cases I believe because of some- 
 thing that I do, and that faith arises through action, would 
 surely be contrary to fact. And the objection that in such 
 cases there is no possibility of doubt, and that there is there- 
 fore no faith, seems once more untenable. To me it seems 
 clear that I may believe in ideas the opposite of which I am 
 able to conceive, and that my possible doubt is overcome 
 by an influence which is not properly intellectual, and yet 
 which certainly does not consist in action. And I do not 
 see how to deny that such a process is faith. If and so far 
 as I go on to act, the action, I agree, will and must affect 
 the source from which it arises. But we have here a sub- 
 sequent reaction, and to conclude from this to the nature 
 of the first origin seems illogical. 
 
 {b) Hence, even in the widest sense of the term, the origin 
 
II FAITH 23 
 
 of faith is certainly not in all cases practical. And it may be 
 doubted whether even the result can in all cases be called 
 action. For example (to take first action which is practical 
 in the narrower sense) I may believe that to-night it will 
 rain because some one in whose opinion I trust tells me so. 
 And this belief may, so far as I see, in no way influence what 
 I call my conduct. And to urge that under other conditions 
 that influence would be there, and that therefore it is there, 
 to myself seems not permissible. Hence the issue of faith 
 need not always be called practical, if that term is to keep 
 its ordinary meaning. 
 
 And even if we extend that meaning so as to embrace every 
 kind of mental action, a difficulty may still remain. If I 
 believe upon faith that to-night it will rain, my conduct, 
 we saw, may remain uninfluenced. A difference of some 
 kind will, however, have been made in what in the widest 
 sense I may call my mental furniture. And, since I always 
 in some way am acting theoretically, the difference made 
 by any belief, however seemingly irrelevant, in my mental 
 furniture, niust affect every subsequent theoretical action, 
 and therefore may be said to consist in activity. So far as 
 I really and actually believe that to-night it will rain, so 
 far any judgement of mine with regard to anything in the 
 universe will be affected, and the result of my faith will 
 thus be action. To this extreme contention I may naturally 
 object that, whether I beUeve that it will or will not rain, 
 may make apparently no visible difference. Still I may be 
 asked, in reply, why and how the idea of rain is kept before 
 me at all unless it is connected with some subsequent mental 
 action ? We should thus be brought to the question, whether, 
 and if so in what sense, I have faith so long as I do not 
 exercise it, and so long as there is no actual idea before 
 my mind. 
 
 I do not wish to discuss this here, but must insist on the 
 conclusion that the first origin of my belief must in some 
 
24 FAITH CHAP 
 
 cases be passive. Again, as to the result, it is questionable 
 how far in some cases we can speak of any actual result at 
 all. We may infer a result on general grounds, but there 
 may be nothing that we can verify in detail. And, further, 
 an action resulting from faith need not be practical. We 
 must therefore conclude that certainly faith does not in all 
 cases arise from action, and that, whether it issues necessarily, 
 in act, even a theoretical act, seems highly doubtful. 
 
 If we pass from faith in general to religious faith, this 
 conclusion must be altered. Religious faith consists, I 
 should say, in the identification of my will with a certain 
 object. It essentially is practical and must necessarily be 
 exercised in conduct. I do not contend that in its origin 
 all religious faith must be practical. On the contrary, it 
 may be generated, I believe, in a variety of manners. But, 
 except so far as the accepted idea is carried out practically, 
 the belief (we should perhaps most of us agree) is not properly 
 religious. And of course the practical exercise of a belief 
 must react on its origin. But, unless we wish to lay down 
 a definition which is more or less arbitrary, I do not see 
 that we are justified in arguing from the nature of religious 
 faith to that of faith in general. For reasons that have been 
 given I could not agree that everywhere faith involves the 
 identification of my will with an idea. 
 
 III. It may perhaps help the reader to judge as to the 
 truth of the doctrine we have laid down, if I go on to offer 
 some applications in detail. And a certain amount of repeti- 
 tion may perhaps be excused. It is not, for instance, faith 
 where I draw deductions from a principle accepted on faith. 
 So far as the sequence is visible, faith so far is absent. 
 Further, an unverifiable assumption as to detail — an-assump- 
 tion made because a principle demands it— seems hardly 
 to be faith, unless so far as the princijile itself is taken on 
 faith. Wherever a principle is seen and grasped apart from 
 
II FAITH 25 
 
 faith, my confident acting on this principle should not be 
 called faith. And from the other side, where through 
 weakness of will I fail to act on my knowledge, we must not 
 everywhere identify this defect with want of faith. In the 
 first place, the knowledge itself may or may not rest on 
 faith, and again, the knowledge itself may still be faith even 
 if it apparently is followed by no action. It is only, we saw, 
 in the case of religious faith that this must be denied. The 
 apparent fact of my failure to act upon knowledge will 
 always, I presume, create difificulty, since the detail in each 
 instance may vary and is hard to observe correctly. In 
 some cases my failure may have its origin in doubt, in 
 doubt, that is, not with regard to the principle but as to 
 the detail of its application here and now. And, so far as 
 the right ideas would be secured and the contrary ideas 
 banished by knowledge or faith, my want of action may be 
 attributed to a defect in faith or knowledge. But there are 
 other cases where such an account of the matter seems not 
 to answer to the facts. ^ To pass to another point, when we 
 hear that ' the infant, who has found the way to the mother's 
 breast for food, and to her side for warmth, has made 
 progress in the power of faith ',^ we are at once struck by 
 the inappropriateness of the phrase. The action in such 
 a case need not arise from any kind of belief and idea. And 
 in the second place, where there is an idea from which 
 the action proceeds, the conditions may exclude the possi- 
 bility of faith. Where an idea, suggested by perception or 
 otherwise, cannot be doubted, faith is obviously inapplicable. 
 Faith, in the proper sense, cannot begin until the child is 
 capable of entertaining a contrary idea. 
 
 At the risk of wearying the reader I will add some further 
 illustration. When serving on a jury a man may come to 
 
 ' I have discussed this difficult question in an article in Mind, N.S., 
 No. 43. 
 " Bain, Emotions, Ed. IH, p. 506. 
 
26 FAITH CHAP. 
 
 a decision in various ways. If he accepts and rejects testi- 
 mony, and in the end judges according to probabiUty and 
 by what he knows of the world, the process so far is not 
 faith. If he is influenced by another man simply because 
 he infers that the other man knows better, faith once more 
 is absent. If he is influenced by the other man otherwise, 
 let us say morally and emotionally, and in consequence 
 follows the other man with belief, this is certainly faith. 
 But we cannot call the same thing faith where, and so far 
 as, the belief is absent. The influence of another person on 
 my conduct tends, we may say, normally to influence my 
 belief, but this consequence may be absent, and, if so, 
 we cannot speak of faith proper. Finally, if our juryman 
 cannot decide rationally, and if he says, ' Since I must 
 decide in some way, I will take the plaintiff as being in the 
 right,' that again certainly is not faith. The man's doubt 
 here is not overcome, nor is there any principle, rational 
 or otherwise, which he accepts as the ground of his particular 
 decision. 
 
 IV. I will end by asking whether and, if so, in what sense 
 faith is implied in philosophy. The question how far in 
 philosophy we can be said to go to work with our whole 
 nature, and not merely with our intellect, need not here be 
 discussed.^ But, to pass this by, philosophy, I should say, 
 in a sense must depend upon faith. For we do not rest 
 simply on a datum, on a given fact or a given axiom. On the 
 contrary, we may be said to depend on a principle of action. 
 We seek, that is, a certain kind of satisfaction, and we proceed 
 accordingly. In and for philosophy (I do not ask if this holds 
 also in the separate sciences) truth in the end is true because 
 I have a certain want and because I act in a certain manner. 
 The criterion may be said in the last resort to involve my 
 act and choice. And thus in the end truth is not true 
 
 • See Chap. VIII. 
 
II FAITH 27 
 
 because it is simply seen or follows logically from what is 
 seen. Further, philosophy in my judgement cannot verify 
 its principle in detail and throughout. If it could do this, 
 faith would be removed, and, so far as it does this, faith 
 ceases. But, so far as philosophy is condemned to act on an 
 unverified principle, it continues still to rest upon faith. 
 
 You may indeed object that here there can be no faith 
 since here doubts are impossible, but this objection, I think, 
 will hardly stand. The doubts may be said to be impossible 
 only because of our principle of action. And, if it were not 
 for our faith, we have perhaps a right to say that the other 
 ideas, now meaningless, might at least in some irrational 
 sense be entertained. But how we are to decide on this 
 point, and whether we are to assert or to deny that philo- 
 sophy in the end rests on faith, is to my mind of no great 
 consequence. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 ON FLOATING IDEAS AND THE IMAGINARY i 
 
 In this chapter 2 I shall attempt to deal briefly with 
 several subjects or perhaps aspects of one subject. My aim 
 throughout is to advocate the same main conclusion, but 
 no satisfactory treatment of the questions opened is possible 
 within these limits. The first discussion will be about the 
 existence of floating ideas, the next will examine the difference 
 in content between the ' real ' and the ' imaginary ', and the 
 third will inquire as to the relation between imagination and 
 play, together with the distinction between play and earnest. 
 The conclusion to be urged or suggested in each case is that 
 a hard division between the real and the imaginary is not 
 tenable. The true nature and criterion of reality must hence 
 be sought and found elsewhere. 
 
 I. I will take first the question as to floating ideas. This 
 should be preceded by a discussion of the nature of ideas in 
 general, but such an inquiry is obviously not possible here. 
 I must content myself here with referring to the conclusion 
 which I have advocated elsewhere.^ Every idea * essentially 
 qualifies reality, but no idea on the other hand does this 
 simply and bodily. Every idea has its own existence as 
 a fact, and with this side of its being it, as an idea and so 
 far, does not qualify reality. Its essence, we may say, lies 
 in ignoring or in discounting this side of itself. And thus 
 
 ' This chapter was first published in Mind for April 1 908. 
 
 " The first two divisions of this chapter may be taken as a commentary on 
 various parts of my book A ppearance and Reality. See especially pp. 366 ff . 
 
 " In Appearance (see the Index) and in various articles in Mind {O.S., 
 No. 49, p. 23 ; N.S., No. 40, pp. 5, 6 ; No. 41, p. 17, and No. 44, pp. 27, 28). 
 Cf. Chapters IX and X of this volume. 
 
 • This holds even of the idea of ' nothing '. See below, p. 41. 
 
Ill FLOATING IDEAS AND THE IMAGINARY 29 
 
 everywhere truth and ideas have a double aspect. But every 
 idea, used as an idea, must so far attach itself as an adjective 
 to the real, and hence in the end there will be no such thing 
 as an idea which merely floats. 
 
 This conclusion is very commonly rejected as false. Its 
 falsehood is at times even silently assumed against those who 
 maintain its truth. And certainly at first sight any such 
 doctrine seems open to grave objection. 'An idea', it may 
 be said, ' always, if you please, refers in some sense to the 
 real world, and always, if you please, neglects or discounts 
 its own private existence, if, that is, it possesses any. But 
 on the other hand there are ideas which plainly do not 
 qualify the real. When an idea is taken as false it may even 
 be repelled and denied. And, apart from this, ideas may be 
 recognized as merely imaginary, and, taken in this character, 
 they float suspended above the real world. The same thing 
 happens wherever we deal with questions, with ideal experi- 
 ments, and again with those suggestions which we merely 
 entertain without pronouncing on their truth. And how, 
 when you do not know that an idea is true, or when you 
 even know that it is not true, can you say in such a case 
 that the idea qualifies reality ? In such cases the idea, it 
 is plain, can do no more than float.' There is force in 
 this objection, and with myself, I admit, the objection at one 
 time more or less prevailed.^ I will now, however, attempt 
 to show briefly that it rests upon misconception. 
 
 ^ Principles of Logic, p. 4. There are, besides, various more or less 
 objectionable expressions used in the account of ideas which is given there. 
 So far as I know, these expressions have not been used by me since, though 
 I hardly understand how a careful reader of the volume could be deceived 
 by them. The term ' sign ' or ' symbol ', for instance, implies strictly, 
 I suppose, the recognized individual existence of the sign. And obviously 
 with an idea this aspect may be absent. There are other expressions also 
 which, if you take them literally, are certainly false, and also inconsistent 
 with what may be called the general doctrine of the book. But I hope 
 that the statements as to ideas, which I have made several times since 1 883, 
 are less misleading. I should have added that, from the first and through- 
 out, Prof. Bosanquet has consistently advocated the true doctrine. The 
 debt which philosophy owes to him here has not been adequately recognized. 
 
30 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 The misconception is in short a false assumption as to the 
 limits of the real world. Reality is identified with the world 
 of actual fact, and outside of this world floats the unsub- 
 stantial realm of the imaginary. And actual fact, when we 
 inquire, is in the end the world which is continuous with my 
 body. It is the construction which in my waking hours ^ 
 I build round this centre. My body, taken in one with my 
 present feehngs and with the context which in space and 
 time I can connect with this basis, is regarded by me as 
 actual fact while all else is unreal. Thus my dreams are 
 facts so far as they take their place as events in the real 
 series, while the contents of my dreams are not real since 
 they cannot so be ordered. The real world on this view is 
 a group and series of actual events, and the test in the end 
 is continuous connexion with my felt waking body. This is 
 the doctrine which consciously or unconsciously underlies 
 our common view as to the actual world. And it is this 
 doctrine, I think, which usually is asserted or impUed when 
 the existence of mere floating ideas seems plausible. 
 
 I do not purpose here to discuss formally the truth and 
 consistency of this view of reality's limits.^ The doctrine is 
 in trouble at once with regard to the actual existence of past 
 and future. It fails wholly to explain the position given to 
 the sphere of general and of abstract ideas. And to say 
 that, when confronted with the facts of the spiritual world, 
 with art and science, morality and religion, it proves inade- 
 quate, is to use a weak expression. The truth is that no one 
 except for certain purposes really believes in such a view, and 
 that no one for other purposes can fail, however unawares, 
 to reject it. And, without pausing to consider any possible 
 attempts at defence, I will proceed to offer another view 
 which seems at least more in accordance with fact. 
 
 ' In the end in my present waking moment. The point is further 
 discussed later in this chapter. Cf. Chap. XVI. 
 
 " The foundation of this view is exposed in the second part of the 
 present chapter. Cf. Chap. XVI. 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 31 
 
 Every man's world, the whole world, I mean, in which his 
 self also is included, is one, and it comes to his mind as one 
 universe. It necessarily does so even when he maintains that 
 it truly is but plural. But this unity is perhaps for most 
 men no more than an underlying felt whole. There is, we 
 may say, an implicit sense rather than an explicit object, but 
 none the less the unity is experienced as real. On the other 
 hand above this felt totality there is for the average man an 
 indefinite number of worlds, worlds all more or less real but 
 all, so far as appears, more or less independent. There are 
 the facts perceived by the outer senses, and there is the inner 
 realm of ideas and intimate feelings and passing moods. 
 And these regions more or less may correspond, but they do 
 not correspond wholly. Then there is my present actual 
 world, and the ambiguous existence of what has been and is 
 about to be. There are the worlds of duty and of religious 
 truth, which on the one side penetrate and on the other side 
 transcend the common visible facts. And there are the 
 regions of hope, desire and dream, madness and drunken- 
 ness and error, all ' unreal ', if you please, but all counting 
 as elements in the total of reality. The various worlds of 
 politics, commerce, invention, trade and manufacture, all 
 again have their places. Above the sensible sphere rises the 
 intellectual province of truth and science, and, more or less 
 apart from this, the whole realm of the higher imagination. 
 Both in poetry and in general fiction, and throughout the 
 entire region of the arts and of artistic perception, we 
 encounter reality. Things are here in various ways for us 
 incontestable, valid and ' true ', while in another sense of the 
 word ■ truth ' these things could not be called true. But this 
 multiplicity of our worlds may perhaps be taken as a fact 
 which is now recognized.^ The diversity and even the 
 division of our various worlds is indefinite and in a sense is 
 endless. And, without entering further into detail, I will 
 
 ' Cf . Prof. James's Psychology, chap. xxi. 
 
32 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 state at once how this diversity bears on our problem. 
 Because there are many worlds, the idea which floats sus- 
 pended above one of them is attached to another. There 
 are in short floating ideas, but not ideas which float abso- 
 lutely. Every idea on the contrary is an adjective which 
 qualifies a real world, and it is loose only when you take it in 
 relation to another sphere of reality. 
 
 On the one side the whole Universe or the Absolute Reality 
 is the subject to which in the end every idea is attached. On 
 the other side (and this is the side on which we have to 
 dwell here) the reality qualified by an idea depends always on 
 a distinction. The subject in a judgement is never Reality in 
 the fullest sense. It is reality taken, or meant to be taken, 
 under certain conditions and limits. It is reality in short 
 understood in a special sense.^ And hence when an idea 
 floats above, and is even repelled by, one region of the world, 
 there is available always another region in which it inheres 
 and to which as an adjective it is attached. And every- 
 where, where we seem to find ideas which float absolutely, we 
 can discover the ground to which really they are fixed. 
 
 I will go on to point this out in a variety of instances, but, 
 before proceeding, I must lay stress on an important distinc- 
 tion. If ' judgement ' is used in its ordinary sense of explicit 
 judgement, where we have a distinct predicate and subject 
 taken one as applied to the other, then it certainly is true 
 that apart from judgement we have ideas. And if the issue 
 is raised thus, and if not to be so predicated means to float, 
 then inevitably we shall be forced to believe in floating ideas. 
 For in doubt and in denial, to take obvious instances, we 
 should find the evidence that they exist. But the issue, if so 
 raised, I must go on to urge, is raised wrongly. We have not 
 to choose everywhere between an idea which is predicated 
 
 1 It is not possible for me to attempt here to explain and justify the 
 above. I may perhaps in passing point out that, if the subject were tie 
 entire reality, no place would be left for the existence of the idea. Cf. p. 41, 
 note. 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 33 
 
 and an idea which simply floats. On the contrary, an 
 ideal content can qualify and be attached to a subject apart 
 from any predication in the proper sense or any explicit 
 judgement. And by virtue of such an attachment the ideas 
 which relatively float are everjrwhere from another point held 
 captive. The idea comes before my mind as in suspension 
 and as loose from a certain subject, and so far it floats. But 
 none the less as an adjective it qualifies another subject. It 
 is not predicated of this other subject, but it comes as at- 
 tached to it or as inhering there. This other subject may be 
 more or less specialized or more or less vague and general, 
 and the union again between this subject and the idea may 
 be more or less implicit. It may amount to little more than 
 the immediate inherence of one aspect in a felt whole. But 
 in every case of a floating idea this other subject and its 
 attachment can be found. The idea in short, held free from 
 one subject, coalesces more or less immediately with another 
 subject from which in varying degrees it is distinct. 
 
 Thus in negation the idea denied is not in the proper sense 
 predicated of another subject. But this idea in every case 
 qualifies an alternative more or less distinct, and hence no- 
 where floats absolutely. The idea repelled is, in other words, 
 felt to fall somewhere else. It may qualify another alter- 
 native more or less specified before the mind, or it may 
 coalesce with that vague whole which comes to us as the 
 residue of the Universe. But to existence unsupported 
 within a void it never attains. 
 
 This quaUfication apart from explicit judgement can by 
 reflexion everywhere be turned into formal predication. 
 Whether before that we should speak of judgement I need 
 not discuss. The point is that apart from predication ideas 
 can qualify a subject. Hence you cannot conclude that, 
 where predication fails, ideas, if present, must float, since 
 the possibility of informal union between ideas and reality 
 destroys this conclusion. The reader may now have realized 
 
 1B74 D 
 
34 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 the bearing and the importance of the above distinction, and 
 I will go on to explain and justify it in detail by considering 
 various instances of floating ideas. We find obvious ex- 
 amples in negation and supposition, in the use of imperatives 
 and questions, and in the world of imagination and of mere 
 idea. I will deal first with the case of imaginary ideas. 
 
 The imaginary in general is defined by exclusion from the 
 real. It is something which positively possesses the character 
 of this or that real world and hence suggests its inclusion 
 there, but on the other hand is shut out from the limits of 
 the world in question. And the world which excludes is 
 primarily the world of actual fact. This world, we saw 
 above, is made by construction from my real body. It is 
 the region, in short, which is taken as continuous with that 
 basis. ^ Whatever, having more or less the character of this 
 series, nevertheless falls outside it, is imaginary, or, taken 
 more generally, the imaginary is whatever is excluded by 
 actual fact. And in a secondary sense the imaginary is what 
 in the same way falls outside of any kind of world which is 
 taken as actual. Now if an idea is admitted to be imaginary 
 (which we have seen means unreal), how, it will be objected, 
 can such an idea be the adjective of reality ? And this pro- 
 blem is solved, we have seen, by the plurality of real worlds. 
 The idea is repelled from one sphere but qualifies another, 
 and in this other sphere is real. Reality, we feel, is a whole 
 which extends beyond any special world. It is something 
 which comes to us as wider than the distinctions we make 
 in it. Hence, wherever an idea is repelled by a subject, 
 there remains another field which in some sense is real. In 
 this field the idea falls positively, inheres in it and qualifies 
 it, and, when we reflect, we can express this inherence in a 
 judgement. The idea, before we so reflect, is not a predicate, 
 but the idea on the other hand is still not free. It is in the 
 
 ' In the second part of this chapter I will further discuss the nature of 
 the basis mentioned above. 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 33 
 
 air, if you will, but you must add that it qualifies this air 
 which is its support and reality. 
 
 Consider for example the world inhabited by the characters 
 in some novel. Things not only here are so or otherwise in 
 actual literary fact, but beyond this fact we recognize a world 
 of reality. And this world does not consist in or depend on 
 the mere event that Balzac or Thackeray chose to write down 
 this or that detail.^ It is the same elsewhere and in every 
 world of the arts. The imaginary, we all say, has its laws, 
 and, if so, we must go on to add, it has its own truth and own 
 life, and its ideas, floating in reference to common fact, are 
 hence attached to this its own world of reality. Thus again 
 in abstract science, where we should refuse to say that truth 
 is imaginary, we could hardly assert the existence of any and 
 every truth as an actual fact. On the other hand, whatever 
 we might protest, we feel and know that truth somewhere 
 must be real. Nay, even in the practical relation of desire 
 and will, ideas are felt somehow to be real. Indeed, their 
 reality in collision with their non-existence makes the con- 
 flict in which we suffer. We suffer there most where most 
 we feel that the idea has reality superior to the existence 
 which excludes it. Our will is moved by, and it unawares 
 insists on, the reality in another world of that idea which it 
 brings here into fact. The star that I desire does not wander 
 outcast and naked in the void. My heart is drawn to it 
 because it inhabits that heaven which is felt at once to be 
 its own and mine. 
 
 In the end and taken absolutely (to repeat this) there can 
 be no mere idea. Reality is always before us, and every idea 
 in some sense qualifies the real. So far as excluded it is 
 excluded only from some limited region, and beyond that 
 region has its world. To float in the absolute sense is 
 impossible. Flotation means attachment to another soil, a 
 
 ' See on this point Prof. Bosanquet's Knowledge and Reality, pp. 144 ff., 
 followed by Prof. James in his Psychology, ii. 292. 
 
 D 2 
 
36 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 realm other than that sphere which for any purpose we take 
 here as solid ground and as fact. Now the region which we 
 oppose to fact may be a distinct world, or may be a residue 
 more or less unspecified. It may be this or that province of 
 the ideal, or it may be no more than the undefined space 
 which falls beyond what we distinguish as fact. But the 
 province, or the mere residual space or vague background, 
 is still reality felt as positive, and to this reality the idea is 
 bound.^ 
 
 We may deal rapidly with the position of the idea in 
 imperatives and questions. The nature of an imperative 
 has been discussed by me elsewhere (in Mind, N.S., No. 49, 
 pp. 4 and 5), and we have no need to enter on that general 
 topic. But with regard to reality it is with the idea here 
 as in the practical relation generally. The idea, ordered to 
 exist in our world, qualifies already the world of ideas and 
 has reality there. The same thing holds again in interroga- 
 tives. In a question we have some known aspect of reality 
 before us, which we regard, at least here, as actual fact. We 
 have next the suggestion of an idea, more or less specified 
 or again undefined, which we assume to be somehow con- 
 nected with our known fact. We have finally a demand for 
 further knowledge in this direction. The demand is addressed 
 to another mind, or even secondarily to our own, or again to 
 material nature. The further knowledge (of which we have 
 the idea) is absent from our known fact. But on the other 
 hand this knowledge, the answer to our question, is not 
 fetched from nowhere. We take it to be truth which already 
 is there and which in some sense exists.^ It already, that 
 is, qualifies another realm of reality, and to this realm it is 
 attached. 
 
 ^ The idea again may be excluded from the subject taken simply and 
 in itself, or again from the subject taken merely as so far known. The 
 negation in the latter sense may, if we please, be called privative. 
 
 ' The reader possibly may object that, in the case of the future which 
 I am to make, the above account will not hold. I reply that it holds 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 37 
 
 We may pass from this to consider the case of supposition 
 and hypothetical judgement. In supposition we use an idea 
 which in one connexion is true and is real. This ideal truth 
 we bring into relation with a ' fact ' taken in another 
 sphere, in order to discover what result comes in a certain 
 direction. This result is truth which is considered now, as 
 before, to qualify and to be rooted in the ideal world. Sup- 
 position in short presupposes that the actual or real fact is 
 not the whole of reality. It implies that there are other 
 spheres, or other provinces of the same sphere, all connected 
 in a wider Universe. Hence ideas once more never float 
 except relatively. Their suspension involves a positive 
 attachment to a point of support taken elsewhere. 
 
 I may perhaps be allowed to dwell somewhat longer on the 
 problem raised by hypothetical judgement. It is obviously 
 impossible for me here to discuss this fully in regard either 
 to its psychological origin or logical value, and I must content 
 myself with calling attention to a point which is essential. 
 In a hypothetical judgement we have an assertion, and it is 
 really idle to dispute this. If you suppose something then 
 something follows, and, unless you know that this is so, you 
 cannot say it. There is an assertion, but this assertion 
 (properly) is not of actual fact. On the other side you have 
 before you a datum which in some sense you take to be fact 
 and actually real. And there is some connexion, you assume, 
 between this fact and your ideal truth. But in spite of this 
 connexion the fact is not the subject of your judgement, or 
 rather it never is so except improperly and through mere 
 implication. 
 
 In order to understand the hypothetical judgement we 
 must keep in mind the following essential aspects, (i) The 
 
 here unquestionably as it holds elsewhere, and that otherwise the attempt 
 at prevision would be meaningless. The difficulty is caused by the nature 
 of a real fact which is future, a construction which is full of radical incon-' 
 sistency. But in any case, if the idea of the future cannot qualify the world 
 of fact and truth, it still does not float but is attached to the imaginary 
 world. 
 
38 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 subject of this judgement is never the actual fact. (2) On 
 the other hand the actual fact to some extent enters into the 
 judgement. And (3) in many cases the judgement contains 
 an unavowed implication. It more or less covertly implies, 
 that is, a certain connexion between its subject and the 
 actual fact. 
 
 (i) In every hypothetical judgement there is actual fact 
 to which the subject is opposed. This actual fact may be 
 a perceived existence, or again it may belong to some ideal or 
 imaginary world. But in every case the use of 'if marks 
 a distinction between what we think and what is otherwise 
 real. If a square could be round then something follows, 
 which does not follow from an actual square. And ' if you 
 attacked that man he would defend himself ' does not make 
 its assertion about that man. The man is not attacked, the 
 square is not round, and you do not even suggest that 
 either is so. And in ' if he goes there he will succeed ' you 
 do not say that he will go there. From him, as you know 
 him, that predicate is absent, and your ' if ' means that you 
 are not speaking of the known actual man. In every case 
 you are speaking of that which you suppose, and whatever 
 you suppose you ipso facto oppose to what you take to be 
 real. Otherwise there would be no sense in supposing and no 
 meaning in ' if '. 
 
 (2) On the other side your assertion clearly in some sense 
 refers to the actual fact. For otherwise, and if there were 
 no connexion, who could think of supposing ? If your asser- 
 tion had positively or negatively nothing to do with your 
 actual reality, it would be meaningless or at least must 
 lose its hypothetical form. Thus on the one side you are 
 dealing in some sense with actual fact. The subject of your 
 judgement on the other hand is not an actual fact. But the 
 actual fact is referred to and to some extent it enters into 
 the subject of the judgement. We have first the actual man 
 who is not attacked and who is not the subject, and we have 
 
in AND THE IMAGINARY 
 
 39 
 
 next the supposed, the ideal, man of whom the judgement is 
 true. If these two men are the same, our ' if ' at least im- 
 plies that we do not know this, while on the other side our 
 ' if ' implies that these men are connected. There is in short 
 enough known identity between the two men to warrant a 
 supposition. We thus assert about the ideal man but also 
 refer to the other man. Our reference assumes that certainly 
 between the two there is a partial identity, while our 
 supposition means that, for anything we really know, there 
 is a difference which on the whole is superior and prevails, i 
 (3) So much as the above belongs to the essence of hypo- 
 thetical judgement. Many cases, however, present an 
 additional aspect, which has given rise to difficulty and to 
 error. We have often a further implication as to the 
 amount of identity between the ideal subject and the fact, 
 and, owing to this implication, the judgement, while hypo- 
 thetical in form, may assert or deny of the actual. In 
 si vales bene est there is an implied identity, between the 
 supposed and the actual, sufficient to justify the use of est. 
 On the other hand in si tacuisses philosophus esses we assume 
 a known difference, between the two cases of yourself, suffi- 
 cient to warrant a denial of the conclusion in fact. This 
 implied identity or difference can exist in a variety of degrees, 
 and the actual meaning conveyed by the judgement may 
 depend upon this implication. But this implication, we 
 must not forget, falls outside the hypothetical form. It 
 is often absent from it, and when present it may even be 
 said to contradict it, since it involves knowledge on a point 
 where the use of ' if ' assumes ignorance. Hence this acci- 
 dental meaning conveyed by some hypothetical judgements 
 
 ' A hypothetical judgement (to state this otherwise) is itself always 
 universal, hut it implies that there is a question of bringing a designated 
 case under this universal judgement. It implies that this question is worth 
 considering, and (taken strictly) it implies that the answer is unknown. 
 
 I should remind the reader that in the above discussion I assume through- 
 out the correctness of the account of existential judgements which I have 
 given elsewhere. See my Principles of Logic. 
 
40 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 is foreign to the essence of the hypothetical form. And 
 a want of clearness on this point must everywhere, I think, 
 preclude an understanding of that essence. 
 
 With these brief but, I fear, too lengthy remarks, I must 
 pass from the hypothetical judgement. Assuming every- 
 where, as that does, various realms of reality and truth, 
 the consideration of it has tended to confirm our main 
 conclusion. The ideas which float have in every case another 
 world in which they are based and secured. 
 
 When we pass to the alleged existence of floating ideas in 
 the case of negation, we find a subject too intricate and too 
 difficult for discussion here. I must content myself with 
 a summary statement of the conclusion which I adopt.^ 
 By negation I understand a denial of the intelligible and not 
 a mere refusal to entertain the unmeaning. And the main 
 point here is this, that all negation is relative. Negation, 
 whatever else it is, is repulsion, repulsion not absolute but 
 from a subject formed by distinction within reality. ReaUty 
 therefore is always wider than the subject which negates, 
 and beyond this subject we have always a region taken in 
 some sense to be real. And the idea, which is repelled from 
 the subject, falls within this other world and qualifies it. 
 
 I do not mean that in all negation the alternative is dis- 
 tinct. The alternative on the contrary may be unspecified 
 in various degrees. Our other world may amount to no 
 more than that vague residue which remains after the subject 
 has been selected. But, however undefined this other may 
 be, it is the region into which the banished idea is sent. 
 The idea never floats, like Mahomet's coffin, between both 
 worlds, or somehow hangs nowhere. And the idea once 
 more belongs to and qualifies that world which it inhabits. 
 I do not mean that the idea, when repelled from one subject, 
 must be predicated of another subject. Predication, we 
 
 > On the subject of negation I would refer the reader to Prof. Bosanquefs 
 ftdmirabJe Logic. 
 
in AND THE IMAGINARY 41 
 
 have seen above, is not asserted wherever floating ideas are 
 denied (p. 33). The union of the repelled idea with the 
 other world may be no more than a coalescence in feeling, 
 and in various degrees may be immediate. But this union, 
 we have seen, is a qualification and amounts to a bond. 
 And with this summary result I must pass from the claim of 
 floating ideas to exist in negation.^ 
 
 ' I will deal briefly and in passing with several difficulties, (i) Where 
 the subject, from which the idea is repelled, is the Universe at large, it 
 may be objected that we have no longer here a distinction taken within 
 reality. The answer is that here the Universe as a whole is distinguished 
 from its own partial contents. What we deny is that the idea, which 
 qualifies a finite sphere within the Whole, is in the same sense true of the 
 Whole. (Cf. Chap. XI.) But obviously I cannot here discuss the difficulties 
 which in the end beset the general doctrine of truth and the ultimate dis- 
 tinction of subject and predicate, (ii) It may be asked how the idea of 
 ' nothing ' can qualify reality. I answer, as before, in general that exclusion 
 from the Universe admits presence in a field of distinction falling within 
 the Universe. And I answer further that ' nothing ', being always relative, 
 can always qualify such a field. If there were a genuine idea of sheer 
 nothing, the case would be altered. But without entering into further 
 difficulties and into refinements for which there is no space, I may state 
 broadly that this is impossible. We cannot have a consistent idea of 
 nothingness if that is made absolute, (iii) But I may be asked further 
 how an idea, if self-contradictory, can qualify the real, and whether there- 
 fore, in asserting that all ideas qualify reality, I am not in conflict with 
 the Law of Contradiction. The question is interesting, and to myself it is 
 even more interesting when followed by another. How, when self-contra- 
 dictory ideas in some sense exist (as is allowed to be the case), is it possible 
 that such ideas should not in some sense qualify the real ? Such questions 
 cannot, however, be properly discussed apart from an inquiry into the 
 ultimate meaning of contradiction. I have undertaken this inquiry else- 
 where (Appearance, pp. 562-72, and Mind, No. 20, p. 482), and must here 
 be allowed to take the result reached by it as true. And resting on this 
 basis I reply as follows to the objection just raised (cf . Chapters IX and X). 
 The self-contradictory, as it anywhere qualifies the real, is taken so far not 
 to contradict itself. Incompatibles, such as round and square, if you con- 
 nect them in another world are not taken as simply united in one subject. 
 And, apart from such a union, they are no longer incompatible. You 
 may suppose a distinction more or less specified in the imaginary subject 
 to which they belong. Or again, without any such positive supposition, 
 you have at least by your repulsion from the ' real ' world removed the 
 point of identity through which they collide there. The incompatibles 
 hence fall into and coalesce with the residual mass of unspecified con- 
 junction. As qualifying this somehow they are compatible, and you can, 
 if you please, go on to predicate both as true. On the other hand, if even 
 
42 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 I have now in various instances attempted to justify the 
 denial of floating ideas. If the principle has been made clear 
 to the reader, I think that further detail would be super- 
 fluous. Ideas float, but they float relatively, and there is 
 another ground always which supports them, and of which 
 they are adjectives. They need not be predicated of this 
 ground, and, if such a necessity is assumed, then the denial 
 of floating ideas, I agree, is untenable. But this necessity 
 rests, I urge, upon a false alternative. Without predication 
 an ideal content can qualify more or less immediately a 
 subject from which it is distinct. And such a qualification 
 is all that our conclusion requires. 
 
 Every possible idea therefore may be said to be used 
 existentially, for every possible idea qualifies and is true 
 of a real world. And the number of real worlds, in a word, 
 is indefinite. Every idea therefore in a sense is true, and is 
 true of reality. The question with every idea is how far and 
 in what sense is it true. The question is always whether, 
 qualifying reality in one sense, the idea qualifies reality in 
 another sense also. For, true in one world, an idea may be 
 false in another world, and still more false if you seek to 
 make it true of the Universe. 
 
 II. It may serve to throw light upon the whole subject if 
 I go on to discuss briefly a well-known doctrine. We often 
 hear that between an object as imaginary and the same 
 
 in an imaginary world you seek to unite round and square simply in one 
 subject, they once more cease to qualify this ' real ' world. They are once 
 more exiled to a further outlying world of mere imagination, in which, being 
 again merely somehow conjoined, they can both together be real. The 
 references given above will, I hope, furnish the explanation of this brief 
 answer. I would, however, once more remind the reader that in any case, 
 by even speaking of contradictories, we tacitly assume them to be somehow 
 conjoined, and I would add that any view of contradiction which fails to 
 deal with this aspect of the case is at best incomplete and is probably 
 defective. The difficulty raised in connexion with the Law of Contradiction 
 will I think, when fully considered, tend to confirm on every side the truth 
 of the main conclusions which I defend. 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 43 
 
 object as real there is no difference in content, or at least 
 that such a difference, where it exists, is not essential. This 
 doctrine is often stated as axiomatic or as at any rate in- 
 contestable, and certainly I do not doubt that it possesses 
 truth. On the other hand the truth possessed by it seems 
 partial and limited. And in the end and in principle the 
 doctrine must even be called false. 
 
 About its plausibility there is no question. What is the 
 difference, we are asked, between a real and an imaginary 
 shilling, and, if they differ as shillings, how do they differ ? 
 Suppose that they differ, then take this point of difference, 
 whatever it is, and in imagination remove it. There will 
 now no longer be any diversity in content between the two 
 shilhngs, which still remain two. This contention obviously 
 is plausible, and, though there are difficulties — to my mind 
 insoluble — which result from its acceptance, the prevalence 
 it has acquired is not surprising. 
 
 On the other hand, when we reflect, the counter-doctrine 
 seems no less plausible. The real shilling, it has been re- 
 marked, does things, where the imaginary shilling has no 
 power. The former is an active and in some sense a per- 
 manent constituent of the real world. And this difference 
 appears to be essential and to affect the internal content of 
 the shilling. You may perhaps deny this, and may attempt 
 to argue that any such difference falls outside the two 
 shillings. They are to differ, that is, barely in and through 
 their external relations and not at all in themselves ; and of 
 course continuance will be a mere matter of external context. 
 But this is to assume that a thing's relations, which make 
 all the difference to other things, or at least all the differ- 
 ence beyond itself, make no difference whatever to itself. 
 And this assumption, if it is tenable, seems at least not free 
 from difficulty. For in the end the doubt is suggested whether 
 in the end, when you have removed the relations, there is 
 any shilling at all left. 
 
44 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 You may answer perhaps that this abstract difficulty 
 leaves you unmoved. At any rate, when the ' real ' external 
 relations are cut off, what in fact is left is no more or less 
 than the imaginary shiUing. But this answer, I will go on 
 to show, apart from any objection based on general principle, 
 is in practice unavaihng. For we have not to deal merely with 
 two shiUings, the one real and the other fancied. There is not 
 on one side a single ' real ' world of fact and on the other 
 side a single world that I call ' imaginary '. On the contrary 
 a man has, as we saw, an indefinite plurality of worlds.^ 
 
 Now this diversity of worlds, and the presence of the same 
 object in various worlds, seems to bear on our problem. If 
 on the one side you agree that these worlds are diverse, each 
 through a different content, it seems natural to think that 
 the object's quality may be affected in each case by this dif- 
 ference. But if on the other side all these worlds are to 
 be diverse without differing in content, such a doctrine, if 
 tenable, has surely at least ceased to be plausible. It seems 
 to commit us to the view that there is an indefinite number 
 of distinctions without any difference, or that there are 
 differences between things which do not really differ.^ For 
 myself such a conclusion tends to the dissolution of all things, 
 whether real or imaginary, and at any rate there will be few, 
 I think, to whom it commends itself at once as plausible. 
 
 If now leaving general considerations we test our doctrine 
 by applying it to special cases, we discover that at least it 
 has limits. The whole distinction in short between the 
 imaginary and the real tends, as we apply it, to become 
 invalid. The first instance I will take is the case of the 
 Universe or Reality, for it is better, I think, here not to use 
 the instance of God. Can we speak of the Universe as being 
 merely real or as being merely imaginary ? Is it not on the 
 other hand plain that such a distinction falls within the 
 
 * In a work of fiction, for instance, we have the imaginary worlds of the 
 characters over against their real world, and so on indefinitely. 
 
 ' On this point and on ' external ' relations cf . Chapters VIII, IX, and X. 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 45 
 
 Universe ? If we oppose the real to the imaginary, then 
 clearly the Universe is neither or both. Taken as a whole 
 it falls on neither side of this opposition, and is not com- 
 prised in either the real or the imaginary world. Both these 
 worlds on the contrary are contained within the Universe. 
 So far then as we maintain the hard distinction between 
 imaginary and real, we can neither say that All is real nor 
 that All is imaginary. This distinction, and with it the 
 whole doctrine which we are considering, has proved in- 
 applicable or mistaken. 
 
 Again, let me take the case of my real self. My real self, 
 as I am now aware of it, appears to be unique, and in con- 
 trast with it I have a variety of imaginary selves. Now, if 
 the doctrine in hand is correct, the difference between my 
 imaginary selves and my real self does not rest on content. 
 It must on the other hand somehow consist in mere external 
 relations. But this conclusion, if in the end it is not sense- 
 less, seems contrary to what experience here suggests. The 
 distinction between imaginary and real seems, at least here, 
 to rest on a felt difference, and, where there is a felt differ- 
 ence, it is natural to assume a diversity in content. To sup- 
 pose that my real and imaginary selves are in themselves 
 interchangeable, and that there is no diversity here except 
 in that which falls outside each, seems, in the presence 
 of the actual fact, to be untenable if not unmeaning. Thus, 
 as appUed to the Universe, we found that the doctrine 
 which we examine proved invalid, while now in the case of 
 my real and my imaginary self it seems even vicious. 
 
 But the doctrine without doubt possesses truth, truth not 
 unlimited but partial. So far as you can abstract from the 
 diversity of your different worlds, whether real or imaginary, 
 you can take their contents as merely the same. And to a 
 certain extent and in many cases it is legitimate and useful 
 so to abstract. But, while the doctrine taken in this sense 
 is true, in any other sense it seems not true. It is, first, not 
 
46 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 true that the content so abstracted is in the strict sense 
 imaginary. This content on the contrary is so far neither real 
 nor imaginary. And again it is not true that all the diversity 
 from which you abstract must consist in something other 
 than content. You cannot take this diversity as everywhere 
 something external, which leaves objects unaffected in their 
 character. For in the end the whole distinction of imaginary 
 from real fundamentally rests, we shall find, on a difference 
 in quality. If, to repeat, you abstract from the difference 
 between the imaginary and the real, you obviously so far 
 have no difference of any kind between them. But, if on 
 the other hand the difference between them is to be main- 
 tained, it must rest in the end on a difference in felt content. 
 
 What is the imaginary ? ^ This is a question which up to 
 a certain point we have answered already. The imaginary, 
 we saw, is not something indifferent, to which reality coidd 
 simply be added. The imaginary is qualified by exclusion 
 from real existence, and apart from that exclusion it loses 
 its character. And real existence, I have now to urge, 
 depends on a positive quahty. 
 
 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 feehng. You may protest 
 that its basis is really my normal waking self, but in the end 
 you have no way of distinguishing such a self from the self 
 which is abnormal. In the end my foundation is and must 
 be my present self, whatever that happens at the moment to 
 be. In madness or drunkenness we have the distinction of 
 imaginary from real, and the distinction seems here to be as 
 good as elsewhere. Nay even in dream I may cpnstruct 
 another world which is the environment of my dream-body, 
 and may oppose to this reahty a mere imaginary world. 
 The basis of the opposition everywhere is, in a word, present 
 feeling, and one present feehng, if you take reahty so, stands 
 ' There are some further remarks in Chap. XII. 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 47 
 
 as high as another. And the conclusion suggested is that 
 the above opposition of ' real existence ' to ' mere imagina- 
 tion ' is in the end invahd and breaks down. 
 
 But, however arbitrary my procedure, my real world is 
 taken as that which is continuous with my normal waking 
 felt self. And it is by exclusion from this real world that 
 the imaginary is made. Thus if I and a hundred other men 
 were to dream the same dream, and in somnambulism were 
 to act from our dreamt world, this world would remain 
 unreal because not continuous with the world of my self as 
 normal and waking. By virtue of exclusion from this world 
 the realm of the imaginary is defined. And it is only at a 
 stage of mind which is comparatively late that such a division 
 is made. Thus the gulf fixed between imaginary and real 
 existence, however necessary and useful it may be, is at 
 once arbitrary and novel. 
 
 And the points to which I would direct the reader's atten- 
 tion are these, (i) The existence of the imaginary depends 
 upon my real world, and (ii) the existence of my real world 
 depends on a felt quality. 
 
 (i) A content is not made imaginary by mere privation 
 and through simple failure. If you abstract from all relation 
 to what is called my real world, you have so far not got the 
 imaginary. Abstract truths, for instance, do not express 
 ■ real ' matters of fact, but they fall elsewhere than in the 
 realm of mere imagination. This realm is made by positive 
 exclusion from the special world which I call real. And 
 in a word if you desire to turn ' imaginary ' into ' real ', 
 you cannot effect this by mere addition. You require also to 
 subtract the above exclusion, though, this subtraction being 
 unimportant practically, has been generally ignored. 
 
 (ii) And my real world, difference from which and exclu- 
 sion by which, we have seen, is the essence — on what does 
 that rest ? It rests on a quahty, on a felt content, on that 
 of which I am aware when I say ' this myself which is now '. 
 
48 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 I experience this content when I feel the difference between 
 the mere idea and the actuaUty of my present self. But it 
 is impossible for me to bring this content wholly before me 
 as an object. With every object I have still the difference 
 felt between this object and my felt self. And, if this were 
 not so, the difference and the relation between subject and 
 object would vanish. And thus what I call my real world, 
 the world which is made by a construction from my self, 
 depends in the end on a content, a content not expUcit but 
 positive, not brought before me but felt. If you take away 
 this content, and the exclusion by this content, then at one 
 stroke you have removed the characters of both imaginary 
 and real. And if such a mere felt quality seems but a pre- 
 carious foundation for our edifice, that is precisely the con- 
 clusion which I desire to suggest. For what I call my real 
 world is something other than Reality. It is a construction, 
 required for certain ends and true within hmits, but beyond 
 those limits more or less precarious, neghgible, and in the 
 end invalid.^ 
 
 The imaginary then is made by exclusion from my real 
 world. It rests in the last resort on a felt difference from 
 a felt unique quality, and this, I apprehend, is a difference 
 
 ' It is useless to insist that my real world is real because it is the world 
 where we all meet really through the real cormexions of our real bodies. 
 For, as was remarked above, in my dreams my own dream-body possesses 
 its world of things and of other persons ; and this order of things, while 
 I dream, is real to myself. Nay an indefinite number of persons might, for 
 all we know, dream a world of identical content, in which each with a 
 difference occupied his proper place. And if you ask for the criterion by 
 which to decide between my dreamt and my waking worlds, something 
 more is required than a mere arbitrary choice. You are led in the end to 
 find that the superiority of my waking world lies in its character, in the 
 greater order and system which it possesses and eSects. But, with this, 
 the hard division has turned into a question of degree, and this question 
 once raised will tend to carry us still further. 
 
 I may remark in passing that the real world is by some writers defined 
 so exclusively, that whatever is perceptible but to one person becomes 
 unreal. But obviously any man might under individual conditions have 
 an experience which would not be shared by others, and which would 
 yet belong to the order of events in the real world of fact. 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 49 
 
 in content. Such a result, I admit, entails difficulties which 
 I do not here discuss. But, if we reject it, we seem forced 
 to conclusions which to my mind are far less tolerable. 
 For I cannot see how things or orders of things are to be 
 distinct, if they are not different, or what in the end can be 
 meant by a relation which is merely external. 
 
 The difference between the real and imaginary thus rests 
 in the end upon content. So far as you abstract from the 
 difference, the content of both worlds is obviously the same. 
 For many purposes the abstraction is permissible and useful, 
 but it is not everywhere valid. And so the doctrine of 
 the identity in content between real and imaginary has 
 but partial truth. When you take the instance of the Uni- 
 verse or again of my real self, the doctrine proves inapplicable 
 or vicious. 
 
 We have hence been led once more to the main theme of 
 this chapter. The difference between my world of fact and 
 my other worlds is important and necessary, but the exag- 
 gerated value we often tend to attach to it is really illusory. 
 Its pretensions are in practice refuted incessantly by ex- 
 perience of other kinds. And, when we examine its theo- 
 retical claim to possess ultimate truth, we find that this is 
 founded on arbitrariness, is built up in inconsistency, and 
 ends in obscurity. The difference for us between real and 
 unreal is vital. This can hardly consist in a division founded 
 on felt quaUty condemned for ever to be latent, and, while 
 seeking for another foundation, we found none which is 
 intelligible. Hence this difference, vital for us, must be 
 sought and be discovered elsewhere. It must depend on 
 the internal character of those various worlds which claim 
 our allegiance. And our impassable gulf and our hard and 
 fast division will have to give way to degree and to differ- 
 ences in value.^ 
 
 ' On the nature of the imaginary compare Chap. XII, and on the ' real 
 world ' see further in Chapters XIV and XVI. 
 1574 E 
 
50 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 III. I propose now to discuss briefly the meaning of play 
 in its contrast with earnest, and to remark on the mistaken 
 view that play is essentially concerned with the imaginary. 
 The following pages will be found, I hope, still to be more 
 or less concerned with our main subject, since the discussion 
 of these topics will tend once more to break down the divi- 
 sions erroneously forced into life. We shall again discover 
 the mistakes which follow from any attempt to sunder the 
 human world, to divide things from ideas, to identify the 
 real with matter of fact, or to set apart somewhere by itself 
 a superior realm of earnest. 
 
 What is play? It is activity, we may say, so far as 
 that is felt to be unconstrained.^ And hence the activity 
 must in the first place be pleasant. It must be enjoyed 
 and exercised for its own sake, and, so far as it is mere play, 
 it must not be felt as subject to any sort of control. In 
 play I have nothing which I do or seek because I am forced 
 from the outside, because I am driven by desire, or because 
 there is a valuable end which I pursue and which thus is 
 able to dictate. Play is therefore mere amusement, and, 
 so far as it remains mere play, it owns no master but 
 caprice. In playing I realize myself not only apart from 
 the compulsion of force or appetite, but as free from any- 
 thing that could define and so limit and constrain me. 
 Play is thus incompatible with foreign control, and again 
 it is further opposed to earnest. Where you have something 
 that is valuable and that matters, you have so far no play, 
 or rather you have no play here except within restraint and 
 Umits. For, wherever I am in earnest, my activity is 
 
 ' The reader will observe that I am not attempting to deal with the 
 subject of play generally. Neither its origin, nor its varieties, nor its 
 position in the whole of animal and human life can be touched on here. 
 And again from the point of view of education I am not offering to say 
 a word. Even if space allowed it, I am not competent to speak on the 
 whole subject, and the reader must be referred to works such as those 
 of Prof. Groos. I am concerned here with the sense of play, and with 
 play as we experience it in contrast with earnest. 
 
in AND THE IMAGINARY 51 
 
 defined by an end. And, even if there is no end outside the 
 activity, the control is still present. For where my activity 
 is valuable, its detail is relative to the whole, and its detail 
 is therefore more or less subordinate and subject to restraint. 
 And, so far as I feel this, I lose the sense of mere play and 
 caprice. Play is thus activity spontaneous and agreeable 
 and quaUfied by the absence of compulsion or earnest. 
 
 It may be asked if this contrast is really inherent in the 
 sense of play. The opposition to earnest, it may be objected, 
 need exist nowhere except in the spectator's mind. There 
 is natural activity which bursts forth apart from any sense 
 of limit and restraint. Such activity we can find everywhere 
 in the young, and we may even imagine it, if we please, as 
 existing in a perfect mind. And here, it will be said, there 
 is a sense of freedom and of self-assertion and of play, un- 
 coloured by any feeling of contrast or restraint. But the 
 above objection turns, I think, upon a question of words. 
 I fully agree that there is such a sense of spontaneous 
 activity, but, apart from a felt contrast, I could not myself 
 call it an experience of play. And at any rate I propose 
 here to use the word otherwise. Where there is play, felt 
 as play, I shall suppose the more or less remote contrast 
 with a more or less withdrawn earnest. I shall assume the 
 presence of a more or less specified sense of something, more 
 or less prominent or in the background, which is felt as 
 control or limit. Restraint, whether as what is forced on 
 me or as what matters, I shall take therefore as a necessary 
 element implied in play. But in what follows I shall confine 
 myself to the consideration of play as limited not by force 
 but by earnest. 
 
 If you ask what is earnest and what matters, then in the 
 end it is life as a whole which matters. Every pleasant 
 activity therefore is so far good, and all matters because 
 and so far as it realizes the main end. But on the other 
 hand within the contents of this whole there are degrees of 
 
 E 2 
 
52 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 necessity and of importance. In general or in particular, 
 against something that either is indispensable or that matters 
 more, some aspect of hfe may be unimportant. And any 
 aspect which thus relatively does not matter, can be felt 
 here and now not to matter at all. Here is the province of 
 play in its contrast with earnest. Where there is activity 
 which as a whole or in its detail is thus relatively of no 
 moment, we have a limited sphere of caprice and amusement 
 and, in a word, of play. 
 
 But there is no hard division in life between play and 
 earnest, and there is in short no genuine human end which in 
 principle excludes play. The absolute separation in life of 
 optional and necessary, of play and work, leads essentially 
 to error. And the error is palpable where everything except 
 maintenance of life is identified with play. Certainly my 
 bare subsistence is an end which may be said to come first, 
 because everything in life is lost if there is no more living. 
 But on the other hand a mere living which is not good itself 
 or for the sake of something good, is neither necessary nor 
 desirable. Work for the sake of work and practice for 
 practice' sake are, in fact, ends which no one apart from 
 illusion could accept.^ 
 
 And generally the sundering of life into spheres of work 
 and spheres of play is indefensible. It is true that in life 
 there are things which are everywhere necessary. There is 
 a certain amount of physical well-being and a certain degree 
 of mental and moral development which are fundamental. 
 Human life is impossible except on this basis of individual 
 and social virtue. But beyond this common basis are those 
 special stations in social life the occupation of which is more 
 or less a matter of choice. And further there are non-social 
 
 ■ What Prof. Taylor has well called ' the Gospel of Drudgery ' is still 
 too much with us. But labour without joy in labour is no moral end. It 
 is a necessity, tolerable, if at all, only for the sake of something else. And, 
 preached as in itself a duty, it is nothing short of inhuman nonsense 
 and cant. 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 53 
 
 modes of human self-realization which in a sense are higher 
 and in a sense are still more optional. They are optional in 
 the sense that deprived of them life could be lived, and that 
 with regard to them the individual has a right and a duty to 
 choose. But on the other hand to treat these higher functions 
 as mere play would be obviously absurd.^ We have in the 
 next place what may be called the minor graces of life, 
 things the detail of which is more or less variable at our 
 pleasure. And finally we end in what are called amusements. 
 Here, where the amusement is mere amusement, the detail 
 is optional. It has no value in itself, but is desirable solely 
 for the sake of its effect on human welfare. 
 
 Play may be called necessary in the sense that without 
 play human life is not fully realized, and hence we may 
 speak of a general duty and obhgation to play. But on the 
 other hand the obhgation stops short of prescribing the 
 details, which in the main are left to our pleasure. Hence 
 we may find here the merely optional, which we may oppose 
 to the merely necessary, and may forget that neither of these 
 in abstraction and by itself is a human end. In short to 
 identify the barely necessary with that which matters and 
 is to be taken in earnest, is in principle indefensible. Yoii 
 cannot in life make a hard division into separate spheres 
 of work and play, for play in a word exists everywhere so far 
 as I am able to play there. 
 
 I will point out briefly first how in principle every human 
 activity admits of play, and in the next place how more or 
 less all plays ^ in a sense are serious pursuits. 
 
 (i) It is possible first to take a serious pursuit and to amuse 
 myself with it. I may, that is, occupy myself with this 
 activity just so far as it amuses me, and I may treat it as 
 something which, for me, falls outside of what really matters. 
 
 ' In connecting fine art with the play-impulse it is easy, I may remarlc 
 in passing, to fall into serious error. 
 
 * This use of the plural is adopted solely for the reader's convenience 
 and I hope on that ground may be excused. 
 
54 ON FLOATING IDEAS CHAP, 
 
 In comparison with other things the pursuit has no serious 
 claim on me. I am not in earnest with it, I may do with 
 it as I please, and in a word I may play with it. But to 
 distinguish here between mere trifling on one side, and on 
 the other side interests which are serious though limited, is 
 often impossible. There are again interests with which, in 
 the case of this or that man or of every man, no trifling is 
 permissible. But, without attempting further explanation, 
 it is safe to conclude that within limits it is possible and 
 right to play at a serious pursuit. What, however, I here 
 desire to insist on is this, that in principle every human 
 activity, however grave and even sacred, admits of some 
 play. Play is here the expression of certain conquest and of 
 absolute mastery over detail. And this joyous aspect is 
 wholly absent from work only where, as too often happens, 
 the conditions are inhuman. The most serious aspects of 
 human life admit of play in this sense. In religions, not 
 one-sided, there is an element of merry-making and sport, 
 such as comes naturally with a sense of full security and 
 triumph. And the morality which ignores the charm of 
 sportive well-doing, has lost sight of the full ideal of 
 human goodness. To trifle with a principle, to make it 
 the sport of mere self-will,^ is forbidden. It is another 
 thing to be filled with an implicit sense of relative value, 
 and in the service of a higher principle to enjoy its trimnph 
 over the fixed detail and limits of himian duties. This is 
 a gracious element seldom absent from the highest wisdom 
 and love. 
 
 (ii) There is no serious pursuit, we have seen, which in 
 principle excludes play. And on the other hand play hardly 
 can maintain complete severance from earnest. Mere amuse- 
 ments, it appeared, as general amusement are necessary 
 for our welfare, and in most cases perhaps they are more 
 than mere amusements. Plays may advance some social 
 ' In other words, to make game of it. 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 55 
 
 end, or may develop some individual faculty which in its 
 effects or in itself is really valuable. They tend in other 
 words, so far, to pass into useful performances, or into ac- 
 complishments worth having because adding to the sum of 
 human perfection. And again from another side plays are 
 something more than mere playing. They are subject in 
 each case to special restraint by the rule of the game. They 
 are limited not only by a more or less specified world of 
 earnest, but they become in various degrees defined in them- 
 selves. And so far as in playing you must not trifle with 
 the rule of the game, your playing has taken on a feature 
 of earnest. 
 
 Plays contain usually a large element of chance and 
 caprice, but apart from that, as plays, they keep essentially 
 the following character. They have no individual worth, 
 their detail in itself does not matter, and one of them has, 
 in itself as against the others, no value at all. You are 
 therefore, so far, free to choose amongst them at your 
 caprice. If one of them is your best way of plajdng, that 
 one has special value for you. But, on the other side, its 
 value is generic merely, and it has worth only as a means to 
 an end. In this point plays differ from accomplishments, 
 which have value so far as they each contribute individually 
 to human perfection. Plays on the other hand, so far as 
 mere plays, have no end but a general end which falls out- 
 side of all taken individually. And where this principle is 
 ignored, and where the rule of the game perhaps gains more 
 than a conventional value, we are too familiar with the 
 result. Plays are perverted into the serious pursuits of life, 
 the moral perspective is distorted or destroyed, and the effect 
 on life is, according to circumstances, more or less injurious 
 or even ruinous. The above distinction, however, between 
 mere plays and accomplishments, though clear in principle, 
 is often in practice not easy to maintain. 
 
 Play is any activity in life so far as that is agreeable, is 
 
56 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 unconstrained, and is felt here and now not to matter.^ 
 Play is not in principle excluded, we have seen, from any 
 aspect of life. And when we come to mere amusements which 
 exist for the sake of playing, they tend, as we have seen, to 
 develop a character, too often perverted, of work and earnest. 
 There is in short no natural separation of Ufe into spheres 
 of necessary work and of mere play. And, when we con- 
 sider these extremes, we find that, differing otherwise, they 
 share the same essential feature. Neither has its end in 
 itself, neither contributes, individually and in itself, a special 
 element to human value. Each on the contrary is desirable 
 solely for the sake of an effect, particular or general, which 
 it produces. 
 
 The division of human existence into spheres of necessary 
 work and of optional play leads therefore, when developed, 
 to confusion and absurdity. The world of play turns out 
 to be the only world which a man could seriously desire, 
 and the world of earnest, when you examine it, proves to 
 be that which by itself has no importance or value. Every- 
 thing which possesses human interest becomes mere play, 
 while the residue could be an end only for irrational caprice. 
 Any such view breaks down at once when confronted with 
 the facts of actual Ufe. Thus a stage-play, to take that 
 instance, is even to the spectator not mere playing, while to 
 the actor it is the serious business of life. It is not merely 
 the work by which he lives, but it is the main end of his 
 being, the special function by which he at once contributes 
 to humanity and realizes himself. On the other side the 
 necessity of living is no real necessity, unless the life, which 
 in oneself or others it subserves, is really desirable. A mere 
 
 ' If I play because I am compelled to play, that, so far, and while the 
 sense of compulsion lasts, is not playing. And we must even say the same 
 thing where I play because of a want to play. My playing, that is, to the 
 extent to which, in general or in particular detail, it is felt to be necessary 
 to the satisfaction of a want, so far is not mere playing. But of course the 
 detail of play is seldom felt to be thus necessary, and obviously the feeling 
 tends, if the activity lasts, to disappear. 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 57 
 
 inhuman subsistence and an empty practice are (I would 
 repeat) things which, except through an illusion, no one 
 could take in earnest. 
 
 Play, we have thus seen, is one aspect of life. It is, or in 
 principle it may be, everywhere present. The division of life 
 into spheres of work and play may be most important and 
 even necessary, but any such division after all is not absolute 
 but relative. If you take it otherwise it becomes an error 
 which even practically may have bad results, and which 
 theoretically cannot fail to be more or less injurious. It is 
 parallel to the separation of the world into real and imagin- 
 ary, matter of fact and mere ideas. And it proves, when we 
 consider it, to be another offshoot of the same fundamental 
 error. It will, I think, tend further to illustrate the same 
 theme if I add some words on the supposed connexion of 
 make-believe with play. 
 
 Play has been held to contain essentially the presence of 
 make-believe and illusion. It has been alleged in short to 
 depend upon a sense of the imaginary in its contrast with the 
 real. This doctrine to my mind is in such obvious collision 
 with plain fact, that I think it better to begin by asking how 
 it can come to be adopted. And there is (i) the undoubted 
 presence of make-believe in some playing. This feature, 
 having been wrongly generalized and taken as essential, is 
 then postulated in spite of appearance as existing every- 
 where. We have again (ii) the so-called imitative actions 
 in young animals. These, or many of these, it is natural to 
 call playing. And our minds are thus insensibly led to 
 regard such actions as performed in imitation and with 
 a consciousness of unreality. And (iii) there is finally the 
 more or less specified sense of Umitation and restraint, 
 which, we have seen, is essentially involved in playing. 
 Hence, where the erroneous division of the world into im- 
 aginary and real is accepted, the former of these tends to be 
 
58 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 taken as that which in playing is hmited by the latter. Thus 
 we conclude that in play we essentially have a sense of the 
 imaginary as opposed to matter of fact. We shall reahze 
 both the character and the extent of this mistake when we 
 ask as to the nature of that restraint which, we agree, is 
 present in play. 
 
 But it is better first to illustrate briefly the collision of the 
 above doctrine with fact. When two young dogs are chasing 
 one another or biting, when boys let out of school behave in 
 much the same manner, when a man aimlessly strikes at this 
 or that with his stick, or falls into some other trifling activity 
 where, as we say, he has nothing to do — it seems obvious 
 that make-believe here has no concern in the matter. And 
 when we take part in the athletic pastimes of boyhood or 
 manhood, and play at hockey, football or cricket, or again 
 at such games as cards or chess — ^how can it be seriously 
 maintained that illusion is present always and essentially ? 
 The opposite conclusion, to my mind at least, seems too 
 clear for argument. When for example I play at cricket, 
 what am I pretending to do other than the thing which I 
 do ? An outsider doubtless can insist that everywhere we 
 have a mimic battle of this or that kind, but the mimicry 
 surely exists only in the mind of the outsider, and for my 
 mind, as I play, has no existence at aU. And if it is objected 
 that in play we have a sense of limit, and that the restraint 
 must come from a sense of the real as against the imaginary, 
 that brings me to the point which I wish to discuss. On the 
 one hand I agree that in play we have some sense of limit, 
 but on the other hand I urge the absence in many cases of 
 anything like make-beUeve. And I will proceed to show the 
 real nature of that restraint which seems ever5rwhere present 
 in play. 
 
 In many cases of play the restraint, we may say in a word, 
 is not theoretical but moral. Consider the natural sporting of 
 a young dog or a child. There are certain natural activities 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 59 
 
 which in themselves are pleasant. To bite, for instance, 
 or to struggle or run is deUghtful. But — and here is the 
 point — with my playfellow I must not bite beyond a Hmit. 
 If I go too far and hurt my playfellow the result is unpleasant, 
 unless indeed I am angry and want to fight and am not 
 afraid to do so. Hence I exercise my delightful activities 
 so as to stop short of that result. I need not be thinking 
 of this all the time, but any approach to excess brings on 
 what is discordant with my pleasant condition, both in my 
 own mind and perhaps palpably outside my mind also. 
 Such a result is felt to be incongruous, and, as soon as 
 it is suggested, it suppresses the excess of the activity. If 
 the reader will observe a young dog gnawing the flesh of his 
 hand and watching him to observe if the line is at any time 
 crossed, he will, I think realize my meaning. There is ab- 
 solutely no illusion here, but there is restraint, a restraint 
 which later may be formulated as the rule of the game. On 
 the other hand when a dog exercises his activity on a stick, 
 the rule of the game, we may say, is simply that he is not to 
 hurt himself.^ 
 
 It may be objected that so far we have not the distinction 
 between play and earnest. But so far, I reply, I am en- 
 deavouring merely to establish the presence of restraint 
 
 ' It is surely only through a course of actual experiment that an animal, 
 such as a young dog, learns how hard he may bite in play. And I should 
 have added that, in the case of a dog, part of the course consists in his 
 biting himself. Dr. McDougall {Social Psychology, p. in) objects to the 
 account in the text that it is impossible because it implies ' deliberate 
 self-restraint '■ — ^which in a young animal does not exist. I venture to hope 
 that to the reader it will be even obvious that nothing of the kind really 
 is implied, and that the objection rests on the merest misunderstanding. 
 
 What Dr. McDougall's own view is, and whence according to him comes 
 the difference of a dog's behaviour when he plays with another dog and 
 then again with a stick, I have not been able to understand. His whole 
 account here seems to myself to have fallen to such a low level that 
 I feel bound in justice to him to suppose that on this subject I have failed 
 to follow him. Whether some such supposition on his side also, where I 
 am concerned, would not have been prudent, I will leave to the reader 
 to decide. 
 
6o ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 without illusion. I am pointing out that the hmit to pleasant 
 activity may be, in a word, not theoretical but moral. And 
 this result still holds, I now go on to urge, where the specific 
 sense of play is clearly present. In cricket, for example, or 
 in cards I am obviously under restraint, while as obviously, 
 at least to my mind, there is no trace of make-beheve. Un- 
 less I am a professional or a devotee, I am aware that these 
 activities are optional. They do not matter in themselves, 
 and their scope is limited by that in hfe which really does 
 matter. And, in the second place, to secure a better exercise 
 of the activity, it is carried on subject to conventional 
 restraints. I am, in other words, limited by the rules of the 
 game, which exclude at once mere trifling and violence, as 
 well as by the consciousness that, as against what is more 
 serious, my activity does not matter. This is the nature of 
 the restraint which, to my mind, is both effective and 
 obvious. Illusion and make-believe on the other hand I am 
 unable to discern. 
 
 ' But,' I shall be told, ' you are ignoring the play in 
 which make-believe is obvious. A girl with her doll, a boy 
 with a wooden sword, are plain instances which confute you. 
 And the actor in stage-plays, you seem to forget, is called 
 a player. And to deny here the presence of every kind 
 of make-beheve and illusion is. surely irrational.' To this 
 I reply that such a denial is no part of my case. All that 
 I have been urging so far is that illusion does not belong 
 essentially or ever5rwhere to play. Playing, on the contrary, 
 we may now go on to see, is of various kinds. And pla5dng of 
 one kind undoubtedly involves make-beUeve. It impUes 
 within limits the treatment of the imaginary as if it were 
 real. If you take make-believe as the pla5^ng at practical 
 belief, as our acting within limits as if the facts here and now 
 were qualified, as we know that in fact they are not quahfied 
 — then make-beheve, it is obvious, belongs to some play. 
 But to argue from this that, where I do not play at believing, 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 6i 
 
 I must pretend in order to play, seems clearly illogical. 
 Whether in short, and how far, in any play there is illusion, 
 depends in each case — that is all I urge — upon the nature 
 of the play. 
 
 We have seen that in some play there is no pretence or 
 illusion. The exercise of the activity involves no excursion 
 into the imaginary world. But, as can easily be seen 
 with children, this imaginary element soon appears, and in 
 playing it occupies a great space, how great I need not 
 discuss. The perceived facts here do not suffice for the 
 required activity. They are therefore extended by im- 
 aginary qualifications, and the activity becomes possible. 
 And at this point a new kind of restraint and limit can be 
 observed. 
 
 All playing involves a limit, but in some plays this limit, 
 we saw, was simply what we called moral. Beyond a certain 
 point, that is, I must not. But where make-beUeve comes 
 in, we' find a new sort of control. The child that pretends 
 in play knows that morally it must not cross a certain hne. 
 But it knows now also that it has an imaginary world, which 
 is hmited by real fact, and again in some cases by con- 
 ventional suppositions. A schoolboy playing at soldiers 
 knows first («) that he must hurt no one too much, but he 
 knows also {b) that he is a schoolboy as well as a soldier. 
 And he knows (c) that, so long as certain conventions are 
 observed, no consistency is required even in his imaginary 
 character.^ 
 
 The control, in a word, has become theoretical as well as 
 moral. The playing dog knows, we may say, that beyond 
 a certain point he must not. The playing boy knows this 
 in all his playing, and in some cases he knows no more. But 
 in other ceises he knows also that beyond a certain point the 
 thing is not. He has here a world of imagination, quaUfying 
 
 ' So of course mutatis mutandis with the girl and her doll. On the above 
 point the reader may be referred to Prof. Sully's Human Mind, i. 384. 
 
62 ON FLOATING IDEAS chap. 
 
 the real world but always subject to and restrained by 
 that world. 1 
 
 These two controls, the moral and theoretical, are in 
 much play so joined and blended that to separate their 
 several effects would be hard or impossible. In ' playing 
 a part,' on the stage or again in real life, this intimate 
 mingling may be observed. We have first of all the letting- 
 go of certain activities subject to a certain moral restraint. 
 But we have in addition the entrance, for ourselves or for 
 others or for both, into the sphere of pretence, make-beUeve 
 and illusion. This entrance is limited by our consciousness 
 of the real fact, and again by conventional rules, wherever 
 and so far as these exist. And to what extent the control is 
 before the mind, and how far illusion actually is present, de- 
 pends in every case upon the conditions and the individual.^ 
 
 Thus pretence and make-believe do not belong to the 
 general essence of play. They are obviously present often 
 where there is no playing and where they are used con- 
 sciously as means to a serious end. On the other side there 
 
 ' I do not mean that in playing the moral or theoretical control must 
 be kept always before my mind. As we saw before, it is enough that 
 this control should be ready at any moment to come in, and that any 
 suggestion of excess should at once bring it before me, or at least bring 
 it into action. 
 
 " The amount of actual illusion is said, for instance, to differ widely with 
 different actors. See Mr. Archer's well-known collection of facts in his 
 Masks or Faces. Again flirting, the amatory game, is an instance where 
 it is not easy to distinguish between the two kinds of control, theoretical 
 and moral. The amount of illusion or pretence varies widely in various 
 cases, and in many cases probably amounts to nothing. You may have 
 simply the letting loose of certain sexual feelings and actions without 
 pretence or illusion but within a certain moral limit. The beginning of this 
 is easy to observe, for example, among dogs. 
 
 The main essence of the affair is in short not illusion but Umit. That is 
 why (as Prof. Groos rightly observes in The Play of Man, p. 253) we do 
 not in the same way play at eating, for there short of the satisfaction of 
 appetite the means are not by themselves sufficiently agreeable. But to 
 a certain extent, I should say, we may play at eating, for instance at dessert. 
 And children play thus habitually, I suppose because the real satisfaction 
 is out of their power. But here of course the imaginary element comes in 
 and is important. 
 
Ill AND THE IMAGINARY 63 
 
 are many plays (we have seen) from which illusion certainly 
 is absent. In other plays again the activity is exercised 
 within an area more or less quaUfied as imaginary. Lastly 
 there are cases where illusion and pretence are not essential, 
 but where more or less they tend to come in. And the extent 
 here will be determined by the individual conditions. 
 
 We have found once more that the ready-made division of 
 our world into matter of fact and ideas, into imaginary and 
 real, has conducted us to error. And we saw that to sunder 
 life into separate spheres of play and earnest is indefensible. 
 Life and the world do not admit those compartments which 
 are blindly fixed by hasty theories. Life and the world 
 offer us an indefinite number of aspects and distinctions, 
 and the worth and reality of these is in every case relative, 
 though, because relative, it may in a given case become 
 absolute. 
 
 This is the general conclusion which, I trust, throughout 
 this chapter has been suggested as true. That world of fact 
 which we so confidently contrast with the imaginary, and 
 which we set up as real, has turned out, when we take it 
 absolutely, to be false appearance. And in our practice, 
 where we do not sink into convention or worse, we assume 
 our right to deal freely with such reality, to treat it as of 
 secondary moment, or even, it may be, as illusory. But in 
 theory this illusion tends to cling to us, to hamper us and 
 to blind us, when we endeavour to do justice to the various 
 aspects of life. To be or do anything, we assuredly must 
 maintain and control our bodies, and we depend on the 
 world which is immediately continuous with these. Apart 
 from this foundation we cannot have reality, and with this 
 foundation we must therefore be in earnest. This is truth, 
 and it is a truth, I agree, which must not be ignored. But 
 on the other hand this basis and condition, if you try to take 
 it by itself, is worthless and in the end it proves unreal. In 
 
64 FLOATING IDEAS AND THE IMAGINARY ch.iii 
 
 truth it is itself a mere imaginary abstraction. The world 
 of reality, we may say in a word, is the world of values,^ 
 and values are not judged absolutely but are everywhere 
 measured by degree. 
 
 • I should be willing here to add ' of human values ', so long as ' human' 
 is not understood as ' merely human '. To use the term ' humanity ' 
 loosely as covering at once ' all finite mind ' and again ' merely some of the 
 inhabitants of a certain planet ', may, as a support to certain views, be 
 found convenient or perhaps necessary. But whether such ambiguity is 
 permissible is of course another question. In this note I find myself 
 repeating that which in another connexion I had to urge now many years 
 ago {Ethical Studies, pp. 305-7), and even then, in 1876, the matter was 
 far from new. On ' humanity ' see the references in the Index to the 
 present volume. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 
 
 ' INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 The following chapter contains the greater part of an article 
 published in Mind, N.S., No. 51 (July 1904). I have removed 
 the beginning, and later on have made omissions which are noted 
 each in its own place. Otherwise the article is reprinted unaltered. 
 What has been left out has been omitted for two reasons. Its 
 interest in the first place seems to myself to have been ephemeral. 
 And in the second place, if now repubUshed, it might be taken 
 as an attack upon writers who at the time were either not in my 
 mind or who were there more or less incidentally. 
 
 The occasion of this paper in Mind was the appearance of 
 a voltmie, supposed to represent a movement called Personal 
 Idealism, together with some periodical writing which I took to 
 be connected with the same movement. I do not suggest that all 
 the writers in that volume knew beforehand of any movement, 
 or had at any rate much of an idea as to its meaning. And 
 Personal Idealism, I imagine, if it ever lived, is to-day dead. In 
 its place we have now on one side, I presume, the acceptance, 
 partial or complete, of Realism and Pluralism, and, on the other 
 side, we have the tendency to what may be called Irrationalism. 
 The doctrines which group themselves under the name of Pragma- 
 tism will fall more or less under each of these heads. Their best 
 exposition is, perhaps, to be found in the works of Prof. Dewey 
 and his followers. These writers, as well as Prof. James, I have 
 never hesitated to criticize ; but I should be sorry indeed to give 
 the idea that I associate any of them in my mind with anything 
 that is not wholly creditable. 
 
 Both in the present chapter and in later pages of this volume 
 the reader will find some criticisms on Pragmatism. My difficulty 
 with regard to this doctrine has remained insuperable. And the 
 difficulty arises, I cannot but think, at least in part from real 
 
 1574 F 
 
66 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 obscurities, obscurities which, if removed, would unmask radical 
 incoherence. I cannot, that is, believe that so-called Pragmatists 
 are really of one mind either as to what they assert or as to what 
 they wish to deny. They are agreed, I suppose, in opposition to 
 Intellectualism— whatever that may be ; but, while some of 
 them apparently desire to emphasize the importance and the 
 claim of the individual person as against the Whole, others on 
 the contrary appear at least to lean in the opposite direction. 
 And even the degradation of theory and of fine art to the level of 
 mere instruments seems not to be, after all, a necessary tenet. 
 In short, a gospel of Practice where no one knew, and (I had 
 almost written) no one was to know, what Practice means, has 
 produced its natural result. The disciples for the most part see 
 with different eyes, wherever, that is, they are not simply blind. 
 
 A point where all Pragmatists appear to be agreed is this, that 
 at least their doctrine is new ; for, whatever else it is, it certainly 
 is preached as revolutionary.^ But agreement is easier where 
 one does not know in what a gospel really consists. I will there- 
 fore proceed to offer some brief remarks both on the meaning of 
 Pragmatism and on its asserted novelty. For further explanation 
 I would refer the reader to later pages of this volume (Chap. V 
 and Appendices). 
 
 I. Pragmatism might have meant something which, if carried 
 out systematically, would, so far as I am aware, be new. It might 
 have taken truth to be mere working ideas,^ and human interests 
 in their entirety it might have taken as the one end, and as the 
 criterion of knowledge and reality. It might have set these 
 
 ' I am of course aware that Prof. James stated that there was nothing 
 new about the Pragmatic method. But all I would add is this, that, if the 
 statement in the text is not true, the whole attitude of Prof. James, and 
 still more that of some of his followers, seems to have become inexplicable. 
 But see Chap. V (Appendix I). 
 
 ^ Such a position would, however, not entail downright Instrumentalism, so 
 long as the pursuit and possession of truth is itself allowed to be an intrinsic 
 human interest. All that such a position is called on to deny, is the existence 
 of a criterion of truth which is intrinsic and supreme. The criterion of 
 truth, that is, would lie in its contribution to the aggregate of human 
 interests, and, as so contributing, truth might be allowed a value beyond 
 that of an external means or instrument. I am not, however, suggesting 
 that by taking the aggregate of human interests as our end it is possible 
 to reach a consistent view. So far as we keep to a mere collection we are 
 without any principle of order. There are some further remarks on 
 Instrumentalism below, see p. 68. Cf. also Appendix I to Chap. V. 
 
IV INTRODUCTORY NOTE 67 
 
 interests out fully, and not merely at the dictation of prejudice 
 and caprice, and might have made them, severally and again 
 collectively, and perhaps even in an order, the test everywhere 
 of truth and value, in science, in art, and in morals and religion. 
 Such a work would indeed be welcome, and, so far as I know, it 
 has not been accomplished. But obviously this is not the task 
 which Pragmatism has even attempted. Obviously Pragmatism, 
 I should say, has never even faced the above problem in earnest, 
 and much less has it ever applied itself to reach a satisfactory 
 solution. But for a justification of this statement I must refer to 
 a later part of this volume.^ 
 
 From this point, on which misunderstanding is only too 
 prevalent, I will pass on to deal with some questions of detail. 
 
 2. We find in Pragmatism the conception of Society as an 
 organism, a living body in which and of which the individual is 
 a member and a function — an organism which of course develops 
 in time. And I have been led to suppose that there are Pragma- 
 tists who believe that we really owe the above idea to Pragmatism. 
 But such a writer as Prof. Dewey would, I cannot doubt, inform 
 such persons (if they exist) that any notion of the kind is baseless. 
 And he would tell them again that there is nothing new in the 
 same idea of organic development as applied to Humanity. 
 
 But, this being admitted, it may be said that the real point is 
 the position which Pragmatism gives to Humanity. The novelty 
 achieved by Pragmatism perhaps resides in the way in which it 
 takes the relation between Humanity and the Universe. This 
 is, however, a claim which the outsider is hardly in a position to 
 examine. The question as to exactly how far Humanity is and 
 is not to be identified with Reality, seems certainly vital. To 
 discuss, for instance, the nature of truth when you are ignorant 
 as to your answer to such a question, appears, to me at least, to 
 be futile. But the Pragmatist to myself has seemed content to 
 meet challenges on this point by an attitude of prudent obscurity. 
 And I must be allowed to conclude that he is obscure here because 
 he is insolvent, but that, if he were forced to speak, whatever 
 
 ' Chap. V (Appendix I). So far as I know Prof. James never even raised 
 the question whether, and how far, truth is compelled to forgo self- 
 consistency. He appears to have simply assumed that truth must be 
 consistent. But here surely is a problem that should have met him, and 
 should have been even obvious, from the first. 
 
 F 2 
 
68 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 answer he gave would most certainly not be novel. Nor again, 
 I think, is there any answer which, if stated intelligibly, would 
 be accepted by all Pragmatists. 
 
 3. But the organic evolution of Humanity, it may be said, as 
 previously understood was teleological, and the banishment of 
 all idea of End is the novelty brought in by Pragmatism. But 
 surely, after all these years of Darwinism — not to mention the 
 earlier preaching of the ' mechanical ' view — such a claim, if 
 made, would be monstrous. It would be different if, after having 
 removed from organic development the aspect of Good or End, 
 Pragmatism could point to what it offers to set in the place of 
 that idea. But it can offer nothing, so far as I see, that is not 
 old and familiar. The doctrine that there is no end except what 
 happens, that whatever happens is true and right and good, or at 
 least that there is no sense in asking, about anything else that 
 might have happened, if it really would have been better — such 
 a doctrine surely, whatever else it is, would not be new. And 
 to take the old idea of the organic development of Humanity, 
 and merely to couple this with the old denial of any Human End, 
 would hardly pass, I should imagine, as an original achievement. 
 
 4. Nor, once again, can I find anything new in the idea of 
 Instrumentalism. The degradation of philosophy, science and 
 fine art, to the rank of mere means, subserving an end falling 
 outside themselves, is surely nothing novel. And we do not 
 even gain a new attitude if, while den5dng intrinsic value to these 
 things, we forget to ask what it is that, lying outside them, has 
 itself intrinsic worth. 
 
 There is, indeed, a sense in which Instnmientalism, though 
 not novel, would, as I think, be tenable. Everything in the 
 world or in our life can, that is, be regarded as a means. No 
 element apart from all the rest will retain its value, and each 
 therefore, we may say, has worth only in so far as it conduces 
 to the welfare of the Whole. But on the other hand the value of 
 the Whole is not separable from that of its diverse aspects, and in 
 the end, apart from any one of them, it is reduced to nothmg. 
 In the above sense Instrumentalism, I "hould say, is true, so long 
 as you emphasize the fact that everything alike (though not to the 
 same degree) is an instrmnent, and so long as you insist that there 
 is nothing in Hfe which, viewed otherwise, has value. The instru- 
 ment in other words is such, only because it is not taken as a means 
 
IV INTRODUCTORY NOTE 69 
 
 to some end which fails to include itself as intrinsic and valuable. 
 But surely Instrumentalism, asserted in the above sense, would 
 be equivalent to its own denial. ' Instrumentalism ' in other 
 words, unless it is to be a misleading misnomer, should imply 
 in principle and throughout the acceptance of Mechanism. But, 
 so far as I see, considerations of this kind are ignored by 
 Pragmatism. 
 
 5. I do not know if any Pragmatist seriously takes his school 
 to have originated the Primacy of Will. Any such claim would 
 of course ignore the existence both of Fichte and Schelling,^ and 
 it would be another proof, where unfortunately no other proof is 
 wanted, that to our general public even such a writer as Schopen- 
 hauer remains unknown. And as for the idea that the pursuit of 
 truth and knowledge implies a desire for these objects, it is 
 a doctrine in which Pragmatists, like the rest of us, were or might 
 have been brought up. If one had perhaps not learnt it before, 
 one might at least have learnt it from Hegel. 
 
 6. My attitude remains the same in presence of the denial of 
 idle or useless truths, and the assertion that a truth apart from 
 its working is not true. If this is Pragmatism, then surely Hegel 
 was long ago the Pragmatist far excellence, and I doubt if any 
 one who knows the facts would venture to deny this. The general 
 view, which others and myself may be said to have inherited, is 
 this — that the criterion lies in the idea of system. An idea is true 
 theoretically because, and so far as, it takes its place in, and 
 contributes to, the organism of knowledge. And, on the other 
 hand, an idea is false of which the opposite holds good. How can 
 there be any question here of separating an idea from its conse- 
 quences ? How could a true idea possibly make no difference to 
 anything else ? Of course, if, and so far as, consequences are 
 identified with the consequences which are practical, the case 
 is altered. But as long as we do not know what words like 
 ' practical ', ' action ', and ' working ' are to mean, any claim 
 to novelty here must remain ambiguous. 
 
 With regard to what is called verification the same remark 
 holds good. The necessity for, and again the ambiguity of, 
 verification, were topics for discussion long before any Pragma- 
 tist began to utter his boasts. What is to verify ? Is it to find 
 the object of an idea as a sensible event ? Is it to envisage an 
 • I refer specially to the latter's treatise on Human Freedom. 
 
70 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 ideal content clearly and convincingly, or to experience coercion 
 from ideas and their relations ? Is it to show that an idea, taken 
 for true, makes the body of our knowledge at once wider and more 
 consistent ? To maintain that insistence on verification in any 
 of the above senses is a new thing, would be surely to show oneself 
 grossly misinformed. The only real novelty left to Pragmatism 
 is the claim to verify truth by its practical results. But here we 
 have once more on our hands the question as to what ' practice ' 
 is to mean. And any serious attempt to define ' practice ', would, 
 or should, rend asunder the Pragmatist church. Such leaders, 
 at least, as the late Prof. James and Dr. Dewey appear on this 
 vital point to teach doctrines which are in radical conflict. ^ 
 
 It may perhaps be instructive if we allow ourselves here to 
 digress and go back to a writer whose work on certain topics it 
 is too much the fashion to ignore. More than half a century 
 ago Prof. Bain made belief consist in practice. The difference 
 between having a mere idea and holding it for true, lay, according 
 to him, in our practical action on and from the idea. Now if, 
 starting from Bain's view, we go on (as he did not) to write truth 
 for belief, we have what I took to be the essence of Pragmatism. 
 Judgement and truth are the practical working out of an idea by 
 me, and they are nothing else at all. Whether in this interpre- 
 tation I was mistaken or was right, is a point to which I will 
 return, but with regard to Bain I argued long ago that his doctrine 
 cannot stand.^ It is in conflict with fact, and it is not even held 
 consistently by himself. And what I find instructive is this, that 
 Prof. James and Dr. Dewey have repeated Bain's inconsis- 
 tency. Unconscious apparently both of his doctrine and of the 
 objections brought against it, they are forced by the same false 
 principle to the same vicious procedure. 
 
 In maintaining that behef consisted in practical action Bain 
 had to face the fact that we sometimes believe in an idea on 
 which we do not act. He answered that here, if we do not act, 
 we at least, if called on, should do so. This he called ' prepared- 
 ness to act ', and he considered that by this distinction his theory 
 was saved. To the obvious objection that one cannot at discretion 
 identify the possible with the actual, he, so far as I am aware, 
 did not attempt to reply. The truth is that unless permitted, 
 
 ' For evidence of this the reader is referred to Chap. V (Appendix I). 
 " Principles of Logic (1883), pp. 18 ff. 
 
IV INTRODUCTORY NOTE 71 
 
 wherever they please, to treat mere possibilities as actual fact, 
 while never so much as asking what is meant by ' possible ', Bain 
 and J. S. Mill, together with their whole school, are in principle 
 bankrupt.^ 
 
 And, apparently unaware of this open pitfall. Prof. James 
 and Dr. Dewey seek to escape from a like difficulty by the same 
 misleading road. In presence of ideas which do not actually 
 issue in practice, they take refuge in some prospective or potential 
 action, assisting themselves with what I must venture to call 
 mythology or verbiage. The evidence for this fact is given later ,^ 
 and I will leave the reader, if satisfied as to the fact, to draw 
 the appropriate conclusion. 
 
 To pass from this inconsistency, I shall be told that Pragma- 
 tism does not identify truth with the idea which works best for 
 the individual, and that hence the following chapter, or much of 
 it, does not bear on Pragmatism. I fully accept the statement 
 of fact made on this point by Prof. James,^ but in the matter 
 of principle I remain unconvinced. For, if Pragmatism repudiates 
 the doctrine that the idea which most works practically in and 
 for the individual is true, the question is what foundation, and 
 whether any foundation at all, is left to Pragmatism. On this 
 essential point I have failed to gain assistance from either 
 Dr. Dewey or Prof. James. The idea that works ' on the whole ' 
 may, so far as I see, conflict with the idea which works in and for 
 me. And for the subordination of one of these aspects to the 
 other I can find no reason in principle. The conflict might indeed 
 be avoided by an external coincidence which everywhere occurs 
 between these two aspects. But the assertion or postulation of 
 such a coincidence I cannot attribute to either of the writers 
 mentioned. 
 
 What on the other hand I find is an apparent difference between 
 these two leaders, which, if developed, would lead, so far as I can 
 judge, to open schism. Dr. Dewey, I understand, stoutly holds 
 to Instrumentahsm, to the denial of intrinsic worth to theory, 
 and he still maintains the principle that the idea which works 
 practically is the truth. Prof. James on the contrary ended 
 
 ' I had to make the same criticism on the same fallacy in connexion 
 with the doctrine of pleasure taught by Bain, Mind, O.S., No. 47, p. 18. 
 I have had to return to this same point again later. 
 
 ' Chap. V (Appendix I). » Ibid. 
 
72 ON TRUTH AND rKACllCii CHAP. 
 
 (however he began) by using ' practice ' as a mere general name 
 for the Good, by the allowing of intrinsic value to theory, and 
 perhaps also to fine art, and in short he seems implicitly to 
 repudiate Instrumentalism, however vague and inconsistent 
 that repudiation may be. Even on the word ' practical ' he 
 apparently ceased to lay any emphasis.^ And whether on these 
 heads there is not an actual split between his doctrine and that 
 held by Dr. Dewey, the reader must judge. And, like myself, 
 he may be led to wonder what, if Pragmatism meant no more 
 than it meant at last to Prof. James, has become of Pragmatism. 
 If theory after all, as theory, is ' practical ', and, as theory, has 
 intrinsic value, the revolutionary Pragmatic Church seems to 
 have been built on something like self-imposture. On the other 
 hand, if strict Instrumentalism remains the orthodox creed, then 
 apparently Prof. James, and those who follow him, have ceased 
 really to be Pragmatists. But perhaps Dr. Dewey, who fortu- 
 nately is still with us, can show how all this is otherwise. 
 
 7. Further, Pragmatism, it may be urged, lays an emphasis 
 on the genetic, on the historical, side of things. The intellectual 
 aspect of human nature is, it insists, to be understood, Uke every 
 other aspect, apart from abstraction. Knowledge is to be viewed 
 as it arises inseparably intertwined with every other factor in 
 human development.^ Philosophy must be studied, in short, from 
 the point of view of history or psychology. Now I am sure that 
 such a contention is both useful and welcome, though its claim to be 
 novel, I confess, surprises me. This is, however, a question which 
 I will leave to others, better informed, to discuss. But that such 
 a view is to be identified with Pragmatism to myself seems 
 incredible. For a doctrine like the above is surely as easy to 
 understand and to state plainly, as it is difficult to apply and to 
 carry out in detail ; while on the other side the inability of 
 Pragmatism, so far, to make its position generally understood, 
 seems even admitted. And again, whatever else it is, Pragma- 
 tism claims to be the denial in principle and the supersession 
 in practice of the mass of previous philosophy. The real essence 
 
 ' The reader is referred specially to The Meaning of Truth, pp. 206-11. 
 The strength of the language used there by Prof. James suggests to my 
 mind some awareness on his part of the weakness of his case. Cf . Chap. V 
 (Appendix I). 
 
 ^ ' II y aura,' Balzaf has said, ' toujours de I'homme dans la science 
 humaine. ' 
 
IV INTRODUCTORY NOTE 73 
 
 then of Pragmatism is perhaps to deny that there is anything 
 in truth, in beauty, and even perhaps in reedity at large, except 
 its appearance in human development. Nothing, in other words, 
 is at all except as, and just as far as, it occurs as a human event. 
 The inconsistency and irrationality of such a view, when you 
 work it out, soon becomes obvious, and Pragmatism has naturally 
 here preferred to remain obscure and ambiguous. Still that in 
 such a position, if it were made clear, there would be anything 
 new is not easily credited.^ 
 
 I would end by repeating that which I remarked at the begin- 
 ning. Pragmatism seems a collection' of various tendencies, in 
 part inconsistent one with the other, and to a large extent left 
 undefined. In the minds of some of its exponents it seems 
 identified with blind reaction against other views, themselves 
 imperfectly understood. Pragmatism, so far as it is positive, 
 seems to be not so much a doctrine as the expression of a desire, 
 or rather of two separate desires or half-conscious drifts. The 
 one of these seeks perhaps to find a consistent philosophy of 
 Darwinism, while the other aims perhaps to reach a view which 
 will be just to every side of man's nature and will satisfy the 
 entirety of human interest. But whether these two ends conflict 
 or are in harmony, Pragmatism does not know, and does not 
 inquire. 
 
 There is an opportunity here, I think a great opportunity, for 
 the Pragmatist who is wiUing, and who is able, to go to work 
 radically and systematically. Such a man will have in the first 
 place to be in earnest with scepticism, and he must know enough 
 to be able to understand what a thorough scepticism means. And 
 he will have learnt to distrust his own prejudices, even when 
 directed against that which he is pleased to call Intellectuahsm 
 and Absolutism. But whatever else he may discover, such a man 
 will most assuredly find that he himself is face to face with the old 
 question, the unavoidable problem. What is Reahty ? 
 
 The following article, I have already intimated, if taken as 
 a criticism on what is called Pragmatism, is in some points not 
 defensible. In it Pragmatism is too much identified with Personal 
 
 ' For a discussion on Genetic Theory in Logic the reader may be referred 
 to Prof. Bosanquefs Logic (Ed. II), vol. ii, chap. vii. 
 
74 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap, iv 
 
 Idealism, as I understood that movement, and is assumed to be 
 a kind of individualistic voluntarism. But neither individualism 
 nor even perhaps voluntarism seems to be a necessary feature 
 of Pragmatism. I should now doubt if there is a single doctrine 
 which a Pragmatist is called on to hold, so long at least as he 
 abjures Intellectualism — whatever (I once more add) that may 
 mean. In this introductory note, and in later chapters, the 
 reader will find, I hope, a more correct treatment of Pragmatism. 
 But I have judged it better (except for omissions mentioned) to 
 reprint my old article. It contains matter which, I beheve, may 
 be useful to the reader, and it is even, I still think, a refutation of 
 the principle of Pragmatism, if, that is, we are able to suppose 
 that Pragmatism has any principle. And for various reasons 
 I have not cared to re-write it. I will add here the greater part 
 of what was the footnote to its opening sentence : 
 
 This paper was written in the early summer of 1903, and has 
 been left much as it was. I have, however; since that date made 
 acquaintance with the interesting volume called Studies in Logical 
 Theory. There is much in the position taken here by Prof. Dewey 
 and the other writers which seems to me to be suggestive and 
 valuable. On the other hand that position as a whole has not 
 become clear to me. I agree that there is no such existing thing 
 as pure thought. On the other side, if in the end there is to be 
 no such thing as independent thought, thought, that is, which in 
 its actual exercise takes no account of the psychological situation, 
 I am myself in the end led inevitably to scepticism. And on this 
 point I have so far failed to gain any assistance from Prof. Dewey. 
 The doctrine that every judgement essentially depends on the 
 entire psychical state of the individual and derives from this its 
 falsehood or truth, is, I presume, usually taken to amount to com- 
 plete scepticism. This is a matter which doubtless Prof. Dewey 
 has considered, and a discussion of it by him would I am sure be 
 welcomed. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 
 
 I. In maintaining that truth essentially does not consist 
 in the mere practical working of an idea, I would first of all 
 remove a probable misunderstanding. For myself I have 
 always held that at the beginning of its course the intellect 
 directly subserves practice, and that between practice and 
 theory there is as yet no possible division. I have expressed 
 this belief long ago,^ and I have repeated it since, as I 
 believe, unequivocally and plainly. Again I hold that in 
 the end theory and practice are one. I believe in short that 
 each is a one-sided aspect of our nature. And for me the 
 ultimate reality is not a mere aspect or aspects, but it is 
 a unity in which every distinction is at once maintained and 
 subordinated. On the other hand, wherever the word ' truth' 
 has its meaning, that meaning to me cannot be reduced 
 to bare practical effect. And at our human level, and 
 throughout at least some tracts of our life, the words ' true ' 
 and ' false ' have to me most certainly a specific meaning. 
 The nature of this I cannot here attempt to point out,^ 
 but I hold that it is other than the mere fact that an idea 
 works or fails practically. It is on account of this denial, 
 I presume, that I am to be termed an ' intellectualist ', and 
 this denial I will now proceed to justify. The view that 
 truth everywhere subserves practice directly seems to me 
 contrary to fact ; but, even where this is the case, truth 
 itself is not merely practical. This distinction appears, as 
 I have said, to be often ignored. At an early and unreflec- 
 tive stage of mind no idea will be retained unless it works 
 practically, or unless at least it practically satisfies me. 
 
 ' Principles of Logic, pp. 459-60. On the position of practice in life see 
 further the note at the end of this chapter. 
 ' [The reader is now referred to other parts of this volume.] 
 
76 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 We can have at this level no reflection on disappointment, 
 failure and falsehood. And hence I agree that here there is 
 no truth except where an idea works practically. But to go 
 from this to the conclusion that truth's essence even here hes 
 wholly in such working, is a further step which to me seems 
 not permissible. The idea works, but it is able to work not 
 simply because it is there and because I have chosen it. It 
 is able to work because, in short, I have chosen the right idea. 
 
 Everywhere in conation and wiU there is an idea which 
 is opposed to existence. And this existence nowhere is 
 characterless, but it is a determinate being. And the char- 
 acter of this being again is not something inert. On the 
 contrary it is an element in the whole situation, and it 
 dictates to my idea as well as submits to dictation. If my 
 idea is the right one, and if it works, this, we may say, is 
 because the nature of the whole situation selected it. My 
 idea, I agree, then reacts, and I agree that it then makes the 
 situation to be different. But to speak as if the entire nature 
 of the situation were first made by the idea seems really 
 extravagant. If my idea is to work it must correspond to 
 a determinate being which it cannot be said to make. And 
 in this correspondence, I must hold, consists from the very 
 first the essence of truth. I will proceed to show this first 
 on the positive side, and then again where in failure and in 
 falsehood we meet the opposite of truth. But I shall take 
 our experience now at a level more removed from its lowest 
 point, and shall consider it at a stage where reflection is 
 possible. 
 
 (a) The fact which first offers itself is the case of finding 
 means to a positive end. I desire, let us say, to cross a 
 stream in order to gather fruit. The stream is swollen, and 
 there is hence a gap between my idea and its reality. On 
 this let us suppose that I retain my general idea of crossing, 
 and that other ideas as to the particular manner of crossing 
 are suggested. This is in the main what we understand by 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE T] 
 
 finding means to an end. Now these ideas, I agree, may all 
 be said to be practical ideas. My end will remain my cross- 
 ing somehow, and the means will probably consist in my 
 doing something so as to cross. But these means surely 
 must correspond to the actual nature of the stream, and 
 surely to suggest that my ideas manufacture that corre- 
 spondence is absurd. The stream is wider lower down, so 
 that there I may wade. The stream is full of rocks higher 
 up, so that there I may leap. If I will only wait quietly 
 the stream is falling of itself. If I will only sit still, my 
 companion has promised that he will come with a float. 
 My end is practical doubtless, and my means still are the 
 idea of myself doing something — if at least you stretch that 
 so as to include my waiting till something happens of itself 
 or is done by another. But when you ask what it is which 
 makes each idea right or wrong, you cannot exclude its 
 agreement or its discord with fact other than my will. And 
 to ignore this aspect of the case, or to treat this aspect as if 
 it were something somehow immaterial, to my mind, I must 
 repeat, is wholly unprofitable. In selecting my means I am 
 forced to consider their relation to the facts, and, if my idea 
 works, it is because of this relation which is not made by my 
 idea. And it is in this relation that we have to seek the 
 distinctive nature of truth. Or we may say that the whole 
 situation, inward and outward, dictates to me the selection 
 of such an idea as can work, and that hence to treat this 
 conge d'elire merely as my act on the situation is a foolish 
 pretence. Let us take again the case where I go hunting 
 and where my end is the capture of some beast. I obviously 
 here may have to reflect carefully on the nature of the means. 
 Where the animal is, and what it is likely to do under certain 
 conditions, all this I may have to infer from a general know- 
 ledge of its nature and from a variety of indications that 
 I gather from facts now perceived. And, if others are to 
 co-operate, I have to take account also of their natures and 
 
78 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 of their probable conduct. The whole of this is fact to 
 which my idea has got first to correspond. It has, that is, 
 first to be true as a condition of its working. On the other 
 side doubtless the idea of the means is dependent on the 
 end, and doubtless, if you remove the end, you remove at 
 one stroke the idea and its truth. But from this you cannot 
 logically conclude that the entire truth was made by your 
 end and your ideas. It would be as rational first to insist 
 that without the given facts there are in fact no ideas and 
 no truth, and then go on to infer that in the end truth and 
 will consist barely in what comes to my mind. 
 
 (b) I shall be charged, I do not doubt, with idle insistence 
 on the obvious. But where I understand little more than 
 that there is a denial of what to me are plain facts, no course 
 is possible to me except thus to insist on the obvious. And 
 so I proceed to view the facts from their negative side. 
 When, at a certain mental stage, I fail, I do not at this stage 
 merely try again and again, but I retain my failures and use 
 them to determine my conduct. My being carried away 
 by the stream if I attempt to cross here, my falling amongst 
 the rocks if I try to cross there, my being captured by my 
 enemies if I remain where I am — these ideas remove possi- 
 bilities and they qualify the situation by narrowing it. They 
 are practical ideas, and in the end they may subserve another 
 idea which actually works. But, taken in and by them- 
 selves, you can hardly say that they work directly. On the 
 other hand, however indirectly, they do seem to make an 
 assertion about things which are other than my will. And 
 taken as ideas of my ' doing ' they have to fall under the 
 head of ' avoiding '. But that avoidance is based, I submit, 
 on what things do to me. It depends on a character in things 
 which hinders me or even actively makes me suffer. For 
 we are not to say, I presume, that I avoid evils merely 
 because of my desire to do something in the way of avoid- 
 ance. We may see this more evidently where I am not 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 79 
 
 engaged in any positive pursuit, but where a danger threatens 
 me from which terrified I desire to escape. It is dusk and 
 the man-eating tiger will be coming, and I do not know how 
 to avoid him whether by this course or by that. And surely, 
 in order to find some idea which will ' do ', I must before 
 all things consider his nature and what he on his side is 
 likely to do. The same thing is evident again where my 
 enemies are human. My end is practical, but surely my 
 ideas about the means must be dictated to me by something 
 which is clearly not myself. And this forced agreement 
 of my ideas with a nature other than my volition is, I pre- 
 sume, that which in general we understand by truth. 
 
 And there are moments when nothing works and where 
 every idea fails. I am starving, but I am helpless for I can- 
 not climb to reach the fruit. I am dying of thirst, but my 
 legs are broken and I cannot move to reach the water. I am 
 tortured by an internal pain which I can do nothing to 
 assuage. And here I need not idly repeat my futile efforts 
 until exhaustion and stupor supervene. I may realize my 
 fate and I may become aware that this now is my doom. 
 The nature of that which is opposed to my will has triumphed. 
 Or I may see my companion in the jaws of some inevitable 
 danger where I am impotent. This to me is true, it has 
 whatever truth belongs to death, pain and evil, but I hardly 
 know in what sense it is an idea which works. You may 
 possibly reply that suffering and death are undeniably prac- 
 tical, and that my idea at any rate exactly meets the 
 practical situation. But to me there is more sense in the 
 old view that my idea meets the situation theoretically 
 and not practically. The idea of a failure in another or 
 of failure in myself surely here does not itself produce 
 the failure, and, if it did so, surely that would be the worst 
 failure of all. And to make here the agreement of my idea 
 with facts into a practical success, would be the mark of 
 insanity rather than of philosophy or common sense. The 
 
8o ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 idea of avoidance is here an idea which obviously cannot 
 carry itself out. And the reflection that failure is but the 
 deferred and assured coming of triumph, if such aji idea 
 were suggested to creatures in these straits, might seem to 
 them the one idea which above all others neither works 
 theoretically nor practically.^ 
 
 There is indeed an ancient doctrine for which no power 
 in the end is mere force, and which finds no evil in the world 
 except for self-will. And the self that can apprehend all 
 force and all suffering as in the end will and love, does 
 
 ' It may be said that every idea, even of failure, works successfully in 
 producing a corresponding attitude or other change in my body or some 
 part of it. I agree that, to speak in general, an idea tends thus to express 
 itself emotionally. This in brief is one aspect of an idea's general tendency 
 to realize itself. But this way of realization in emotional expression is not 
 to be confounded with the other specific ways which we call thought and 
 will. Every one, we may say, in practice would distinguish a gesture or 
 a blush from a volition or a judgement. The mere emotional expression 
 of an idea is in short not my act, and you cannot attribute it to my will. 
 Again this emotional expression of the idea, if for the sake of argument 
 we assume it everywhere to exist, cannot possibly, I presume, be more 
 than generic. It must therefore fail to correspond to the individuality of 
 the idea. And again it depends so much upon the psychical liveliness of the 
 idea, that an idea counted false may possibly express itself more forcibly 
 than an idea which is taken to be true. We should in short here have 
 a doctrine in principle the same with Hume's theory of belief, and open 
 to the objections which seem fatal to that theory. The emotional expression 
 of an idea or of one aspect of an idea is, we may say, a mere incidental result 
 from the strength and dominance of that idea or its aspect. Any attempt 
 to find in it the specific essence of truth and falsehood in the end must break 
 down. But in any case, so far as what is called Pragmatism is concerned, 
 to fall back on such a doctrine would be suicidal. For this emotional 
 expression is plainly not will. It is the working of an idea on me, and it is 
 not my working. We have here a psychical efiEect and not properly an act 
 of mine. It would (to pass to another point) be interesting to know how 
 our new gospel conceives its relation to Dr. Bain's theory of belief. It might 
 seem to have taken that theory, and, without considering the objections to 
 which it is liable, to have gone beyond it by simply writing ' truth ' for 
 ' belief '. 
 
 Every idea of course works by inhibiting so far the action of other ideas. 
 And, «ince these other ideas may be practical, every idea, if you please, 
 is practical negatively. But on the other hand surely it is clear that the 
 meaning of truth is something positive. Truth surely can never be barely 
 negative, nor can you find its essence in its mere prevention of the happen- 
 ing of something else. In fact here, eis everywhere, it is in the end nonsense 
 to take anything as consisting merely in inhibition. 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 8i 
 
 itself thus succeed and does triumph even in its own anguish 
 and despair. And the way to this end, however hard, is 
 at least familiar, for it is the open secret that has been 
 revealed by the Teachers of the East, and, whatever you 
 like to say against it theoretically, it is a faith which cer- 
 tainly can work. But this is the way which our new gospel 
 of personal individualism seems to advertise as henceforth 
 closed. At least if my ideas and my will, or the will and the 
 ideas of any man or set of men, are to be the measure of 
 truth, then, so far as I see, the reality cannot he beyond 
 the private ends of individuals. And to realize the self 
 by self-surrender to the supreme will, must, I presume, be 
 set down as at once irrational and immoral. For there is 
 not, I understand, and there ought not to be any will which 
 is supreme, and really sole master of the world, and lord 
 of suffering and of sin and of death. And again in no possible 
 case could any will which is quite external to my own 
 become really and in truth something personal to myself. 
 
 But at this point our new gospel, it seems to me, begins to 
 falter, and it seems evasively to point to an ambiguous way 
 of escape. If the world and its power which confront me 
 are the funded accumulations made by striving beings (Mind, 
 N.S., No. 45, p. 94), then after all the world can be no force 
 which is alien to my will. But such a plea to my mind 
 sounds like trifling or like mockery. For to view ourselves 
 as insects on a coral reef is hardly a solution which works. 
 If the world in fact is hostile to my will, then it does not 
 cease to be hostile because others like myself have had the 
 same or a different experience before me. They have 
 altered the world, I know, and they have improved it, if 
 you will, but they have not altered it so that it does not 
 oppose me.i No gratitude of mine for past efforts will 
 transform the living fact, and no belief in some happier 
 
 ' I shall deal lower down with the apparent claim that my world has 
 thus been actually made and not merely altered. 
 1574 G 
 
82 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 future, when I am past, can serve to change the actual 
 present. If indeed to me there were no force in the world 
 but the veiled love of God, if the wills in the past were one 
 in effort and in substance with the one Will, if in that Will 
 they are living still and still so are loving, and if again by 
 faith, suffering, and love my will is made really one with 
 theirs — here indeed we should have found at once our 
 answer and our refuge. But with this we should pass surely 
 beyond the limits of any personal individualism. For this 
 we must have more than the mere accumulation of several 
 efforts. We cannot rest in a God who is no more omnipotent 
 than one of ourselves, and who, though animated, I dare say, 
 by the best intentions, cannot answer for the unknown force 
 which confronts himself and us.^ And, as I understand, 
 the remedy is for us to discard such perverted wants and 
 such unnatural desires. We shall find our glad tidings in the 
 unfailing advertisements of the new way in philosophy, where 
 every doubt and all disease has found its certain cure, and 
 where at last every tub can stand upright on its own bottom. 
 
 II. I will pass on to consider another aspect of the case. 
 We often hear a cry which seems to set forth the virtues of 
 practice. But, when before all things I seek to understand 
 in what this practice consists, then I scarce can apprehend 
 a word which to me is intelligible. And, since my ignorance 
 and perhaps my bias is not peculiar to myself, I will venture 
 without apology once more to lay bare the nakedness of my 
 mind. 
 
 A young man frequently hears it said, why cannot you 
 take up something practical ? Why cannot you, in other 
 words, place your first end in what is called a comfortable 
 life, and seek to eat and to drink and to reproduce your 
 
 ' Instead of ' a God ' I should perhaps have written ' a God or a set of 
 gods '. Our new gospel seems not to have decided at present whether 
 monotheism or polytheism is to be the creed of the future. I should be 
 inclined to agree that from a religious point of view the difference in this 
 case has no importance. 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 83 
 
 species, while enjoying the social consideration and the 
 amusements of the average man ? And the young man 
 may reply that, so far as he sees, this would not bring him 
 happiness. He prefers to place his chief end perhaps in art 
 or in science, or again in the excitement of the chase or of 
 gaming or amours, or possibly, it may even be, in some form 
 of mystical religion. And to seek my happiness, he would 
 exclaim, however far away from what the world calls practi- 
 cal, how can there be for me any course more practical than 
 this ? ^ And evidently here there is a failure to use words 
 on each side with a common meaning. Our confusion may 
 be further heightened when we reflect on the one hand that 
 everything in our lives must be practical. For conduct is 
 practical, and nothing that we are and do can possibly, it 
 seems, be external to conduct. But on the other hand in 
 at least some men we seem to discover non-practical wants. 
 We seem to find a desire for the cultivation of truth or 
 beauty for their own sakes, or even a longing for the con- 
 templative absorption in the eternal. And thus while on 
 the one side every desire and every want must be practical, 
 on the other side some practical aims seem to entail the 
 subordination of practice. 
 
 These famihar doubts, idle to those minds which have 
 risen far above doubt, to other minds have suggested serious 
 questionings. And I will go on briefly to state that which 
 has served as perhaps a sufficient answer. My practice may 
 be called in general the alteration by me of existence, inward 
 and outward, and ' existence ' we may understand as what 
 happens or as the series of events.^ And since, whatever 
 else it is, my whole life certainly is a process in time, certainly 
 everything which I am or do has, or may have, this practical 
 
 ' Cf. Prof. A. E. Taylor, Elements of Metaphysics, p. 317. 
 
 ' [Cf. Principles of Logic, p. 18. The objection that will does not always 
 aim at alteration, but sometimes at prevention of change, was long ago 
 made by Lotze. In Mind for October 1892, pp. 339, 440, I noticed and 
 discussed this objection. It has been urged against me since, I believe, 
 and without any reference to Lotze or myself.] 
 
 G 2 
 
84 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 aspect.^ Our being is realized, we know, by maintaining 
 ourselves and our race against natural accident and decay. 
 We have to eat and to drink and to multiply our kind. 
 Then again there is our life in the family and in society. 
 We are born into and enter into wholes wider than our- 
 selves, and in these the individual linds his own self in its 
 connexion with other men, and has his being in their con- 
 sideration and also their love for him. But now let us suppose 
 further that a man is able to go even beyond this. Let us 
 suppose him capable of pursuing and of enjoying truth and 
 beauty for themselves, and able to find his own nature 
 realized in the unselfish love of these objects. Such a 
 supposition, I am aware, is in principle contrary to indivi- 
 dualism, but our discordance with individualism (by what- 
 ever new name it likes to call itself) has begun long before 
 such a point had been reached. However that may be, 
 let us suppose that a man can in fact desire and can enjoy 
 for its own sake what is beautiful and true. These objects 
 on one side exist for his theoretical activity, and they involve 
 obviously and necessarily an alteration of his personal 
 existence. They and their pursuits are therefore practical, 
 how intensely practical is known to all who have experience 
 of the facts.^ Alteration of existence is implied inseparably 
 in the being of truth, but truth, to confine ourselves here 
 
 1 [The word ' practice ' lays stress on the alteration of existence, I do 
 not mean merely outward existence. Now obviously every purpose 
 carried out must alter the series of events, and every purpose therefore is 
 obviously from one side practical. But this does not mean that the interest 
 and the object aimed at are always practical, except incidentally. This 
 plain distinction the Pragmatist has failed to see, and hence is led at one 
 time to inveigh against the theoretical interest, and at another time to 
 admit it, and in each CEise blindly. Even in the year 1909 Prof. James was 
 still evidently confused as to what ' practical ' means {Meaning of Truth, 
 p. 209). Prof. James appears to me to be attempting here under the stress 
 of criticism to carry out an inquiry which obviously should have come first, 
 and should have been made independently.] 
 
 " There is an admirable passage on this subject in Balzac's Cousine Bette, 
 which is, I hope, well known to the reader. The only reference I can give 
 is to pp. 179-81 of vol. xvii of the edition of 1865. 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 85 
 
 to truth, has another side also. And, when you take in 
 this side, you cannot say that the essence of truth consists 
 in a change made in or made by this or that individual. 
 The angles of a triangle may, if you will, not exist outside 
 of the geometer's head, but their equality to two right 
 angles is hardly nothing but a present change made in him. 
 The laws of the planets and stars, we believe, in part revealed 
 themselves truly to Newton, but the revelation, if so, was 
 something more than a mere personal event. It is only 
 in poetry that America rose from the waves at the will of 
 Columbus, and even in poetry the America which appeared 
 was a thing found as well as done. There is for us no truth, 
 we may say, save that which discovers itself to us. The 
 finding of truth is on one side an alteration of the world, 
 but this alteration on the other side does not ^ contain the 
 truth itself which is found. It is impossible to make the 
 truth a mere deed and a mere outcome and a mere adjective 
 of the person who discovers or enjoys it. As my theoretical 
 activity it is a practical change in my existence, but as my 
 object it has another character and a different purpose. 
 Its essence cannot lie merely in that which I do either to 
 myself or to the world. 
 
 The gospel of practice for the sake of practice, and every- 
 thing else for the sake of practice, makes, I doubt not, a good 
 cry. But it will satisfy in the end only those who have not 
 asked what practice is. Practice we have found to consist 
 in my alteration of existence. Now, if we take this as our 
 «nd, we seem to place the end in mere quantity of being and 
 change. Our end must be being and doing, maintained and 
 reproduced, without regard to any quality possessed by it, 
 except of course so far as difference in quality goes to sub- 
 serve quantity. But such an end is hardly what in general 
 men seek or can desire, and it will, I think, be obvious to 
 any one that in his own case he would not care for mere 
 
 » [' does not," that is, ' as such.' See Chap. XI.] 
 
86 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 increase of being apart from quality. We might of course 
 set up mere pleasure in abstraction as our end, and we might 
 endeavour to subordinate consistently every other aspect of 
 our being to this one reality. Truth and falsehood would 
 in this way become mere increase and decrease of pleasure. 
 And these characters would be no facts to be ascertained by 
 an independent intellect, since the whole of their truth and 
 reality would have to consist in their accordance with my 
 present feeling. This is a view which, so far as I know, no 
 Hedonist among us has advocated,^ and in any case it would 
 hardly square with the gospel of practice. And hence, 
 unless I am to take mere quantity of doing as my end, I can 
 myself find in the end no sense in the cry of practice for 
 practice' sake. 
 
 And, if I may be allowed to put on one side things which 
 I am unable to comprehend, I would venture to state in 
 a few words how I understand the relation of practice to 
 life. The end I take to be the fullest and most harmonious 
 development of our being, and, though I will not deny that 
 this coincides with the largest amount of mere doing,^ the 
 latter aspect I must regard as but incidental. Now, if our 
 being is to be realized, its main functions must be regarded 
 as ends, and every side of our nature in being realized will 
 thus assuredly be practical. For, to speak in the main, 
 whatever we are and whatever we acquire, becomes and 
 remains ours only on the condition that we are active and 
 doing. Thus everything in life, to speak once more in the 
 main, is a practical end, and every possible side of our life 
 is practical. But among these ends and aspects there is 
 on the other hand an important difference,^ for we are forced 
 to deny in a sense that some of them are practical. Some of 
 them, that is, do not involve the alteration of existence except 
 
 ^ Cf. Appearance, p. 374, and Chap. XI of this volume. 
 ' I wish here neither to deny nor to assert this. The question is a 
 difficult one. 
 
 ' I have further enlarged on this point below, pp. 101-6. 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 87 
 
 incidentally, while with the rest this alteration is, in various 
 senses and degrees, essential and vital. Eating and drinking, 
 and life in the family and in society and the state, may be 
 called practical essentially. Our actual existence in time 
 and in space has in various senses to be changed by all of 
 these functions. And in addition their contents can be 
 said to fall within the world of what we do and make. Their 
 product can be said in the main to qualify that existence 
 which we produce and alter. And further the arts and 
 sciences which subserve these ' practical ' ends, are them- 
 selves, so far as they subserve these, practical also. But 
 the attitude of mere theory and of mere apprehension is 
 on the other hand not practical. It has to alter things, 
 but, so far as it remains independent, its chief end and main 
 purpose does not consist in any such alteration. Truths 
 must exist in a mind, and, to exist in it, they must come 
 there, and, to speak roughly and in the main, they must 
 also be brought there. And so of course, in order to exist, 
 they must alter that mind. But the truth itself does not 
 consist in its existence in me. Neither I nor any other man 
 can make truth and make falsehood what they are.^ Truth 
 may not be truth at all apart from its existence in myself 
 and in other finite subjects, and at least very largely that 
 existence depends on our wills. But, though I can find in 
 truth the satisfaction of a want, and though I can recognize 
 my own being in the possession of truth, yet on the other 
 side I cannot regard its nature as subject to my will. If 
 for its realization a change in myself is indispensable, I 
 cannot on the other hand say that its main being lies in 
 that alteration of existence. While truth is mere truth, 
 I do not even carry it out into the world. And to make its 
 essence a bare quality or a mere deed of our minds is to 
 destroy that essence. 
 The same thing holds again of what is beautiful in nature 
 
 1 [See further in Chap. XI.] 
 
88 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 or in art. The nature of that is in principle not subordinate 
 to an external end. We can make it to exist or appear, but 
 we cannot on the other hand make it to be that which it is. 
 Its character is something which is beyond my power, it is 
 something which I must recognize and cannot alter. So far 
 as it is a product it is a product which cannot be taken as 
 the mere adjective of the function or process. Beauty, in 
 other words, is from one side independent of our wills. It 
 is an end the specific nature of which is not subject to our 
 choice, and cannot consist in a relation to anything else 
 which is so subject. And if truth and beauty have this 
 character, and if on the other side truth and beauty are 
 human ends, then clearly we have ends which are not 
 practical. They are practical, that is to say, incidentally, 
 but not in their essence. Thus on the one side these ends 
 may be called independent, though on the other side they 
 must involve human need and desire. And hence, if our 
 life is to satisfy its desires, these ideal ends should be desired 
 and be pursued for themselves. And, viewed in this way, 
 it is clear that, though practical, they are still not subordinate 
 to practice. 
 
 If we take things from another side, then all, as we saw, 
 can fall under the practical end. For everything in life is 
 subject to life as a whole, and the end of morality is to 
 develop, to order and to harmonize, our human existence. 
 There is no element therefore to which the moral end is 
 unable to dictate, and even truth and beauty, however in- 
 dependent, fall under its sway. Beauty and truth therefore 
 are at once dependent and free. The moral end dictates to 
 us their pursuit and it sets limits to that pursuit. The space 
 which these objects are to occupy in my life, how far and 
 how long it is right for me to follow them, nay even to some 
 extent the kind of truth and beauty which I should ignore 
 or should follow, all this, it is obvious, is or may be the 
 affair of morality. But the nature of that which is to be 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 89 
 
 beautiful or true falls outside of the moral control. It is 
 the vision, and it is not the object, which is subject to our 
 wills. The ideal does enter into my life and it makes a part 
 of my existence, but it is only in one aspect that I can master 
 it and subject it to my power. And the practical human end 
 is, in very truth, to follow ends which in themselves assuredly 
 are not all practical or all merely human.^ 
 
 Any such creed is perhaps as obsolete as it is old and 
 familiar, and, if we believe the advocate of ' pragmatism ', 
 it is but foolishness and falsehood. And yet in philosophy, 
 if error is to be removed, it possibly after all should be 
 removed by discussion. It is hardly mere darkness to be 
 dispelled by the rising of some luminary however refulgent. 
 And yet, since neither of us seems to understand what the 
 other can be meaning, a rational discussion between the 
 ' personal idealist ' and any adherent of the old doctrine 
 seems unattainable. There is a view that the independent 
 use of the intellect is impossible, that the intellect has neither 
 freedom nor any being of its own, and that, except so far as 
 it consists in practice or again indirectly squints at practice, 
 the intellect is nothing. This view, to me at least, seems 
 contrary to the plain facts of human nature, and to me at 
 least this view seems to end in nonsense. There is again a 
 view that the independent use of the intellect is possible but 
 is undesirable, and this view again, though less obviously 
 absurd, seems to me indefensible. Certainly on my side I 
 should insist that any one-sided development is not desirable. 
 I should insist that the realization of any aspect of human 
 
 ' We may put it thus, that in the end the practical end must be the 
 Good, but that the Good, when you examine it, is plainly more than 
 mere practice. Or from the other side we may say that in the end there 
 is no criterion which is not practical, and that the true and the real will 
 in the end fall under the Good. But, when we have shown this, we find 
 ourselves forced on the other hand to make distinctions within the Good, 
 ■ and to recognize, as before, that the Good consists in more than practice. 
 And practice itself, when we examine it, will be found even in itself (I cannot 
 deal with this here) to involve and to depend upon judgement and truth. 
 
90 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 nature should, to speak in general, be limited by due regard 
 for the whole. But to distort this truth into a vicious error, 
 and to suppress wholly in its specific quality one main 
 function of my being, this is to me a deplorable and inhuman 
 mutilation. If you could show that the science and art 
 which fails to squint at practice is an evil excrescence, and 
 that like sexual aberration it perverts a desirable function, 
 the case would be altered. But the loud assertion of the 
 Personal Idealist ^ will not move those who have learned 
 otherwise from the facts. And it will move them the less 
 since they are convinced that the assertor, if he understood 
 his own doctrine, must hold any end, however perverted, 
 to be rational if I insist on it personally, and any idea, 
 however mad, to be the truth if only some one is resolved 
 that he will have it so. 
 
 The following of science for the sake of science and of art 
 for the sake of art is, if I may repeat what I have accepted, 
 to be kept within limits. Like every other side of human 
 nature it is thus subordinate to the welfare of the whole, but 
 on the other hand within its own limits it should be per- 
 fectly free. This relative freedom is even dictated by the 
 interest of the spiritual commonwealth ; and hence this 
 freedom is in the end the most practical course, if we take 
 ' practice ' in anything but a limited sense. And it will be 
 a mistake in practice after all, when you take our world as 
 a whole, to seek to banish from it the pursuit of unworldly 
 objects and ends. But you do in effect condemn these 
 pursuits, you vitiate their nature and you destroy them, 
 when you sentence them to keep throughout at least one 
 eye upon the world. On the one hand obviously our 
 
 > Personal Idealism, -p. 8$. I shall briefly notice lower down the difficulty 
 which arises with regard to a knowledge that truth ought not to be inde- 
 pendent. Clearly this truth also is dependent, but it is hard to say on what. 
 [In reprinting this paper I should perhaps add that the particular example 
 of perversion, given in the text, does not itself appear in the passage referred 
 to. It is, however, fully justified by its general statement, and on this point 
 I should be glad if the reader would satisfy himself.] 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 91 
 
 available supply of energy is limited. On the other hand, 
 if due regard is had to this limit, the independent cultiva- 
 tion of any one main side of our nature promises advantage, 
 for it promises (at least to those who hold to the unity of 
 that nature) to react and to contribute to the general good.^ 
 We believe in short in relative freedom, and we do not 
 believe in divorce or in one-sided suppression. And we do 
 not believe that the way to advance our human nature is 
 to subordinate all of it to one aspect — I do not care what 
 that aspect is. At the beginning, I agree, there is no distinc- 
 tion between theory and practice, and again I am clear that 
 there is none in the end. But on the other hand our human 
 life is to me assuredly neither all beast-like nor all divine. 
 And, if I am so far condemned to follow a philosopher who 
 lived before the coming of the new light, I am for my part 
 well content to share in his darkness. 
 
 But I shall doubtless be told that the intelligence springs 
 from and depends upon need and desire. There is no under- 
 standing, it will be urged, and no truth, except where there 
 is an interest ; and since interest and want must be admitted 
 to be practical, we have here a clear proof that all in the end 
 is subordinate to practice. To myself, however, this proof 
 adduced by the logic of Pragmatism seems hardly to require 
 any serious discussion. To me it seems obvious that, if 
 some function belongs to our nature, there will be a need 
 and desire which corresponds to that function. Hence, if 
 the free use of the intellect is really one aspect of our being, 
 we shall in consequence have a need and a desire for that 
 use. And how this can prove that no interest is in the end 
 intellectual, I fail wholly to perceive. There is an attempt 
 
 * I have of course not forgotten that there are ' developments ' of 
 human nature which are undesirable and vicious. Why these are un- 
 desirable is a question which I cannot discuss here. The answer in general 
 is that such things not only are contrary to the interest of our whole nature, 
 but also are hostile to the realization of that very side of it to which they 
 belong. They therefore are not in the best sense developments but are 
 perversions of our nature. 
 
92 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 apparently to pass direct from ' my want must be practical ' 
 to the required conclusion with regard to the object of my 
 want. But since the doctrine attacked denies this con- 
 clusion, and since it holds that interest and want, practical 
 on one side, may nevertheless be directed on an object 
 which in itself is not practical, there is literally, so far as I 
 can see, no argument at all. All that I can find is the sheer 
 assumption that a certain view is mistaken, coupled appar- 
 ently with an entire failure to apprehend in what that view 
 essentially consists. And you might as well come to me and 
 offer to argue that I cannot want to look at a star, because 
 my vision and my want are always terrestrial. And you 
 might as well demonstrate to me that plainly I can love 
 nothing beyond me, because my love after all must be a 
 piece of myself. But the Personal Idealist, I imagine, is 
 likely to smile at my belated logic. 
 
 III. I will now attempt briefly to point out the various 
 senses in which we may try to subordinate truth to practice. 
 We have already learnt the ambiguity of any assertion that 
 truth is practical, but it may repay us to realize this ambi- 
 guity more in detail, even if that detail is far from exhausting 
 the subject. 
 
 (i) We may affirm that ' reason is the slave of the 
 passions '. We may hold that, except to find means to 
 a foreign end, truth is {a) idle and useless or (b) even 
 impossible, {a) The first of these statements does not deny 
 the possibility of a truth which is merely theoretical. It 
 denies it only so far as to insist that such a truth is worthless, 
 and that it therefore does not deserve to be called truth. 
 (b) The second statement on the other hand appears to make 
 an unqualified denial. But it seems inconsistent with itself 
 so far as it assumes an independent knowledge of means ; 
 for any such knowledge would appear to contain truth 
 which so far is theoretical. Further the doctrine that the 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 93 
 
 world and my nature are of such a kind that all truth must 
 be practical, appears itself, so far, to be a truth which is 
 theoretical and therefore is no truth. 
 
 (2) We may from this proceed to a position with which we 
 all are more or less familiar. Truth, we may hear, is after 
 all nothing but working hypothesis. We have truth when 
 we can say of an idea that it will ' do ', and an idea will ' do ' 
 only when, and so far as, it will work. There is, in short, 
 no meaning in truth other than the idea which works best. 
 This general statement, however, admits of more than one 
 interpretation, (a) It might mean that truth is the idea 
 which works best theoretically. There is in other words 
 here no truth in the sense of something which is given 
 as absolute. There are no data which we may assume and on 
 which we may build as certain each by itself. All is material, 
 in short, with which we experiment ideally, and the ideal 
 experiment which in the end best satisfies itself and us is 
 what we mean by truth. It is, however, obvious that, with 
 so much, truth has not become merely practical. Indeed 
 such a position would be consistent with an extreme intellec- 
 tualism. And on the other hand the doctrine that truth is 
 what works, usually means to make truth the mere servant 
 of something else. We may therefore pass on to consider 
 another meaning. (&) The order and series of my sensations 
 may be taken for granted, and truth may be regarded as 
 a construction which is formed out of these. The end for 
 which the construction is made may remain unspecified, 
 and at present at least this point may be ignored, for in any 
 case the doctrine has failed to make truth merely practical. 
 Truth is our construction, but truth is forced to start with 
 an order of sensations.. This order is in the main independent 
 of my choice and my will, and is a given fact which dictates 
 to me and to my choice of means. It is hence hard to see 
 how such a fact can be excluded and left outside of truth, 
 or how again such a fact is merely practical. ' Reality 
 
94 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 which in the outer order confronts me is such, that to reach 
 a certain end I am obUged to hold for true this or that ' — 
 a truth Uke this, I agree, is highly imperfect, but I cannot 
 see that it has ceased to be so far theoretical. Or, if we 
 enlarge our doctrine by ceasing to lay a one-sided stress 
 on what is outer, and if we call truth the ideal construction 
 based on the entire order of what happens, we have still, 
 so far as I see, made no advance in principle. Whatever 
 end we may desire, the means to this end are still dictated 
 by something which we have to call matter of fact ; and this 
 knowledge as to matter of fact still remains and must remain 
 at least in part theoretical. And our knowledge further 
 with regard to this entire state of things seems once more 
 truth which has not itself the character assigned by us to 
 all truth, (c) We may go on therefore to seek a remedy in 
 the removal of our one-sided prejudice. We may reject 
 the limitation of knowledge to the mere world of events 
 which happen, and may deny the claim of this world to be 
 taken as an ultimate foundation. ReaUty, or the Good,^ 
 will now be the satisfaction of all the wants of our nature, 
 and theoretical truth will be the perceptions and ideas 
 which directly satisfy one of those wants, and so indirectly 
 make part of the general satisfaction. This is a doctrine 
 which to my mind commends itself as true, though it 
 naturally would call for a great deal of explanation. But, 
 with this, evidently truth is not subordinate to practice. 
 It has a practical aspect, no doubt, but its whole essence 
 is not practical. Its end is an element in the general end, 
 and is in this sense subordinate ; but its end is not sub- 
 ordinate to any other partial aspect of the whole. And 
 practice on its side will be no more than such a partial 
 aspect. Hence, if truth is to be practical, this whole view 
 must be given up or else must be modified. And it must, 
 
 1 The Good is here taken once more in its highest sense, a sense in which 
 it has ceased to be merely practical and has ceased to be merely good. 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 93 
 
 I presume, be modified by the denial of any want save that 
 which in the end is practical in its essence. Truth will there- 
 fore once more become dependent and subordinate, and will 
 consist in the ideas which serve as external means to the 
 practical end. But, with this, we seem thrown back once 
 more into the midst of our old difficulties. For the nature 
 of things does not seem to depend upon and to consist in 
 subserviency to the practical want and choice of myself 
 or of any set of men. And on the other side truth seems 
 forced to take account of the whole nature of things. In 
 other words I may choose to isolate what I call my practical 
 end, but the means to that end must be prescribed largely by 
 something other than my choice. And since truth is forced 
 to express something which thus dictates to practice, the 
 essence of truth can hardly consist in subservience to the 
 practical end. We may perhaps put the same thing by asking 
 how, if truth has no independence, there is in the end any 
 possibility of real argument or of real error. And our 
 knowledge of the whole situation and of the nature of truth 
 seems once more incompatible with the position which we 
 have thus given to knowledge.^ 
 
 (3) A more radical view is the doctrine that reaUty in the 
 end is will, and that intelUgence has somehow a secondary 
 position. A view of this kind was upheld in the first quarter 
 of the last century by more than one well-known philo- 
 sopher, and it has naturally been subjected to a good deal 
 of criticism. This is a point which our new gospel seems to 
 think calls for little attention, and I could not myself be 
 expected here to enter into it at length, even were I able 
 to do so. I may, however, be permitted to state briefly the 
 
 1 The question how far anywhere we are to use working ideas the nature 
 of which is to be dictated in some sense by a practical end, is a question 
 I do not discuss. The point, I agree, is both interesting and important, and 
 it deserves a discussion which would be impossible within the limits of this 
 paper. I am concerned here simply with the assertion that all truth is in the 
 last resort merely practical. 
 
96 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 main reasons which have always made it impossible for me 
 to accept in any form the primacy of will. 
 
 (a) Will in my judgement must imply something in the self 
 or beyond the self which is other than will, and, apart from 
 this ' other ', I cannot find any sense or meaning in the ' will ' 
 either of man or of God. There is to me no thinking with- 
 out something which thinks and again something which is 
 thought of — something in either case which is other than 
 mere thought. And in the same way there is no wilhng 
 except that which both proceeds from something and changes 
 something — something again in either case which is other 
 than will. And I may add that to me will involves not only 
 perception but also idea, and that I find this hard to reconcile 
 with a secondary position of intelligence. 
 
 (b) The necessity for an ' other ' may lead to an admitted 
 plurality of wills, and in any case without such a plurality 
 the whole doctrine tends in effect to negate itself. But on 
 the other hand the plurality, if admitted, raises difficulties 
 which to my mind are insuperable. If will demands a per- 
 ceived ' other ' which it alters, how is this to consist merely 
 in another will ? To me it seems that each will must pre- 
 suppose in the other will something which is more than bare 
 willing. My volition, to me, is a process of passage from 
 idea into existence. Hence, as soon as and as far as that 
 passage is realized, my volition in the proper sense has 
 ceased to exist. The outer existence which is the expression 
 of my will is in a sense certainly my will, but in the strict 
 sense it is not my will. Thus I do not understand how the 
 inner side of another will is to serve as that perceived ' other ' 
 which my will demands, while again, if the other will is 
 taken as a perceived existence for me, I must understand 
 it to be something which is more than and is other than 
 mere volition.^ And we have aheady seen that, if you 
 
 1 The fundamental difficulty I take to be this, that will must imply and 
 must presuppose what is other than itself. Thus on the one hand bare will 
 is no will, while on the other hand, as soon as will has ceased to be bare. 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 97 
 
 confine yourself to my will, that demands both an ' I ' and 
 an ' other ' as conditions of the process. Further with an 
 admitted plurality of wills there is a difficulty with regard 
 to their relation. The relation (that seems evident) cannot 
 be the mere adjective of either of its terms. But, if it falls 
 beyond each, then neither term by itself is all reality, and 
 there is at once a question on our hands with regard to 
 their ' togetherness ' or unity. This again apparently must 
 be will ; but, if it is will, I do not see how it is in the end 
 to have an ' other '. If on the contrary it is not will, then, 
 since we hardly can take the unity as barely unreal, reality 
 seems at once to include more than will. 
 
 Will in fact implies all reality, and in this it is like thought, 
 for in thinking once more you can find all reality. You can, 
 that is, identify a complex whole with one of its aspects, 
 and then naturally in that aspect you can go on to find 
 everything contained or implied. But for myself I see no 
 advantage in such a procedure. And I see no advantage in 
 rushing blindly from the rejection of one extreme to the 
 acceptance of the other, especially since I have now been 
 acquainted with both extremes for more years than I care 
 to recall. 
 
 it has become something more than will. This main difficulty is, to me, 
 at once radical and insuperable, and it shows itself in the relation betweeif 
 will as inward and as carried out. If you do not here admit an existence 
 which in some sense is more than mere will, you, so far as I see, make ' will ' 
 an unmeaning word. Thus with a plurality of wills, if each will is to have 
 any known world outside itself, you are on the above ground forced to 
 admit some existence beyond it which is more than any mere will. For 
 I cannot see how, if each will has no outside of its own, each is going to 
 serve as the outside for another. This idea may seem plausible, but I at 
 least cannot carry it out. And if, leaving this, you assert that will itself is 
 a whole which possesses in itself both an inward and an outward side, then 
 I do not understand what you are to reply when some one else chooses to 
 assert that this same whole is intelligence or feeling. 
 
 To find the solution of the world's problem in a number of wills, which 
 serve amongst themselves, each to the others, as outward existence, is, 
 I agree, at first sight a very promising adventure. For myself I have 
 never been able to surmount the obstacles which I have mentioned. But 
 it would be a pleasure to me to learn that they can be surmounted. 
 
 1674 H 
 
98 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 If further we give to intelligence a secondary place, we 
 have to reconcile this fact with our knowledge that it is so. 
 We may say that Will possesses an awareness of itself, and 
 on this awareness we may base our philosophy of Will. 
 But, not to speak of the difficulty which arises from the 
 evident or at least the apparent fact of other experience and 
 knowledge, it is hard to see how this awareness can justify 
 its position. For we are in a difiiculty on one side if we 
 regard it as secondary. On the other side if this knowledge 
 and this truth is to be primary, the secondary place assigned 
 to all intelligence seems hardly intelligible. 
 
 (4) I must pass from this attempt to identify reality in 
 the end with will. For the Will, which is reality, is not for 
 such a view my mere individual will. And it is my individual 
 will with which, so far as I understand the matter, we have 
 to do when we come to Prof. James and his followers. At 
 least, if it is not my will which makes reality and truth to be 
 what they are, I hardly see what can be left of the gospel 
 which they preach. ^ I have already noticed what to my- 
 self appears a mere endeavour to compromise. If you take 
 the world to be a funded accumulation made by striving 
 beings [Mind, N.S., 45, p. 94), you unite in one creed, it 
 seems to me, every opening to objection. In the first place, 
 ■feince this fact is not your mere individual will, you either 
 are confronted with a reality which is other than your will, 
 or else you must accept a real identity between this existing 
 will and yours. And what then has become of individualism 
 and of pluralism and of ' personal idealism ' I am unable 
 to guess. ^ And further your knowledge of the fact of this 
 
 • [And, so far as I can now judge, really nothing in principle is left. Prof. 
 James (the evidence is given in Chap. V and its Appendix I) ended 
 apparently by abandoning every doctrine which can be taken as distinctive 
 of Pragmatism. When once a Pragmatist allows intrinsic value to theory, 
 surely the whole bottom of his gospel may be said to have fallen out. This 
 remark has no application to Dr. Dewey, who, I understand, still remains 
 consistent.] 
 
 '' The self-elected leader of our Personal Idealists seems at times to fall 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 99 
 
 accumulation, on what does that knowledge rest ? Is it 
 dictated to you by a fact which is other than your will ? 
 Then, so far as I can judge, the whole doctrine has in prin- 
 ciple vanished. Does it depend on and consist in your 
 individual want and choice, and is it this which in the end 
 both is and makes all reality and truth ? It is strange, if 
 so, that you should seem unable to say what you mean, and 
 should fly for refuge to the unexplained phrase of ' condi- 
 tions '. It is useless again to offer a reference to Aristotle 
 and to Fichte, for there is more than one reason why such 
 a reference gives no satisfaction. The preachers of a new 
 gospel should, in short, be ready with payment in cash. 
 And, when they seek to put me off with a cheque drawn 
 on their account with Moses and the prophets, I take it as 
 a practical admission of insolvency.^ 
 
 I will recall some beliefs which our new gospel seems 
 called on to meet. Practice is a necessary aspect of human 
 nature and of the whole of things, but practice is not the 
 whole of things nor is it the entirety of human nature. It 
 is a pernicious error to set up one aspect of our being (I do 
 not care what that aspect is) as an end by itself to which 
 everything else is subordinate. Our nature is complex, and 
 on the other hand our nature has and ought to have a unity, 
 but its unity is not to be found by setting up one element 
 as absolute, and by turning all the rest into mere external 
 means. Further it is true that any one-sided expenditure 
 of our limited energy is so far hurtful. And it is true that 
 
 back on the old and well-known view, that truth is merely what happens 
 to prevail, merely those sensations and ideas which happen to enforce 
 themselves among a particular set of men, and that truth has no meaning 
 which is other than this. He even appears to be under the impression 
 that this doctrine is new as well as salutary. But, for myself, I could never 
 see that whatever is the result of a crude interpretation of Darwinism must 
 therefore be novel. And when the same writer preaches that Man (with 
 a capital) is to be the measure, I should not infer that he has asked himself 
 what in the end this capital is to mean. 
 
 ^ [About a page of the original article has, after this, been omitted.] 
 
 H 2 
 
100 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 in the interest of the whole such expenditure must be 
 Hmited. But it is wrong to conclude from this that within 
 its own limits no element is to have free play, and that the 
 whole in short is best served by the work of slaves. And, 
 before a man lays down the law as to practice, it might be 
 better if he told us what in the end he takes practice to mean. 
 And before we rush or drift from a rejection of ' intellec- 
 tuahsm ' to a setting up of ' voluntarism ', we might perhaps 
 inquire whether after all we are inevitably condemned to 
 choose between conflicting abstractions. ^ 
 
 The contention that truth and falsehood depend on my 
 will is to the last degree ambiguous, and it may end in what 
 is unmeaning or is plainly false. To make the whole essence 
 of truth consist in a choice made by this or that person 
 subverts the very nature of truth. On the other hand to 
 treat the will of others, or to treat the result of any past 
 volitions as being my will and choice, seems really a thought- 
 less attempt at compromise. Finally the essence of will 
 requires an ' other ' which is not will, and without this 
 ' other ' bare will, like bare intellect, ceases to be itself. 
 Itself is reduced in either case to vacancy and to nothingness. 
 And the question of this ' other ' cannot be disposed of by 
 unexplained phrases, and still less can it be met by any 
 
 ' Personal Idealism, it seems to me, supplies us with two striking illustra- 
 tions of the tendency to avoid Scylla and to find a haven in Charybdis. 
 [An omission has been made here.] The omnipotent and omniscient 
 infinite God of Christian theology has of course given rise to well-known 
 difficulties. And an exit from these difficulties may naturally be sought 
 by the removal of one or more troublesome attributes. If God is made 
 finite, and, I presume, in part ignorant and in part impotent, and in short 
 is reduced in principle to the level of one creature among others, certain 
 objections, it is clear, will at once lose their force. Thus, if you want to 
 treat God as one person over against others, your readiest course is to 
 deny that he is infinite. And, if you wish to relieve any person of moral 
 responsibility, it is a well-known expedient to seek to deprive him either 
 of knowledge or of power. But there are unfortunately obvious objections 
 and difficulties on the other side. And these obvious dif&culties, I presume, 
 were present to and moved the minds of the more orthodox theologians. 
 In any case surely they exist, and surely there can be no excuse for ignoring 
 them. [Cf. p. 124 and Chap. XV.] 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE loi 
 
 appeal to authority. And once more, if knowledge is known 
 to be secondary, the fact of this knowledge itself calls for 
 explanation. 
 
 It is well to protest against one-sided intellectualism and 
 to insist on the reality and on the worth of practice. It is 
 well to lay stress on the defects of Monism and on the 
 positive claims of Individualism and Pluralism. Such pro- 
 tests against one-sidedness are perhaps never out of place. 
 Such criticisms, even where they are not deserved, can per- 
 haps do no harm ; and they can never perhaps fail to be 
 more or less deserved. But these protests and these criti- 
 cisms, it seems to me, are one thing, and the setting up and 
 the preaching of some counter-onesidedness is surely another 
 thing. And before anything, no matter what it is, is pro- 
 claimed as a new gospel, it will be better, I think, to ask if 
 account has been taken of objections, objections which at 
 least exist, even if they are not old and obvious. 
 
 Note. — It may be useful, even at the cost of some 
 repetition, to add a few words on the difference between 
 practical and non-practical activity. The doctrine which I 
 have advocated is briefly this, that the above difference 
 exists and that on the other hand it is not absolute. 
 
 There is in the first place no activity which in the end is 
 merely practical, and the merely practical would in the end 
 be nothing real. It would, so far as I see, be the mainten- 
 ance and alteration of existence in complete abstraction 
 from the quality of the existence and the change. Its end 
 would be to produce the greatest quantity of bare doing. 
 How far such an ideal is in principle self-consistent, I will 
 not inquire, for certainly it is an ideal which no one would 
 accept, no one at least who understood clearly what it means. 
 And the assumption that such a practical activity exists 
 anywhere must be rejected. You will find no creature out 
 of whose life you can strike quality as irrelevant. However 
 low you descend you will reach no stage where the ' what ', 
 
102 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 that is sought and done, is subordinate to bare doing, and 
 except as a means to bare doing is worthless. 
 
 And that at least not everything in life is thus practical 
 or a mere means to practice seems manifest when we glance 
 at the facts of life. We need not appeal here to that which 
 in the narrower sense is intellectual or aesthetic. The 
 pleasure of rest after accomplished labour, the song that 
 gives vent to the joy in being, the heightened self-feeUng 
 from the perceived presence of one's kind — it seems strange 
 to insist that these things are barely practical. For myself 
 I prefer to think that each creature has its own quahty and 
 its especial delight, and that in the quality of that which 
 fills its self it finds and it seeks its own fulfilment. 
 
 This is a view which, I admit, I did not learn from philo- 
 sophy, and, even if it were refuted by philosophy, I could not 
 forget what I imbibed in my youth. I learnt that Jehovah 
 found his work good, and took pleasure in it because it was 
 so, and not merely because his own activity had been some- 
 thing extreme, or because (as a Personal Idealist might say) 
 he had been ' young strong and virile '.^ And I learnt from 
 the poets that every life in its own quality partakes of the 
 divine. There is nothing so humble or so vile as to have no 
 nature of its own in which it finds happiness, but every 
 creature realizes, however strangely, what is at once its 
 special being and something beyond it. And every creature 
 rejoices not merely because so much is in doing or has been 
 done, but because its own need is satisfied or because the 
 object of its own particular desire has become reality. 
 
 Any such doctrine is divided by a chasm from the creed 
 of the Personal Idealist, the Personal Idealist, that is, who 
 
 1 [The reference is to a passage iiomHumanism (p. viii) which was quoted 
 in an omitted part of the foregoing. It runs thus : ' The ancient shibbo- 
 leths encounter open yawns and unconcealed derision. The rattUng of dry 
 bones no longer fascinates respect nor plunges n, self-suggested horde of 
 fakirs in hypnotic stupor. The agnostic maunderings of impotent despair 
 are flung aside with a contemptuous smile by the young, the strong, the 
 virile.'] 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 103 
 
 comprehends his own principle. To his mind, when the male 
 creature is drawn towards its mate, there is no feeling of an 
 overmastering end beyond self. There is no object to which 
 passion ascribes, for however fleeting a moment, an infinite 
 worth. Nor is there a common existence where love, how- 
 ever imperfect and rude, gives in an object the abiding sense 
 of an inward contentment. In the view of the Personal 
 Idealist no object counts for any more than a worthless 
 means to one's own mere activity. The object is recognized 
 as something which is good barely because it serves the turn, 
 as something which in short has value just so far as it is 
 found to be practicable {Pers. Id., p. 98). The ideal is, in 
 short, the abstraction of activity and of function from the 
 quality of its object. This abstraction represents, perhaps to 
 most of us, the essence of that which is false in theory and 
 sordid in conduct. And the reason why the Personal 
 IdeaHst is unaware of such a radical coUision, is that he 
 has made no attempt to realize the true meaning of his 
 own doctrine.^ 
 
 On the one hand no activity is barely practical. There 
 is in the end no activity which exists for its own sake as 
 a process, without any regard for its own nature and quality, 
 and in abstraction from all that can be regarded as a product. 
 On the other hand we may say that in the end all activity is 
 practical. For there is nothing which is apart from process 
 and change in existence. And in one of its aspects it is 
 possible to view the whole Universe as a will which every- 
 where asserts itself practically. Between that which is 
 practical and that which is not practical we thus seem in 
 the end unable to maintain any difference. 
 
 ^ The passage referred to, which deals with Identity, is obviously full 
 of intellectual confusion, whatever we may think of it otherwise as a sample 
 of academical literature. [The reader will, of course, bear in mind that the 
 text speaks of a view, not as it is in fact, while confusedly and inconsistently 
 entertained, but as it really in principle is, and as it would be if it under- 
 stood itself.] 
 
104 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap. 
 
 And there is in truth no such difference which is absolute. 
 On the other side a relative distinction may be useful and 
 necessary, and I will point out the principle on which this 
 may be drawn. If you like to say that the difference in 
 any given case is a matter of degree, to some extent I am 
 able to accept that contention. 
 
 As against a non-practical activity my activity is practical 
 when and so far as its product directly qualifies the existence 
 which is altered. When I am active it is plain that I make 
 a change in my existence. Now can the product of my 
 activity be taken as the adjective of my changed existence ? 
 So far as this can be done my activity is practical, and other- 
 wise not so. When I dig the ground I make a change in my 
 world, and it is my world which so far is altered. When I 
 morally order myself, the moral arrangement becomes the 
 adjective of my own existence. When I eat and drink, the 
 result is that food and drink have been consumed, and that 
 on the other side I am changed by having eaten and drunk. 
 When I unite with other men in supporting and developing 
 a social community, the result of what we do is, at least in 
 the first instance, an adjective of our organized existence. 
 Thus and so far the above activities are practical distinc- 
 tively. On the other side when I perceive a horse that is 
 present, or think of one that is absent, certainly by my so 
 perceiving or thinking my existence is changed, but the 
 alteration cannot be said to consist in the horse. For my 
 perception or thought has not, on any sane theory, brought 
 the horse into being. My activity therefore is so far not 
 practical. And when after digging the ground I contemplate 
 it, and when I say ' My work is good ', my activity here 
 has ceased to be practical. For I can hardly so far be taken 
 to have altered the ground or myself, and to have given 
 to either of them a new quality not owned before. And, 
 in short, all apprehension, whether theoretical or in the 
 widest sense aesthetic, will fail to be practical except 
 
IV ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 105 
 
 incidentally. It is practical only so far as what comes in 
 it is the adjective of that existence into which it has come 
 and which it has changed. Thus an activity is not prac- 
 tical because existence has been changed by it. It is 
 practical only so far as the changed existence can be taken 
 as qualified by the product of the activity. And again in 
 a secondary sense anything is practical so far as it is taken 
 as subserving a practical change. On the other hand, so 
 far as the change made is, in a word, a revelation, to that 
 extent the change is not practical. Thus the apprehension 
 of an object is never merely practical. Again when I make 
 a spade purely for the sake of digging, the end is practical ; 
 and a perception of the means, though not practical itself, 
 is subordinate to practice. But, when I adorn the handle 
 of the spade and so regard it with pleasure, my perception 
 and my pleasure have ceased to be practical. For the spade 
 has now been revealed to me so far as a joy in itself. And 
 it is an object which, apart from desire for its possession, 
 we may call ' in itself desirable '. Wherever, in short, in 
 the life of the family or of society, wherever in love morality 
 and religion or beauty and truth, I have a product which 
 is more than a mere quality of what is altered, I have some- 
 thing which so far goes beyond practice. I so far have 
 something which is a revelation and is not a mere doing 
 or something done. But we have entered here on a theme 
 which goes far beyond the limits of this Note. 
 
 In any case the abstraction of mere doing is not a rational 
 end. The good, in other words, so far as it is good in itself, 
 is so far not merely practical. And as good in itself, we may 
 believe, it is revealed in some measure even to the humblest. 
 And as good in itself, which in different senses and in various 
 degrees is more than the mere adjective of passing events 
 and of finite existence, it is apprehended by and becomes 
 clear to the human intellect. On the other hand I must 
 repeat that no such distinction is absolute. Thus to the 
 
io6 ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE chap, iv 
 
 religious mind everything which is good is but the bringing 
 to light of God's perfection and glory ; and yet to the same 
 religious mind nowhere is God more really present than in 
 that win for good which in myself and others makes changes 
 in the world. This double nature and aspect of things will 
 remain foolishness to the Personal Idealist, and it cannot be 
 held consistently in human life ; but the constant sense of 
 it together with the endeavour to realize it in thought, may 
 perhaps be said to make the life of philosophy. And thus 
 philosophy is hard, while to think one-sidedly and to make 
 theories which ignore the deepest instincts of our nature, 
 is not so difficult. Philosophy always will be hard, and 
 what it promises even in the end is no clear theory nor any 
 complete understanding or vision. But its certain reward 
 is a continual evidence and a heightened apprehension of 
 the ineffable mystery of life, of life in all its complexity and 
 all its unity and worth. And I have not myself cared to ask 
 if philosophy suffers violence, or lavishes after all its best 
 gifts on ' the young the strong and the virile '. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 ON TRUTH AND COPYING i 
 
 Mr. Joachim in his interesting work on The Nature of 
 Truth did, I think, well to discuss once more that view for 
 which truth consists in copying reality. It is a view which, 
 for myself, I have been accustomed to treat as exploded, 
 but it is a natural way of taking things, and, I suppose, can 
 never cease to be popular. And, since from time to time 
 a discussion of this topic is likely to be useful, I will venture 
 to offer some remarks on it here. 
 
 The idea that truth consists in mere copying is suggested 
 from many sides. A man through language and ideas has 
 to convey fact to other men, and how can he do this unless 
 his ideas copy fact so far as the purpose requires ? And, in 
 dealing practically with the present or the future situation, 
 unless I have mirrored in my mind the main features of that 
 situation, how can I hope to succeed ? And in recalling the 
 past we are bound above all things not to alter it, and how 
 can we avoid this unless in some way, however indirect, we 
 produce a copy ? Finally truth implies agreement amongst 
 the ideas of separate individuals. And, since this agreement 
 is not made by one or another individual, and so not by all 
 of them, it therefore seems due to all of them following one 
 original fact. But unless they mentally repeat this fact, how, 
 it will be asked, can they follow it ? 
 
 The above view is natural, but, even as it stands, seems 
 hardly consistent with itself, for how the past or future can be 
 copied is at least not evident. And it is soon in trouble, as is 
 
 ' This chapter appeared in Mind for April 1907. On the whole subject 
 of it, cf. Chap. XI. 
 
io8 ON TRUTH AND COPYING chap. 
 
 well known, with regard to the sensible properties of things. 
 But, not to dwell on this, the whole theory goes to wreck in 
 principle and at once on a fatal objection. Truth has to copy 
 facts, but on the other side the facts to be copied show already 
 in their nature the work of truth-making. The merely 
 given facts are, in other words, the imaginary creatures of 
 false theory. They are manufactured by a mind which 
 abstracts one aspect of the concrete known whole, and sets 
 this abstracted aspect out by itself as a real thing. If, on 
 the other hand, we exaggerate when we maintain that all 
 facts are inferences, yet undeniably much of given fact is 
 inferential. And if we cannot demonstrate that every 
 possible piece of fact is modified by apperception, the out- 
 standing residue may at least perhaps be called insignificant.^ 
 Or (to put it from the other side) if there really is any datum, 
 outward or inward, which, if you remove the work of the 
 mind, would in its nature remain the same, yet there seems 
 no way of our getting certainly to know of this. And, if 
 truth is to copy fact, then truth at least seems to be in fact 
 unattainable. 
 
 If the above objection cannot be met (and I do not know 
 how it can be met) the theory in principle is ruined. In the 
 end truth is not copying ; but it is possible, while admitting 
 this, to attempt to save the theory in a modified form. 
 We may draw a distinction between perceptional and reflec- 
 tive thinking. As to what is perceived we may allow that 
 we cannot argue that this is copied, but in any case, we may 
 go on to urge, our ideas must copy our perceptions. And 
 thus, after all, our secondary and reflective truth must seek 
 to mirror reality. But the position taken here, though 
 founded on a distinction, which in itself is important, for 
 the purpose in hand seems wholly ineffectual. And, apart 
 from such difficulties as might once more be raised as to 
 
 ^ I am not assuming here that we have no feelings so elementary as to 
 be unmodified by apperception. But any assumption on the other side 
 seems hazardous and could at any rate not extend far. Cf. p. 204. 
 
V ON TRUTH AND COPYING 109 
 
 given facts which are past and future, we have only to apply 
 this view in order to find it break down in our hands. 
 
 Disjunctive, negative, and hypothetical judgements cannot 
 be taken as all false, and yet cannot fairly be made to conform 
 to our one type of truth. And in general the moment we 
 leave perceived facts and seek explanation — which after all 
 is implied in the desire for truth — we find that we are 
 moving away from the given. Universal and abstract truths 
 are not given facts, nor do they merely reproduce the given, 
 nor are they even confined to the limits of actual perception. 
 And in the end, when we come to general truth about the 
 Universe, it seems impossible to regard this as transcribed 
 from the given Universe. Our truths in short can all of 
 them in some sense be verified in fact, but, if you ask if they 
 all are copied from fact, the answer must be different. And 
 we are driven to admit that, at least when we pass from 
 individual truths, our truth no longer represents fact but 
 merely ' holds ' or ' is valid '. And, asking what these 
 phrases mean, we are forced to perceive that both truth and 
 reality go beyond the perceived facts. The given facts in 
 other words are not the whole of reahty, while truth cannot 
 be understood except in reference to this whole. ^ 
 
 We saw in the first place that given facts are even them- 
 selves not merely given, but already even in themselves 
 contain truth. And secondly we have seen that, even if the 
 perceived facts were given, truth cannot merely transcribe 
 them. And, since truth goes beyond the given, it is impos- 
 sible to understand how truth can copy reality. For, before 
 the reality has been reached, there is no original to copy, 
 and, when the reality has been attained, that attainment 
 already is truth, and you cannot gain truth by transcribing it. 
 
 I will now break off the consideration of that view for 
 which truth consists in copying fact, and will endeavour 
 
 1 This is the main conclusion which was urged in my Principles of Logic. 
 It did not occur to me that I should be taken there or anywhere else to 
 be advocating the copy-theory of truth. 
 
no ON TRUTH AND COPYING chap. 
 
 briefly to indicate a better way of resolving the problem. 
 But I must begin by pointing out the main error which, if 
 left unremoved, makes the problem insoluble. This error 
 consists in the division of truth from knowledge and of 
 knowledge from reality. The moment that truth, knowledge, 
 and reality are taken as separate, there is no way in which 
 consistently they can come or be forced together. And 
 since on the other hand truth implies that they are some- 
 how united, we have forthwith on our hands a contradic- 
 tion in principle. And according to the side from which the 
 subject is approached, this contradiction works itself out into 
 a fatal dilemma. 
 
 This defect in principle has been illustrated by the view 
 we have been examining, and it may repay us to notice in 
 a different case the result of the self-same error. An attempt 
 is sometimes made to escape from difficulty by insisting that 
 truth is merely what ' holds ', or is what merely ' serves ' 
 or merely ' works '. But since these phrases are relative 
 and, I presume, relative to something which is known, we 
 have at once a division of truth from knowledge. On the 
 one side is known reality, and on the other side is mere truth, 
 and in short we have repeated the error of that view which 
 took truth as a copy. And the fatal result of our proceeding 
 soon becomes manifest. ^ Truth is merely to be that which 
 subserves something else, and I am to know that this is so, 
 and that this is so is true. But such a truth about truth 
 seems itself to go beyond truth, and our theory is dissolved 
 in self-contradiction. 
 
 Let us consider this more in detail. We are, it seems, to 
 take an end, such say as the abstraction of practical success 
 or of felt pleasure, and we are to understand truth as a 
 means, an external means, to this end. And what, we may 
 hear, can be more plain and intelligible than this ? It is, 
 I agree, almost as clear as the former view for which truth 
 
 1 Cf. the note at the end of the article. 
 
V ON TRUTH AND COPYING m 
 
 merely copied things, and perhaps this suggestion may be 
 an omen. But first let us ask as to our end, is this known or 
 unknown ? If it is unknown, how do we know that it is 
 an end served by means ? And, if it is known, then what 
 are we going to say of this knowledge ? Is it true ? Can we 
 discuss it ? Have we got a truth about our end, and, if so, 
 does ' about ' mean no more than merely subserving ? I 
 do not myself know how these particular questions should 
 be answered, but in general I cannot see how to defend truth 
 which is external to knowledge or knowledge which is external 
 to reality, and with this I must pass to another difficulty 
 which attaches to the present view. Truth has been taken 
 as being merely the means to an end, and we naturally under- 
 stand this to say that truth is really the means. But here at 
 once arises a well-known puzzle. The end, we all agree, in 
 a sense dictates the means, but on the other hand the end, 
 we are accustomed to think, must choose those means 
 which are really possible. We are hence, given the end, in the 
 habit of discussing the means. We have to consider, in short, 
 about suggested means whether they are means really and 
 in truth. But, with this, we seem to have knowledge and 
 truth and reality, certainly all in relation with the one real 
 end, but on the other side all external to it and apparently 
 more or less independent of it. We started in other words 
 by saying ' Truth is nothing beyond that which subserves ', 
 and we have ended in explaining that ' Truth is that which 
 in fact and in truth subserves '. And when in a given case 
 a question is raised as to this fact and truth, it is answered 
 apparently by appealing to something other than the end. 
 Any such appeal obviously is inadmissible; but, when we 
 reject it, we seem now to have excluded all truth about our 
 means, just as before we seemed to have no knowledge nor 
 any truth about our end.^ 
 
 ' One is, I presume, naturally led to avoid this difficulty by maintaining 
 that our knowledge in the end is intuitive. We have, that is to say, an 
 experience in which reality, truth, and knowledge are one. But, with this, 
 
112 ON TRUTH AND COPYING chap. 
 
 And a prescribed remedy, if I rightly understand, is to 
 throw overboard all preconceived ideas as to truth and 
 reality. Truth is merely the ideas which are felt in a certain 
 way, and are felt to dominate in a mind or in a set of minds, 
 and any further question as to their truth is senseless.^ You 
 may indeed ask psychologically, if you please, how they have 
 come to dominate, but, however they have come to dominate, 
 their truth is the same. If you and I disagree we both so 
 far have truth, and if you argue with me and persuade me, 
 that is one way of agreement But, if you prefer to knock 
 me on the head, that, so far as truth goes, is the same thing, 
 except that now there is truth not in two heads but one. 
 And as to there being any other truth about all this state of 
 things, or in short any truth at all beyond mere prevalence, 
 the whole notion is ridiculous. And, if you deny this, you 
 do but confirm it, since your denial (though of course true) 
 must also be false, since it is true only because in fact it has 
 prevailed. And if you want further proof, you can perhaps 
 demonstrate all this by a downward deduction. For either 
 this or the copy- theory must be the truth about truth, 
 and as the copy-theory will not work, this by inevitable 
 consequence remains as true. But there is no one, I think, 
 who is ready apart from some reserve to accept wholly the 
 above result. 
 
 It would be easy, passing on, to point out how the same 
 main error, appearing in other forms, works itself out from 
 other sides into conflicting dilemmas. But the limits of this 
 chapter compel me to proceed. The division of reahty from 
 knowledge and of knowledge from truth must in any form 
 
 there is an end at once and in principle of the view that truth is an external 
 means to something else. And on our new ground the problem of Error, 
 the question how we can hold for true what is false, obviously threatens to 
 become pressing. 
 
 ' For some further discussion on this point the reader is referred to 
 Chap. XI. 
 
V ON TRUTH AND COPYING 113 
 
 be abandoned. And the only way of exit from the maze is 
 to accept the remaining alternative. Our one hope lies in 
 taking courage to embrace the result that reality is not 
 outside truth. The identity of truth knowledge and reality, 
 whatever difficulty that may bring, must be taken as neces- 
 sary and fundamental. Or at least we have been driven to 
 :hoose between this and nothing. 
 
 Any such conclusion, I know, will on many sides be 
 rejected as monstrous. The last thing to which truth pre- 
 tends, I shall hear, is actually to be, or even bodily to possess, 
 the real. But though this question, I know, might well be 
 irgued at length, the issue in my judgement can be raised 
 md can be settled briefly. Truth, it is contended, is not to 
 De the same as reahty. Well, if so, I presume that there is a 
 iifference between them. And this difference, I understand, 
 s not to be contained in the truth. But, if this is so, then 
 ;learly to my mind the truth must so far be defective. How, 
 L ask, is the truth about reality to be less or more than reality 
 vithout so far ceasing to be the truth ? The only answer, 
 io far as I see, is this, that reality has something which is 
 rot a possible content of truth. But here arises forthwith 
 :he dilemma which ruined us before. If such an outstanding 
 ;lement is known, then so far we have knowledge and truth, 
 vhile, if it is not known, then I do not know of it, and to 
 ne it is nothing. On the one hand to divide truth from 
 :nowledge seems impossible, and on the other hand to go 
 )eyond knowledge seems meaningless. 
 
 And, if we are to advance, we must accept once for all 
 he identification of truth with reality. I do not say that we 
 re to conclude that there is to be in no sense any difference 
 letween them. But we must, without raising doubts and 
 ifithout looking backwards, follow the guidance of our new 
 irinciple. We must, that is, accept the claim of truth not 
 be judged from the outside. We must unhesitatingly | 
 ssert that truth, if it were satisfied itself, and if for itself it 
 
 1574 I 
 
114 ON TRUTH AND COPYING chap. 
 
 were perfect, would be itself in the fullest sense the entire 
 and absolute Universe. And agreeing to the uttermost with 
 this claim made by truth, we must attempt, truth and our- 
 selves together, to judge truth from its own standard. 
 
 I will endeavour first to point out briefly in what this 
 standard consists. The end of truth is to be and to possess 
 reality in an ideal form. This means first that truth must 
 include without residue the entirety of what is in any sense 
 given, and it means next that truth is bound to include this 
 intelligibly. Truth is not satisfied until we have all the facts, 
 and until we understand perfectly what we have. And we 
 do not understand perfectly the given material until we have 
 it all together harmoniously, in such a way, that is, that we 
 are not impelled to strive for another and a better way of 
 holding it together. Truth is not satisfied, in other words, 
 until it is all-containing and one. We are not obliged here, 
 I think, to inquire further how these aspects of the idea of 
 system are related, and whether, and in what sense, they 
 have their root in a single principle. It is sufficient here to 
 insist that both aspects ^ are essential to truth, and that any 
 theory which ends in dividing them is certainly false. 
 
 But, when we judge truth by its own standard, truth 
 evidently fails. And it fails in two ways, the connexion 
 between which I will not here discuss.^ (i) In the first place 
 its contents cannot be made intelligible throughout and en- 
 tirely. A doubt may indeed be raised whether even in any 
 part they are able wholly to satisfy, but this again is a ques- 
 tion on which here it is unnecessary to enter. For in any 
 case obviously a large mass of the facts remains in the end 
 inexplicable. You have perpetually to repeat that things 
 are so, though you do not fully understand how or why, and 
 
 ' We may use a variety of phrases here. We may speak, for instance, of 
 homogeneity and specification, or again of integration and difierentiation. 
 The main point is this, that truth must leave nothing outside, and, with 
 regard to what it contains, must not have to ask for further explanation 
 as to how one part stands to another part. 
 
 " The reader is referred on this and other points to later chapters. 
 
V ON TRUTH AND COPYING 115 
 
 when on the other hand you cannot perceive that no how or 
 why is wanted. You are left in short with brute conjunctions 
 where you seek for connexions, and where this need for 
 connexions seems part of your nature.^ (ii) And, failing 
 thus, truth fails again to include all the given facts, and 
 any such complete inclusion seems even to be in principle 
 unattainable, (a) On the one hand the moment's felt 
 immediacy remains for ever outstanding, and, if we feel this 
 nowhere else, we realize at each moment the difference 
 between the knower and his truth, (b) And on the other 
 hand the facts before us in space and time remain always 
 incomplete. How is it possible for truth to embrace the 
 whole sensible past and future ? Truth might understand 
 them (do you say ?) and so include them ideally. Well but, 
 if truth could do as much as this, which I myself think not 
 possible, truth after all would not include these facts bodily. 
 The ideal fact after all and the sensible fact will still differ, 
 and this difference left outside condemns truth even as ideal. 
 And in short we are entangled once more in our old dilemma. 
 We have an element given which in no way we can get inside 
 the truth, while on the other side, if we leave it out, truth 
 becomes defective. For there seems really no sense in 
 endeavouring to maintain that what remains outside is 
 irrelevant. 
 
 With this at first sight we have ended in bankruptcy, but 
 perhaps we may find that the case is otherwise and that our 
 failure has carried us to success. For we were looking for \ 
 the connexion between truth and reality, and we discovered 
 first that no external connexion is possible. We then ' 
 resolved to take truth as being the same with reality, and 
 we found that, taken so, truth came short of its end. But 
 in this very point of failure, after all, lies the way to success. 
 Truth came short because, and so far as, it could not become 
 
 ' You ^yaut in other words to, answer the question ' What ' by and from 
 the object itself, and not by and from something else, 
 
 I 2 
 
ii6 ON TRUTH AND COPYING chap. 
 
 that which it desired to be and made sure that it was. Truth 
 claimed identity with an individual and all-inclusive whole. 
 But such a whole, when we examine it, we find itself to be 
 the Universe and all reality. And when we had to see how 
 truth fails, as truth, in attaining its own end, we were being 
 shown the very features of difference between truth and 
 reality. And in passing over into reality and in thus ceasing 
 to be mere truth, truth does not pass beyond its own end 
 nor does it fail to realize itself. Hence, being the same as 
 reality, and at the same time different from reality, truth 
 is thus able itself to apprehend its identity and difference. 
 But, if this is so, we seem to have reached the solution of 
 our problem. 1 
 
 Truth is the whole Universe realizing itself in one aspect. 
 This way of realization is one-sided, and it is a way not in 
 the end satisfying even its own demands but felt itself to be 
 incomplete. On the other hand the completion of truth 
 itself is seen to lead to an all-inclusive reality, which reality 
 is not outside truth. For it is the whole Universe which, 
 immanent throughout, realizes and seeks itself in truth. 
 This is the end to which truth leads and points and without 
 which it is not satisfied. And those aspects in which truth 
 for itself is defective, are precisely those which make the 
 
 * On the whole question see my Appearance. From this basis we can 
 deal with the difficulty as to truth's being able consistently to pronounce 
 itself imperfect. The dilemma that arises here was noticed by me (p. 513) 
 and solved by a distinction (pp. 544-7). On this a sceptical critic (in 
 Mind, No. 11, p. 336), seizing his opportunity, urged against me this 
 dilemma which I had noticed, forgetting to mention that I had noticed it, 
 and omitting the fact that, having noticed it, I had offered a solution. 
 This opportunity for criticism I confess that I had not observed, but in 
 the second edition of my book, desiring always, so far as I can, to be of 
 use to all the world, I called attention to this opening, more or less by 
 way, if I may say so, of invitation (p. 620). And this standing invitation, 
 I was going to add, has been accepted by Captain Knox, in Mind, 
 No. 54, p. 212. But in view of this writer's extensive ignorance of the 
 work which he came forward to criticize (see Mind, No. 55), I can hardly 
 suppose that such an assertion would be justified. Still, if I cannot credit 
 myself here with a successful invitation, I think that at least I may lay 
 claim to a true prophecy. 
 
V ON TRUTH AND COPYING 117 
 
 difference between truth and reality. Here, I would urge, 
 is the one road of exit from disastrous circles and from inter- 
 minable dilemmas. For on the one side we have a difference 
 between truth and reality, while on the other side this 
 difference only carries out truth. It consists in no more 
 than that which truth seeks itself internally to be and to 
 possess. 
 
 Truth, we thus can say, at once is and is not reality, and 
 we have found that the difference is not external to truth. 
 For truth would be satisfied in its own self-sought completion, 
 and that completion would be reality. And if you ask how 
 truth after all stands to reality, and whether after all truth is 
 not a copy, the answer is obvious. Apart from its aspect of 
 truth the reality would not be the reality, and there surely is 
 no meaning in a copy which makes its original. In truth and 
 in other aspects of the Universe we find one-sidedness and 
 defect, and we may go on to see that everywhere the remedy 
 for defect lies in the inclusion of other aspects more or less 
 left out. But as for comparing the Universe, as it is apart 
 from one aspect, with the Universe as complete, such a 
 comparison is out of our power. And it is even, when we 
 reflect, ridiculous to seek to discover by thinking what the 
 Universe would be like without thought. You cannot take 
 reality to pieces and then see how once more it can be com- 
 bined to make reality. And thus, if we are asked for the 
 relation of truth to reality, we must reply that in the end 
 there is no relation, since in the end there are no separate 
 terms. All that we can say is that, in order for truth 
 complete itself into reality, such and such defects in truth 
 itself would have to be rectified. 
 
 That there are difficulties in the way of this solution I 
 readily admit, ^ but difficulties and impossibilities, I urge, are 
 
 • On this whole matter see my Appearance. One difficulty, on which 
 stress has been rightly laid, is that we have no direct experience of any 
 total experience which comprises in itself finite centres (cf . Chap. XV). I do 
 not however myself see that this is more than a difficulty. 
 
ii8 ON TRUTH AND COPYING chap. 
 
 not the same thing. And any other exit from our maze is, 
 I submit, closed impassably. On the one hand we must 
 not use words that have no positive sense, and, with this, all 
 reality that falls outside experience and knowledge is, to 
 my mind, excluded. On the other hand we cannot rest in 
 that which, when we try to think it, conflicts with itself 
 internally, and is dissolved in dilemmas. But, in order to 
 know that the Universe is a whole with such and such a general 
 nature, it is not necessary to perceive and to understand 
 how such a Universe is possible, and how its various aspects 
 are held apart and together. We desire to know this, I agree, 
 but I fail myself to see how we can, and I think that with 
 less than this we can gain positive knowledge enough to 
 save us from mere scepticism. ^ 
 
 If we now return to that view for which truth is a mere 
 copy of things, we have seen that in the end no such doctrine 
 is admissible. But from a lower point of view it may be 
 convenient to speak of truth as corresponding with reality 
 and as even reproducing facts. In the first place the 
 individual in truth-seeking must subject himself. He must 
 (I cannot attempt to explain this here) suppress ideas, 
 wishes and fancies, and anything else in his nature which is 
 irrelevant to and interferes with the process of truth-seeking. 
 And hence in a sense the individuals can have something 
 in common, correspondence to which is essential for truth. 
 Secondly, in truth-seeking the individual (once again I 
 
 ' By scepticism I of course do not mean any positive view as to know- 
 ledge in general, and still less any kind of conclusion supported by proof. 
 I mean by it denial or doubt with regard to the existence de facto for me 
 of that which satisfies intellectually. This denial or doubt rests certainly 
 on a positive basis, but, so long as the basis is not made explicit and the 
 denial remains particular, the basis itself is not denied, and the position 
 remains consistent. On the other hand the scepticism which itself poses 
 as a doctrine, which deals in general truth, and in a word claims to be 
 de jure, to my mind does not understand itself. No consistent scepticism 
 can, in my opinion, offer a reasoned proof of itself, nor can a consistent 
 scepticism maintain any general positive doctrine, or indeed any universal 
 thesis of any kind whatever. 
 
V UJN IKUIH AJND CUi'YlJNG I19 
 
 cannot try to explain this) must follow the object. Our 
 understanding has to co-operate in the ideal development 
 of reahty, and it has not, like will, to turn ideas into existences. 
 And thus following the object the ideas of the individual in 
 a sense must conform to it.^ In the third place reflection, 
 as we have seen, must take up sensible qualities as given 
 matter, and it must accept also more or less brute conjunc- 
 tions of fact. Intelligence of itself does not recreate the 
 given past nor does it procreate entirely the given present 
 or future. And it may be said to wait on and to follow 
 a course of events which it is powerless to make. And, 
 finally, to some extent language and truth must seek even 
 to copy perceived facts, and, as we saw, to convey them 
 faithfully, though of course in a partial manner. In the 
 
 ' So far as concerns ' the suppression of the subjective ', as it is some- 
 times called, that of course belongs alike to everything serious in life. 
 In this general respect there is no difference between the pursuits of truth 
 beauty and moral goodness. When, in order to create a work of art, a man 
 has to keep down (so far as is necessary) what is merely particular to 
 himself, that does not mean either that the work of art makes itself without 
 him, or that it is not different because he in particular has made it. So also 
 in the process of the will for good. When that is called ' objective ', the 
 meaning is not that the individual's will makes no difference. The meaning 
 is that whatever in him is irrelevant to the issue, is suppressed as merely 
 ' subjective '. So again in truth-seeking. The ideal development of the 
 object itself, which I follow, does not make itself. In the first place apart 
 from individual minds there is no object anywhere. In the second place, 
 so far as I in particular am concerned, the process of truth demands my 
 personal seU-realization. If you took that away, the objective process 
 would not exist in me at all, and, more than that, its nature would to some 
 extent be modified by my personal failure. On the other side the ' objective ' 
 development cannot possibly take up into itself then and there everything 
 that is at the moment psychically present in myself when I seek truth. It 
 calls therefore for the suppression, so far as is required, of whatever in me 
 falls outside of and is irrelevant to this special development. 
 
 Any reader who wishes not to criticize but to understand, must try to 
 bear in mind two things, (i) The suppression of ' the subjective ' takes 
 place in regard to truth beauty and goodness alike, and not more in regard 
 to one than the others, (ii) The merely ' subjective ' does not mean what is 
 personal. It means that which for the special purpose in hand is irrelevant 
 and in this sense is merely personal (see Appearance, p. 237). On the other 
 hand the reader who wishes simply to criticize will, I think, find no difficulty 
 so long as the above points are ignored. 
 
120 ON TRUTH AND COPYING chap. 
 
 above senses truth may be spoken of as corresponding to 
 facts, and it is right and proper as against one-sided theories 
 to insist on this correspondence. ^ But, as we have seen, 
 such a way of speaking is not permissible in the end. 
 
 I will ask, in conclusion, how what we may call the copy- 
 theory of truth is affected by the connexion between thought 
 and volition. That in some sense thought depends on desire 
 and will is even obvious, and it is a doctrine in which most 
 of us perhaps have, we may say, been brought up. But it 
 is a doctrine on the other hand which can be interpreted in 
 various ways. If in the first place truth is made wholly to 
 depend in its essence on the individual's desire, then in this 
 case, naturally, since truth itself goes, the copy-theory of 
 truth goes also, together with every other sane theory of 
 truth. But otherwise, if you simply take truth to be copying, 
 the desire for truth will be a desire for copying, and by laying 
 emphasis on the aspect of desire I do not see that you add 
 anything. 
 
 Further, if you adopt a one-sided intellectual view, and 
 maintain that reality is an original system of thought which 
 you try to rethink, or a world of ideal essences whose presence 
 you desire — it seems useless in such a case to speak about 
 copying, since copying is excluded. There may be an 
 original here, but, whatever else you are doing, you do not 
 copy that original, since obviously you have no original 
 before you to copy. The realization in detail of a general 
 end is clearly in itself not repetition, and on the other side, 
 as clearly, repetition and reproduction cannot all be called 
 copying. Hence to ask here why we should desire to copy, 
 is obviously irrelevant. The rational question to ask is 
 
 ' This I myself did in Mind, N.S., No. 51. I did not refer here to the 
 fact that I had written elsewhere on the nature of truth, but I took care 
 to warn the reader (p. 311, now p. 75 of the present volume) that I could 
 not in that article attempt to point out the meaning of truth and falsehood. 
 Notwithstanding this my article has literally been taken as a statement of 
 my view as to the ultimate nature of truth. 
 
V ON TRUTH AND COPYING 121 
 
 about our desire for reproduction and repetition or for the 
 presence in or to our minds of a self-existent reality. 
 
 But, if we adopt a more concrete view, all such questions 
 become idle. On such a view my desire and my will to have 
 truth is the will and the desire of the world to become truth 
 in me. Truth is a mode of the self-realization of myself and 
 of the Universe in one. And if you ask why the full reality 
 cares to spill itself into gratuitous vessels, or whence and why 
 to me comes this mania for turning myself into a superfluous 
 receptacle or instance — the answer is ready. Such inquiries 
 are based on and betray a most stupendous misconception. 
 The Universe is nowhere apart from the lives of the indi- 
 viduals, and, whether as truth or otherwise, the Universe 
 realizes itself not at all except through their differences. On 
 the other side the individuals, if they are to realize themselves 
 personally, must specialize this common life of which truth is 
 one aspect. And to suppose that the individuals can seek their 
 end and their reality somehow apart (say in the abstraction 
 of mere practice or of private pleasure) is in the end really 
 meaningless. Thus truth, the same in all, is from the other 
 side not wholly the same, since difference to it is vital and 
 it gains difference in each. The personal diversity of the 
 individuals is hence not superfluous but essential.^ For 
 viewed from one side this diversity brings with it fresh 
 quality, and from the other side, even so far as truth is com- 
 mon to the individuals, it must be taken none the less as 
 modified in each case by its fresh context. But I must 
 hasten here to add that no such general doctrine can be 
 verified in detail. 
 
 The process of knowledge is, on any view like this, not 
 something apart and by itself. It is one aspect of the life 
 of the undivided Universe, outside of which life there is no 
 truth or reality. And to speak here of copying as in a mirror, 
 
 ' See further in Chap. XI. 
 
122 ON TRUTH AND COPYING chap. 
 
 we may once more repeat, is absurd. If you like to add that 
 the absurdity is heightened when we remember that hfe in 
 general, and knowledge in particular, imply will and desire, 
 to this naturally I make no objection. But for myself I have 
 always been contented to know that the whole suggestion of 
 copying is here ridiculously irrelevant. Still, as according 
 to some critics my destiny is to illustrate what they call 
 ' intellectualism ', this chapter, if I could understand it, is 
 doubtless a blind flutter against the limits of my cage. 
 
 Note to page no. — Compare here Mind, N.S., No. 51, p. 323,^ 
 and again Hoffding, Problems of Philosophy, pp. 79 foil. (Eng. 
 trans.), a peissage the force of which, it seems to me. Prof. James 
 fails to appreciate. I may perhaps use this opportunity to say 
 something with regard to points really or apparently at issue 
 between Prof. James and myself. I cannot undertake to criticize 
 Prof. James's ultimate view as to truth knowledge and reality, 
 because that is accessible nowhere, I believe, except in more or 
 less occasional and fragmentary articles, and I do not think that 
 justice can be done to it until it is put out in a more complete 
 and systematic form. But it has been a relief to me to see that, 
 as I understand him. Prof. James rejects the idea that the 
 essence of truth consists in nothing but its mere practical results.^ 
 In accepting the standard of clearness and inclusiveness and self- 
 consistency {Mind, N.S., No. 52), Prof. James apparently adopts 
 the view in which I at least was brought up, a view for which 
 of course the notion of any external standard of truth was an 
 exploded fallacy. This explanation on the part of Prof. James 
 seems to me to have removed wholly one supposed point of 
 disagreement. 
 
 Next as to ' working ', I of course agree that in proportion 
 as a truth is idle it is less true, and I again agree that in the 
 end no truth can be wholly idle. A truth that makes no difference 
 to truth is to my mind an impossibility. But I cannot agree 
 that, wherever we fail to see this further difference, it is non- 
 existent, and the alleged truth therefore not true at all. It is 
 one thing to say that, so far as we perceive, such or such a truth 
 
 ■ Chap. IV, pp. 92 foil., of the present volume. 
 
 ' But on this and other points see the Appendices to this chapter. 
 
V ON TRUTH AND COPYING 123 
 
 has no importance, and to act accordingly, and it is surely 
 another thing to insist that such a truth has no truth whatever. 
 And I seem in passing to remember that Hegel, rightly or wrongly, 
 incurred censure for an attitude more or less of this kind towards 
 some facts or truths of natural science. Next I agree that in the 
 end all truth has practical and again aesthetic consequences. 
 I believe in a word in the implication of aU aspects of reality with 
 one another. But once more I cannot believe that we can see this 
 implication in detail, so as everjrwhere to use the consequence 
 (whatever consequence it is) as a criterion. And to my mind it 
 would be senseless to allege that the several aspects of the whole 
 are each nothing but their consequences. Further I have no 
 objection to identif3ang reality with goodness or satisfaction, so 
 long as it is clear that this does not mean mere practical or any 
 other one-sided satisfaction. Again I agree that any idea which in 
 any way ' works ', has in some sense truth. Only to my mind it 
 has not on this account ultimate truth. It need not be a way 
 of expression which gives a theoretical satisfaction in which we 
 can rest. In the sciences we use working ideas and convenient 
 mythology, and, while not admitting that these have ultimate 
 truth, I should think it absurd to deny to them truth altogether. 
 And surely so it may be again with morality and religion. The 
 ideas that are really here required, most certainly, I should say, 
 must be true. But to conclude from this that they have ultimate 
 truth for metaphysics is to my mind irrational. And if you ask 
 what I am to say then when these truths are contradicted by meta- 
 physics, I reply that in my opinion they are not so contradicted, 
 though certainly in my opinion metaphysics must understand 
 them otherwise. If however any one believes in this contradic- 
 tion, he should in my judgement on no account sacrifice or 
 subordinate his practical truths, though as certainly he should 
 not offer them as the sole and final truth about the Universe. 
 But nothing, I fear, that I can say is likely to shake the pernicious 
 prejudice that what is wanted for working purposes is the last 
 theoretical truth about things (see my Appearance, p. 451 and 
 elsewhere). This prejudice tends everywhere to result in one-sided 
 attempts at consistency. In our moral practice, for instance, 
 there evidently in fact is involved some element of uncertainty 
 as to the issue. Hence on this point the Christian religion, cling- 
 ing to the concrete whole, on one side maintains this element of 
 
124 ON TRUTH AND COPYING chap. 
 
 moral straggle, but on the other side completes it (inconsistently 
 no doubt) by an assurance of final victory. And here from 
 both sides comes a protest, and a one-sided cry for clearness and 
 consequence. Unless really, and as an ultimate fact, there is an 
 uncertain future, morality, we hear, is destroyed. God therefore, 
 to save morality, must be made sufficiently ignorant and suffi- 
 ciently weak for the future really to be doubtful. And apparently 
 it is not seen that, with this, there is an end logically of all that 
 is meant (and much is meant) by ' the peace of God '. Again, on 
 the same principle but from the other side, some fanatic from 
 time to time insists on the utter supremacy of Good. And hence 
 he concludes in the older style that morality is irrelevant and 
 worthless, or to-day in a newer mode that the individual, as such, 
 is perfect, and that there is no toothache but ignorance. But 
 'for practical purposes surely there is something higher than 
 theoretical consistency, even if such consistency in practice were 
 actually attainable. Hence, unless ultimate theoretical truth 
 itself may be inconsistent, it is better for practice surely not to 
 identify our working ideas with ultimate truth. For practice you 
 want ideas which keep hold of all sides of the main substance, and 
 to sacrifice any part of that substance to theoretical consistency 
 is practical error. But on the other hand the reader must be 
 warned that to agree with us here is to incur the peril, whatever 
 that is, of being called an ' Intellectuahst '. 
 
 To come now to that which Prof. James would call 'humanism', 
 I am reminded forthwith that an accusation of mere humanism 
 was one of the charges long ago brought against German Idealism. 
 And since (if I may speak for myself) I do not believe in any 
 reality outside of and apart from the totality of finite mind,^ and 
 since there is certainly nothing original in my disbeliefs or beliefs, 
 once more here I fail to perceive the chasm which separates the 
 new ' humanism ' from what went before. And I am again 
 reheved to find that on the whole Prof. James himself takes this 
 view, and regrets an attitude of hostile criticism on our side as 
 due largely to mistake. Prof. James doubtless here does not 
 remember that on our side nothing was said until we found our- 
 selves judged and sentenced. The philosophic world, ostensibly 
 
 > This statement (with others) is liable to be misunderstood, and perhaps 
 as it stands, is one-sided. The reader is referred to the footnote on 
 pp. 350-1, in which a question as to Nature is discussed. 
 
V ON TRUTH AND COPYING 125 
 
 in Prof. James's behalf, was divided into sheep and goats, and 
 the trumpet was blown, and Plato and Aristotle sujtnmoned from 
 the dead to witness the triumph of the one philosopher and the 
 confusion of the sophists.^ But for my part I have no wish to 
 recall such extravagances, if Prof. James will not forget that it 
 was his fortune, however ill-merited, to inspire them. And if 
 I can do anything to remove or to throw light on any issue between 
 Prof. James and those who cannot follow him, it will be a pleasure 
 to me to attempt this. 
 
 (i) In the first place as to ' pragmatism ', we want to hear 
 definitely from Prof. James whether the practical side of our 
 nature is to be made supreme, or whether there is anything else 
 which has value and rights of its own. Even now I ask myself 
 in what sense, or whether at all, mutilation is advocated. I still 
 do not know if I am called on to enter into life halt and maimed, 
 to say nothing of being blind of one eye. And a reassuring state- 
 ment in general terms is, I think, not sufficient. But if Prof. James 
 would explain to us how in the end he understands the human 
 Good, and how its elements are related to one another, this point 
 perhaps would become clear. We might at last know whether we 
 all should or should not call ourselves Pragmatists. (2) Next as 
 to ' humanism ', surely we should be informed, first, whether 
 ■ finite mind ' is to stand merely for some of the inhabitants of 
 a single planet, or is to have a far wider meaning, and, if the 
 latter, we should be told what that meaning is. This is not a new 
 question (it might even be called an old and famiUar one), and 
 in some aspects the difference here between various views may be 
 reaUy enormous. It seems, to myself at least, imperative that 
 such a point should not be left in darkness. And (3) in the process 
 of Humanity (however Humanity is understood) we have to 
 inquire how the individuals stand to the whole. Have both sides 
 of the process equal reality, or, if this is not so, what is the 
 alternative ? If the individuals are the final realities, what in the 
 end are we to say of the ' together ' and of the whole process ? 
 These are well-known problems, and they surely call for systematic 
 treatment. (4) Then, to say nothing of questions about know- 
 ledge — a subject with which Prof. James has in some degree 
 dealt — what in the end is the meaning of and the truth about 
 Progress ? Endless progress as an ideal is itself hardly above 
 '■ The reference is to Mind for April 1902, N.S., No. 42. 
 
126 ON TRUTH AND COPYING chap, v 
 
 criticism, but is there in the end any meaning in progress at all ? 
 Is mere prevalence and survival to be the same as progress, and, if 
 not that, then what else is progress to mean ? And is the temporal 
 process of the Universe (which process is apparently the one 
 reality) to be taken as a progress, and if so, on what grounds ? 
 We have once more here an old problem which calls for solution. 
 (5) Finally I need perhaps say nothing as to the difficulty with 
 regard to ' a condition ' outside of finite minds, except to point 
 out that any obscurity on this head must naturally affect the 
 entire view. 
 
 The above questions, and others, can hardly be answered 
 satisfactorily unless they are dealt with all together and as 
 connected parts of one inquiry. Prof. James's answer to them, 
 when it comes, will not altogether, I imagine, meet all our diffi- 
 culties, but most assuredly it will be welcome. Even at Oxford 
 we have not yet been so deafened by periodical manifestoes and 
 by prophetic outcries as to be incapable of hearing. And there, 
 as indeed everywhere else. Prof. James may count upon willing 
 and respectful attention. 
 
APPENDIX I TO CHAPTER V 
 
 ON THE AMBIGUITY OF PRAGMATISM i 
 
 Like other readers of Mind 1 have been occupying myself lately 
 with Prof. James's lectures on Pragmatism, and with these I have 
 been reading the defence of Pragmatism offered by Prof. Dewey 
 in a late number of Mind (No. 63). Their account of the matter 
 strikes me as in certain points calling for further explanation, and 
 I am venturing to offer some remarks on this head. If Profs. James 
 and Dewey do not yet know what Pragmatism means, there is 
 no one, I imagine, who is likely to be in a better case. For this 
 reason I have felt justified in confining my attention here to 
 these acknowledged leaders, and in ignoring other Pragmatists. 
 In what follows I am concerned solely with Profs. Dewey and 
 James, and I will begin with the latter. 
 
 I. While reading the lectures on Pragmatism, I, doubtless like 
 others, am led to ask myself, ' Am I and have I been always 
 myself a Pragmatist ? ' This question I still find myself unable to 
 answer.^ The meaning of 'practice' and 'practical' is to my mind 
 with Prof. James most obscure and ambiguous. On the one side 
 he insists on a doctrine acceptable perhaps only to the minority. 
 On the other side he extends so widely the limits of his creed that 
 few indeed would in the end be left outside the fold. I will 
 remark first on the wide and next on the narrow sense given to 
 Pragmatism. 
 
 (i) One of the objections raised against Pragmatism has been 
 its alleged degradation of truth. All value except of a borrowed 
 kind has apparently been denied to theory. What it is which in 
 
 ' This paper appeared first in Mind for April 1 908. 
 
 ' Cf. Mind, No. 62 (Chap. V of this volume). For the ambiguity of 
 Pragmatism I would refer the reader to Mr. McTaggart's admirable review 
 in Mind, No. 65. I saw this only after the whole of what follows had 
 been written. 
 
128 APPENDIX I TO CHAPTER V 
 
 the end has ultimate worth for the Pragmatist, has remained to 
 myself a matter of mere inference and conjecture. But what has 
 seemed certain is that theorizing has been condemned as worthless 
 except as a means, while that which has value in itself has been 
 left undetermined. Whether for instance the Pragmatist takes 
 the world of art to belong to the region of the worthless-in-itself , 
 I at least could not learn. This situation, surprising to myself, 
 has on one understanding of Prof. James ceased, so far as he is 
 concerned, to exist. For he takes the Good as a genus of which 
 truth is one species. He denies or subordinates the distinction of 
 theoretical and practical. Theory is one kind of practice, and so 
 apparently is theoretical enjoyment (p. 217). And I suppose that 
 fine art and the beautiful once more fall under this same head of 
 ' practice '. And I conjecture that Prof. James would also include 
 under " practical ' all human enjoyment. And, if this is so, who, 
 except perhaps some narrow Hedonist, would wish to dissent ? 
 Life in all its main aspects is allowed to be the end, and none of 
 these aspects is excluded and degraded to the level of a mere 
 external means. Theory, besides its use in altering the course of 
 events, may be pursued independently within certain limits,^ may 
 be allowed to satisfy its proper want, and to use its own criterion. 
 And the same thing again will hold good in the case of fine art. 
 I indeed may wonder what purpose is served by torturing every- 
 thing that is good and valuable under the head of ' practice '. But, 
 if the substance of all for which I have fought is conceded, I should 
 think it unreasonable to dispute about a word. 
 
 In the ordinary sense of the word 'practice ' therefore, according 
 to Prof. James, truth need not be directly concerned with practice. 
 Truth indeed must not become transcendent. It must not turn 
 itself to some other world out of relation with the world of our 
 perceptions and actions. But, so long as truth maintains its 
 connexion, however indirect, with the sphere of our doing and 
 suffering, the Pragmatist is satisfied. ' Any idea that helps us to 
 deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the reality 
 or its belongings . . . will hold true of that reality ' (p. 213). This 
 denial of transcendence, this insistence that all ideas, and more 
 especially such ideas as those of God or again the Absolute, are 
 
 ' I have endeavoured to define these limits elsewhere. See Mind, N.S., 
 No. 51 (pp. 86-gi of this volume). 
 
ON THE AMBIGUITY OF PRAGMATISM 129 
 
 true and real just so far as they work, is to myself naturally most 
 welcome. Most of us have, I think, now for some time accepted 
 and tried to act on this principle. It hardly appears to me to be, 
 at this time of day, revolutionary ; but still, if this is what 
 Pragmatism means, so much the better for Pragmatism. 
 
 And there is a further point on which Prof. James seems once 
 more to endorse our ideas. I had been, I confess, led to think 
 that, where the Pragmatist took successful practice as the test 
 of truth, he meant this to hold of the individual agent. The idea 
 that worked best in the furthering of my individual existence, 
 I thought, was truth for me. I understood in short that good for 
 the individual and true for the individual were much the same 
 thing, and that further the individual could apply this criterion. 
 And naturally I found that this led to difficulty. We speak, for 
 instance, of a man's life being ruined by the useless discovery of 
 some truth, say of his deceased wife's infidelity, and we hardly see 
 our way to set down a truth of this kind as error. But the whole 
 difficulty, we now learn from Prof. James, was manufactured by 
 ourselves. It is a living witness to our blindness, our incompe- 
 tence and injustice, not to use terms still more abusive (p. 233). 
 For Pragmatism, I now understand Prof. James to say, does not 
 pretend to hold of the individual. The idea that in a man's case 
 does not work, or that works to his ruin, may for all that be true. 
 For the true is ' the expedient in the long run and on the whole ' 
 (p. 222). And, this being understood, the whole difficulty so far 
 disappears. 
 
 It is succeeded, however, I would urge, by fresh troubles. For 
 what is ' the long run ' and ' the whole ', and how does the 
 individual get to know about things like these, which seem really 
 beyond him ? On this vital matter Prof. James, it seems to me, 
 leaves us without much assistance. We may conjecture that ' the 
 long run ' is the process that leads (if it really does lead) to the 
 final victory of Good. We are reminded perhaps of that 
 
 One far-ofi divine event. 
 
 To which the whole creation moves. 
 
 But I am very far from sure that we are reminded rightly. And 
 what ' the whole ' is to mean seems, to my mind, beyond probable 
 conjecture. Is it this or that set of beings inhabiting our planet, 
 or is humanity but a small, a microscopical and an inconsiderable 
 
 1574 K 
 
130 APPENDIX I TO CHAPTER V 
 
 element among the beings that have value ? In speaking of that 
 which he terms ' humanism ' Prof. James would have felt himself 
 compelled, we might have supposed, to deal with such dangerous 
 ambiguities and such distressing uncertainties. But another 
 course unfortunately seemed to him more desirable. The result, 
 however, so far as I see, is that ' the expedient in the long run 
 land on the whole ' remains unknown and unknowable. And yet 
 it is this apparently by which the individual has to regulate 
 his life. 
 
 And possibly Prof. James holds that the individual must walk 
 here by faith (p. 296) . The individual does not know and he cannot 
 see that truth and goodness now are one, or how they ever will 
 become one. But he must do what seems to him to be best, and 
 again accept what seems to him to be true, and he must trust and 
 believe that truth and goodness in the end will not be divergent. 
 But, with this, the relative independence for us of truth, beauty 
 and practical goodness, seems fully justified, and, so far as the 
 practice of the individual is concerned. Pragmatism seems in 
 short admitted not to work. 
 
 And with such a result I, in the main, naturally find myself in 
 accord. To me, as to many others, it seems that in the end truth, 
 fact and goodness are one, though I am forced to admit that we 
 cannot perceive and verify this unity in detail, and that therefore 
 in and for the individual a relative divergence must be recognized. 
 Hence between Prof. James and myself the difference in the end 
 would be practically trifling. But, on the other hand, theoretically, 
 as soon as Prof. James attempts to deal with first principles, the 
 case, I think, will be altered. For, as against our principle of 
 immanent Reahty, he seems to have adopted a transcendent Ideal. 
 And that, I imagine the history of philosophy has tended to show, 
 is a thing which, as an ultimate principle, will not work. 
 
 (ii) If the above interpretation of Prof. James is correct, Prag- 
 matism is no mihtant creed. It is in harmony with views against 
 which it is commonly understood to protest, and to imagine that 
 it portends a new dawn of philosophy (p. 6) would be obviously 
 ridiculous. And I hasten to add that I have not imagined that 
 Prof. James would accept his doctrine as it is above interpreted. 
 I think it at least possible that he takes the whole theoretical side 
 of mind to be an instrument worthless in itself, used to gain 
 
ON THE AMBIGUITY OF PRAGMATISM 131 
 
 a valuable end which he finds it convenient to leave in darkness. 
 I am sure that the common antithesis of intellectual or theoretical 
 and practical appears in his pages (e. g. pp. 186-8), ^ and that the 
 former of these words is used derogatorily. The conclusion that, 
 at least for the practice of the individual, Pragmatism is untrue, 
 seems to me contrary to the whole tendency of Prof. James's 
 teaching. And, if I rightly understand him, Pragmatism, far 
 from being a view which tends to reconcile extremes, is committed 
 to the denial of anything contrary to pluralism. It is committed 
 to the assertion of the absolute mutability of the Universe and 
 the absolute reality of individual disaster and evil. With regard 
 to Prof. James's doctrine of human Freedom, here, as elsewhere, 
 I find it impossible to decide what it means. ^ But the pragmatic 
 
 ' In his Meaning of Truth (1909), pp. 206 ff., Prof. James not only seems 
 to recognize the validity of the theoretic interest, but also to condemn in 
 unmeasured terms the critics of Pragmatism for having failed to see that 
 this recognition was taught from the first as the doctrine of Pragmatism. 
 I submit that Prof. James here did these critics a serious injustice. 
 
 What are the facts ? Is it true that from the first Pragmatism stated 
 clearly that theory has an intrinsic value of its own, and that Instru- 
 meutalism — if you take that in the sense of making theory a mere means 
 to practice — is a false doctrine ? Is it true that from the first ' practical ' 
 was not opposed to ' theoretical ', and that, in making the test of truth 
 practical, it was never said or meant that the appeal was to be to practice 
 as distinct from theory ? Is it the case that all that in fact was insisted on 
 was that the test is to be empirical ? Of course, if all this is so, the critics 
 of Pragmatism have been greatly to blame. But I submit that any such 
 account of the matter would be quite untenable. 
 
 Not only was the fact otherwise, but, further, if it had not been otherwise, 
 I suggest that Pragmatism could hardly have preached itself as a new 
 gospel, have talked about a new dawn of philosophy and a turning-point in 
 the history of philosophy (Pref. vii, viii). And I must doubt whether even 
 now Prof. Dewey would accept the position apparently taken by Prof. James. 
 
 The real fact, I presume, is this, that Prof. James and some of his 
 followers (for we have not to do merely with Prof. James) believed them- 
 selves to have in Pragmatism a new and revolutionary doctrine, but, on the 
 other hand, had never realized exactly what ' Pragmatism ' and ' practical ' 
 were to mean. Then, under the pressure of criticism, being forced to 
 discuss the sense of their battle-cry, that sense, in becoming more or less 
 realized by them, became, I submit, seriously altered, though of course 
 without their knowledge. And then the critics are abused for their failure 
 to understand and accept a statement, supposed now, in the teeth of facts, 
 to have been put clearly before them. But I have little doubt as to the 
 judgement which will be passed on all this by the reader who is acquainted 
 with what really has taken place. 
 
 ' I remarked on this point some years ago in Mind, No. 43, pp. 296-8. 
 
 K 2 
 
132 APPENDIX I TO CHAPTER V 
 
 doctrine of Free Will, as it appears in this volume, seems to 
 myself to be repeating that which I, for instance, under HegeUan 
 influence sought to urge, in my Ethical Studies, more than thirty 
 years ago. And Prof. James's view of Freedom, whatever else it 
 may be, must, I assume, be something which leaves him at 
 liberty to denounce Hegel and his followers. 
 
 The conclusion then which I would submit to the reader is that 
 Prof. James's Pragmatism is essentially ambiguous, and that he 
 throughout is unconsciously led to take advantage of its ambiguity. 
 It can at discretion be preached as a new Gospel which is to bring 
 light into the world, or recommended as that old teaching of 
 common sense which few but fools have rejected. The reader 
 may, I think, be helped to appreciate this attempt to make the 
 most of both worlds, if I sketch briefly for him another and, as 
 I think, a better working creed. 
 
 I perhaps may here recall the fact that I have advocated else- 
 where certain views on first principles. But on the other hand 
 I have seen, if I may say so, far too much of metaphysics to think 
 of staking vital issues on the result of speculative inquiry. And 
 for practical purposes I hold in reserve a belief, in common, 
 I imagine, with an increasing number of persons, a belief, the 
 advantages of which Pragmatism would, it seems, like to appro- 
 priate surreptitiously. According to this practical creed there is 
 in the end no truth for us save that of working ideas. Whatever 
 idea is wanted to satisfy a genuine human need is true, and truth 
 in the end has no other meaning. Our sense of value, and in the 
 end for every man his own sense of value, is ultimate and final. 
 And, since there is no court of apped, it is idle even to inquire if 
 this sense is fallible. It is this which in the end decides as to 
 human interests, and whatever ideas are needed to serve those 
 interests are true, however much these ideas are in contradiction 
 with one another or even with themselves. The one question in 
 the end is whether the ideas work. But there are degrees of truth, 
 because ideas may work better or worse, and because again the 
 interests which ideas subserve are more or less valuable. The 
 above is scepticism, if you please, but it is not the stupid scepti- 
 cism which offers itself as positive theoretical doctrine. It is the 
 intelligent refusal to accept as final any theoretical criterion which 
 actually so far exists. And there is here no mutilation of human 
 nature, since every side of life, practical, aesthetic and intellectual. 
 
ON THE AMBIGUITY OF PRAGMATISM 133 
 
 is allowed its full value. We are emancipated once and for all 
 from the narrowness of all one-sided attempts at consistency.^ 
 
 When a man, holding to this less one-sided Pragmatism, says 
 that he for instance believes in God, not a God but a God through 1 
 whom perfect goodness in spite of appearance is real — how futile 
 in the case of such a man are Prof. James's findings ! Prof. James 
 will tell this man that he is a quietist, that he wants to ' give up ' 
 and to ' he back ', and to avoid paying the just price of salvation 
 through individual sacrifice and effort (pp. 276, 289, 292, 295). 
 But the man will answer that, while he believes in the reality of 
 perfect goodness, he believes also that nothing is more intensely 
 real than individual action for good, and that he believes in these 
 two things not one in spite of the other, but one even because of 
 the other. And he will regret that Prof. James should be so 
 wanting in experience as to be unable to perceive obvious facts, 
 and should be in such bondage to the traditional worship of 
 theoretical consistency. And as against such a position, which 
 I do not suppose Prof. James wiU call novel, what has he to offer 
 and to object in the name of Pragmatism ? He has offered at 
 present nothing, so far as I see, beyond one-sided prejudices, and 
 a blind appeal to theoretical consistency, and an uncritical faith 
 in the ultimate validity of some undiscussed Law of Contradiction. 
 
 But that Prof. James could accept the position I have sketched 
 above to myself seems impossible. I do. not suggest that the 
 result is too sceptical for a Professor to endorse, but beyond this 
 there are other obstacles which seem insurmountable. For, if 
 the above is accepted, there is at once apparently an end of the 
 new Gospel, with all its promises and all its boasts about a new 
 dawn of philosophy, together with its anticipatory outbreak of 
 dithyrambic ecstasy (p. 257) . And something perhaps even worse 
 than this would follow. For Prof. James would forfeit all right 
 to emphasize as ultimate truth the absolute mutabihty and 
 incoherence of the world, and the absolute value of this or that 
 individual success or disaster. In short all those prejudices on 
 which he rides to the attack on Absolutism would have to be 
 forgone. These ideas could, none of them, claim more than \ 
 a relative worth, and their opposites would also and at the same 
 time possess truth. \ 
 
 But if Prof. James cannot be content with so broad a 
 ' Cf. Chap. IV. 
 
134 APPENDIX I TO CHAPTER V 
 
 ■ pragmatism ', his alternative, I submit, is to develop his theory 
 of first principles. Assuredly I am not alone in the desire that he 
 would turn his back for a time on sporadic articles and on popular 
 lectures, with their incoherence and half-heartedness and more 
 or less plausible ambiguities, and would work in the way in which 
 a man who seriously aims at a new philosophy is condemned to 
 work, and with a result which I at least feel sure would repay his 
 labour. And perhaps in the meantime he might remind his 
 followers on this side of the Atlantic that, of course without 
 prejudice to the future, it is not yet true that the crowing of the 
 cock brings the sun above the horizon. 
 
 II. I pass on now to consider the account of Pragmatism given 
 by Prof. Dewey in Mind, No. 63, and here, as with Prof. James, 
 I find much which to myself seems ambiguous. I am again left 
 uncertain whether in the end I also am a Pragmatist, or where and 
 how on the other hand I fail to deserve that title. But I have to 
 begin by putting on one side what to my mind are sheer irrele- 
 vancies. I myself long ago (1883) pointed out that theory takes 
 its origin from practical collision, and again for myself theory 
 implies a theoretical want and its satisfaction. And it is obvious 
 that, if Pragmatism means no more than this, I, as I presume 
 Prof. Dewey is aware, have been for many years a Pragmatist, 
 and, however well he preaches, he is preaching here to one long 
 ago converted. 
 
 Certainly I must suppose therefore that for Prof. Dewey more 
 than this is wanted for Pragmatism, and I must go on to inquire 
 how much more is wanted. In the first place Prof. Dewey, I 
 understand, insists that theory is only an instrument.^ Now we 
 all know that there are instruments and activities which have no 
 value but a borrowed one. They may be necessary, but still in 
 themselves they may be valueless or even worse. Hence we 
 naturally ask if this is to be the case with theory, and again with 
 fine art. And, if this is to be the case with one or both, we naturally 
 want to be informed as to the ultimate source of the value which 
 is transferred to them. But, so far as I see. Prof. Dewey leaves 
 us here without any answer. And I do not myself understand 
 how any thinking person is justified in accepting a doctrine left 
 in this ambiguous state. In philosophy surely one has no right 
 ' On Instrumentalism see the references in the Index. 
 
ON THE AMBIGUITY OF PRAGMATISM 135 
 
 to teach that something is only a means, unless one is prepared 
 to state the end to which it conduces and by which it is measured.^ 
 And I must even be allowed to set this down as to my mind 
 elementary. 
 
 Passing on then unsatisfied from this point let us ask what is 
 meant by the practical nature of thinking and truth. Let me say 
 here at once that I have failed, I am sure, to understand what 
 practical means for Prof. Dewey.^ But an idea, it appears, is true 
 only so far as it issues in behaviour. Now, as applied to the early 
 
 ' Prof. Dewey (p. 328) certainly denies that the end is the abstraction 
 of ' mere practice ', but such a denial is obviously no positive answer. And 
 when he adds that he cannot believe that ' any empiricist has ever enter- 
 tained ' ' such a thoroughly intellectualistic construction ', I confess that 
 he amazes me. The ' empiricist ' in my own experience is precisely the 
 man who more than others takes mere abstractions for realities. In any 
 case if the Pragmatist cannot even attempt to state his own doctrine of 
 ultimate value, that, it seems to me, is something like an admission of 
 bankruptcy. 
 
 ' ' By practical ', he says, ' I mean only regulated change in experienced 
 values ' (p. 328). But, if Prof. Dewey means no more than this, his whole 
 article is surely one long ignoratio elenchi. How does such a definition 
 exclude the existence of pure theoretical activity and practice ? And, if 
 it does not, what becomes of Prof. Dewey's polemic ? Pragmatism on this 
 understanding is in agreement with even an extreme one-sided intellec- 
 tualism, so long as that asserts an intellectual need and activity. The 
 reason, I venture to think, why Prof. Dewey fails to realize this, is that 
 he uses ' practical ' in a further sense and passes unconsciously from one 
 sense to another. In this further sense there is the usual opposition 
 between practice and mere theory, and it is, I presume, with this sense 
 in his mind that Prof. Dewey asserts (p. 335) that the truth of a mechani- 
 cal idea is inseparable from the construction of a. working model. In 
 short. Prof. Dewey seems to define practice in one sense and then to slide, 
 wherever it is convenient, into another sense. Either this, or he fails 
 wholly to realize the nature of the position which he believes himself to be 
 attacking. 
 
 Another point which I may notice is the connexion, according to Prof. 
 Dewey, between having an idea and holding it for true. There are state- 
 ments as to ' assumption' (p. 328) and ' hypothetic ' (p. 341 ) which I probably 
 have failed to understand. They look to myself, however, as if Prof. Dewey 
 was assuming the reality of ' floating ideas ' when in controversy with 
 persons some of whom at least regard these ideas as a delusion untenable 
 both in psychology and logic. And it seems to me further that the rejection 
 of floating ideas tends to raise difficulties, the existence of which Prof. Dewey 
 fails to recognize. I cannot but think that here, as elsewhere, a reference 
 to Bain's views would have been useful. But in any case the existence and 
 possibility of mere ideas. Prof. Dewey should remember, is denied, and 
 cannot in controversy be assumed (see Chap. III). 
 
136 APPENDIX I TO CHAPTER V 
 
 life of the soul, I am prepared for the sake of argument to accept 
 this statement unreservedly. It is not, I think, even as applied 
 to the beginnings of intelligence, entirely correct. But I need not 
 here enter on any reservation which seems to me to be required. 
 Let us for the sake of argument agree that early soul-life (as I, for 
 instance, urged some twenty-five years ago) has no ideas about 
 things except the ideas of its own practical attitude towards 
 them. And let us agree that, except so far as an idea actually 
 issues in practical behaviour, it cannot be retained.*^ Still, does it 
 follow from this that later on a theoretical need and satisfaction 
 is not in fact developed ? Apart from such a hazardous conclusion 
 the entire argument from origin appears to me to be worthless. 
 And I presume therefore that Prof. Dewey's main contention is 
 this, that there is not now in fact any theory which is not practical 
 and practical essentially. 
 
 I would repeat that I have failed to understand Prof. Dewey's 
 real position. And I have remarked above on the fatal ambiguity 
 that attaches to the word practical. But if we take practical in 
 the sense in which it is opposed to theoretical — and if we do not 
 take it so the whole controversy seems to vanish — objections to 
 such a position present themselves at once, (i) Suggested ideas 
 — some of them apparently remote from anything which I am to 
 do or could do — are accepted as true. And not only this, but in 
 many cases these ideas appear to coalesce with and to qualify my 
 world, without any experienced collision and apart from anj^hing 
 which I myself seem to do. This account holds good of a large 
 amount of actual present beliefs. And, though Prof. Dewey fails 
 to recognize the extent to which this takes place, he appears to 
 admit that in the case of ' tested ' ideas (p. 341) we have judgements 
 not issuing in actual behaviour. Further, even where ideas do 
 concern my conduct, I would submit that even here they need 
 not be entertained practically and need not in this sense be 
 practical. But in any case, as we have seen, a large number of 
 ideas appear in no sense to relate to my behaviour either in 
 themselves or in their results. (2) I have so far dealt with cases 
 where no actual preceding want or desire for the result can be 
 shown to exist. But, even where the attained truth is the satis- 
 
 * I do not discuss here the doubt which might be raised with regard to 
 the ideas of sufiering as apart from doing. If you go back far enough 
 I should not suppose that such ideas exist. 
 
ON THE AMBIGUITY OF PRAGMATISM 137 
 
 faction of an actual desire, that desire and that want may be, in 
 a word, a desire for truth itself. Knowledge here, practical in 
 one sense, will still not be practical in the sense of being concerned 
 merely with my behaviour. And ' concerned ' is not the word, 
 for according to Prof. Dewey, if I rightly understand him, truth 
 consists merely in my practical behaviour and is itself nothing 
 otherwise. And, when I apply such a description to the solution 
 of every possible historical or abstract problem, I appear to 
 myself to have arrived somewhere out of contact with actual 
 facts. I can keep hold of them only when I admit that practice 
 itself may be essentially theoretical. 
 
 Prof. Dewey to some extent seems to be aware of these objec- 
 tions, but how he considers himself to meet them I am unable 
 except in part to understand. I can therefore do little more than 
 set down what seems to me to be possible ways of reply. The 
 reader will understand that in what follows, except where this is 
 stated, I am not pretending to criticize Prof. Dewey's account. 
 I am detailing some points on which it seems to me that clearness 
 is essential and has not been secured, (i) The first answer to 
 the above objections would consist in urging that truth is the 
 behaviour of an idea rather than that of a man. When an idea 
 acts and works in me in a certain manner, that is truth, and 
 therefore truth in this sense is practical. I mention this view 
 though I do not suppose that Prof. Dewey would accept it. 
 (ii) Another way of showing that an idea is practical, although 
 I really do not act on it, is to urge that I should act on it if 
 the conditions were otherwise, or shall act on it perhaps in the 
 future (p. 339). This is the position taken long ago by Bain, who, 
 for some reason that I do not understand, is here ignored. It is 
 of course open to the obvious reply that the question is about 
 the actual and not about the possible or future, and that to 
 identify these is not permitted.^ We may perhaps put the same 
 point otherwise by asking in what my knowledge that con- 
 ditionally or in the future I should or shall act, itself now actually 
 consists. To answer for instance that with an idea there is a more 
 or less tentative struggle to act, and that therefore there is an act 
 
 ' This point was dealt with by me many years ago. I have ventured to 
 remark that the uncritical identification of the real and the possible is 
 a leading characteristic of English empiricism. On this subject the 
 reader is referred to the Index, s.v. Possible. 
 
138 APPENDIX I TO CHAPTER V 
 
 — seems unsatisfactory. We do not always seem concerned with 
 any struggle, and as to what ' tentative ' is to mean we require 
 information. Any such phrase we recognize as an old device for 
 going on saying that a thing is so, when obviously and visibly it 
 is not so. But whether, and, if so, how far any of the above is 
 appUcable in the case of Prof. Dewey I am unable to say. (iii) Let 
 us then pass from the view that thought imphes essentially an 
 issue in external behaviour. Let us suppose that thought is 
 always an act, and implies therefore of course a psychical altera- 
 tion of myself. But let us suppose that this psychical alteration, 
 though necessary, is not the main essence of thought. And let us 
 take that main essence to lie in a qualification of reality which is 
 ideal. If this is the view urged by Prof. Dewey, as I can hardly 
 imagine it is, I must lament that he has so failed to express it 
 clearly. With such a view it is obvious that in the main I agree, 
 and how it should be urged against myself I am unable to under- 
 stand, (iv) And yet, agreeing in the main with such a view, 
 I cannot whoUy endorse it. For in the word ' act ' there is still 
 too much ambiguity or else downright mistake. There are truths 
 suggested and at once accepted where certainly there seems 
 no act, in the sense of my will or of my act. The idea seems to 
 coalesce with, or, let us say, to be apperceived by my world or 
 one of my worlds. In this case I am altered of course, but in 
 what sense do I act ? And can we even say here that, so far, the 
 idea's truth for me lies in its working and in its theoretical conse- 
 quences ? Have we not got in such a case, so far as I am con- 
 cerned, something like passive acceptance of the idea ? I agree 
 that, when we reflect and when we come to the criterion of truth, 
 the truth of an idea is inseparable from its theoretical results. 
 And, if you like to add that here I always act, I am not concerned 
 to deny this. But how this is to hold in the case of all acceptance 
 of truth I am unable to see. Prof. Dewey seems to perceive the 
 above difficulty, not wholly but so far as it applies to ' tested 
 ideas ' (p. 341). But his answer is, I regret to say, to myself unin- 
 telligible. What is ' permanent status ' ? What is ' energy of 
 position ' (p. 341) ? To my mind these phrases seem to be no 
 better than mere mythology. And to me they come as a tacit 
 admission that the theory will not work when applied to 
 facts. ^ And I have already dealt above with the apparent 
 ' Cf . Prof. James's ' cold storage '. Why not ' hibernation ' or ' slumber ' 
 
ON THE AMBIGUITY OF PRAGMATISM 139 
 
 attempt to revive Bain's method of escape, (v) Finally (to 
 pass on) the issue of the idea in behaviour may be admitted 
 not to hold now and here, at this time or of this agent. No 
 more may be meant than that at some time the true idea will 
 also be true practically. I hesitate, however, to understand 
 Prof. Dewey in this sense even more than I hesitated in the case 
 of Prof. James. With such a conclusion I should agree, if for 
 ' at some time will ' I may be allowed to write ' somehow does '. 
 Still in neither case, I submit, can such a criterion be used in 
 detail. To some extent obviously therefore, I urge, we must 
 remain content with mere theory. And really this is all for which 
 I myself have contended and contend. And if you insist that 
 such a state of things is only provisional, then, so far as I see, 
 the provisional state of things will last as long as there are finite 
 beings.^ 
 
 Against the preceding it may be urged, though I do not say by 
 Prof. Dewey, that the question is about the main and general 
 tendency of things. That general tendency is that the true idea 
 is the idea which works best even externally. And it may be 
 added that this general tendency justifies the ultimate definition, 
 although we cannot verify this definition in detail and in the case 
 of all ideas. But such a position, if occupied by Prof. Dewey, 
 would to my mind be wholly untenable, if at least he is committed 
 to the doctrine that nowhere for us in our experience can truth 
 be other than that which works practically. For such a denial 
 is not only (as we have seen) out of harmony with fact, but in the 
 end it would itself destroy the general conclusion and the ultimate 
 definition. 
 
 For how, I ask, are we to arrive at ultimate knowledge of the 
 main tendency of things ? Take this very question which seems to 
 be at issue between Prof. Dewey and myself. We each of us are 
 face to face here with a colliding situation, and as to this and so 
 far we are agreed. Now what are we trying to do with this 
 situation ? I on my side say that we seek primarily a theoretical 
 solution. We are each of us attempting to find an idea which will 
 
 or ' on half-pay ' or any other mythological metaphor, whichever for the 
 moment seems to bring most conviction ? 
 
 ' The above, of course, justifies the distinction in practice between the 
 idea which is really true and the idea which works best practically (p. 337, 
 note). 
 
140 APPENDIX I TO CHAPTER V 
 
 work, work in the sense of qualifying reality ideally in such a way 
 that the collision so far is at an end.* And I urge that this true 
 idea does not in respect of its truth or falsehood imply a passage 
 into any practical behaviour on my part. The idea involves 
 a psychical change in me certainly, but that, I contend, is not the 
 essence. If Prof. Dewey rephes (as I think probably he does not), 
 that this aspect of psychical change in me is the essence of truth 
 and of falsehood, then I would ask him to state this plainly and to 
 attempt to face the problem on this basis. And I would ask him 
 to remember that the question is not whether with behef and judge- 
 ment there is a psychical change in me. The question is what we 
 are to say about this psychical event, and how otherwise it must 
 be qualified, so that it is not merely a psychical event but is 
 specially a true or false belief and judgement. But if Prof. Dewey 
 falls back upon practical result and non-theoretical behaviour, 
 then I would invite him here to say what this is. What is it that 
 I do here and what is it that he does here, each of us, I presume, 
 differently in the case of the diverse ideas which we accept ? 
 I myself am unable to verify this issue in practical behaviour, and 
 in any case the contention that this issue makes truth's essence 
 remains to my mind untenable. 
 
 If however in this ultimate appeal to fact we are forced to 
 recognize theoretical truth, then to go on from this basis to deny 
 such truth would be suicidal. To upset by knowledge about the 
 main tendency of the world something for us more ultimate than 
 such knowledge, seems to destroy knowledge altogether. To 
 build further upon the foundation on which we stand is of course 
 legitimate. To insist that truth, to reach perfection, must also in 
 every case somehow issue in act, does not deny that truth for us, 
 at least to some extent, must be sought and found otherwise.^ 
 On the other hand to insist on the practical result of the idea 
 everjrwhere as the criterion of truth, and whoUy to deny truth 
 as existing otherwise, is, I submit, to ensure disaster. But I must 
 end as I began, both in the case of Prof. Dewey and of Prof. James, 
 by deploring their ambiguity or my blindness, which in the end 
 
 •■ On p. 330 Prof. Dewey appears to traverse this statement directly. 
 
 ' In the same way when a too ardent Darwinian teaches that the true 
 idea is the idea which prevails, his position so far is consistent. But, when 
 he goes on perhaps to insist that truth is nothing but prevalence, he falls 
 into inconsistency if he now offers at least this truth as more. 
 
ON THE AMBIGUITY OF PRAGMATISM 141 
 
 leaves me uncertain what it is that they mean to affirm and 
 to deny. 
 
 So much indeed of what Prof. Dewey urges seems to me so true 
 and so admirably stated, that I can only applaud and regret that 
 it should seem to be directed against views which I hold. I agree 
 that practical collision is the origin of truth, and I agree that for 
 truth to pass into a new practical result may be called (if we speak 
 at large) truth's natural and normal end. But that by us men 
 theoretical truth, as well as fine art, must be cultivated, at least 
 to some extent, independently, I am no less assured. The denial 
 of this appears to me to violate facts and to threaten us with the 
 mutilation of our human ideal. And if theory and fine art, or 
 either of these, is to have no worth of its own, let us at least be 
 informed what in the end it is which really possesses value. On 
 such a point to state no positive doctrine, and to leave it to 
 opponents to lose themselves in more or less mistaken conjec- 
 tures, is a course, I would submit, unworthy of such writers as 
 Profs. Dewey and James. 
 
 Prof. Dewey's article raises a number of interesting questions 
 which would well repay discussion. Among these the apparent 
 contention (p. 334) that truth is nothing but that which I do with 
 an idea, and that truth therefore is made by me, could hardly be 
 dealt with except at length.^ That contention would become less 
 ambiguous and more instructive, if the problem of falsehood were 
 included, and again that of beauty and ugUness. The question 
 whether and in what sense I can bring into being truth and 
 beauty, ughness and error, good and evil, and in one word value, 
 has of course the highest interest. The answer that not only do 
 I bring all this into existence, but that the distinctive essences 
 of aU these things are nothing beyond what I do and make, 
 I hesitate to attribute to Prof. Dewey. And his isolated treatment 
 of this question so far as regards truth, ignoring even the diffi- 
 culties caused by falsehood, seems to me obviously insufficient. 
 But to deal with this and other interesting issues raised in Prof. 
 Dewey's article, is here clearly impossible. 
 
 I propose again to say nothing here in reply to Prof. Dewey's 
 discussion of certain views held by me. It is not that I do not 
 value his criticism, or again that in most cases I should find it 
 difficult to make an explanation or a reply which, to myself 
 
 ' See Chap. XI. 
 
142 APPENDIX II TO CHAPTER V 
 
 perhaps, would be satisfactory. But I think it far better to defer 
 anything which I have to say to another opportunity. ^ Pragma- 
 tism proclaims itself, I understand, as a great new way in philo- 
 sophy. Hence, if it is true, it is not true because those particular 
 views with which I for instance am identified, are demonstrably 
 false. Such an alternative might be convenient, but it is, of course, 
 indefensible, and with the injustice which it would offer to other 
 views I could not associate myself. Pragmatism is true, if at all, 
 because it can successfully deal with all ultimate issues. It may 
 indeed be shown otherwise to be invalid, but it cannot otherwise 
 be shown to hold good. And I will venture to add that in my 
 opinion some such reminder as this (though perhaps not in the 
 case of Prof. Dewey) seems desirable and necessary. 
 
 APPENDIX II TO CHAPTER V^ 
 
 ON PROF. JAMES'S ' MEANING OF TRUTH ' 
 
 I HAD written, some months before Prof. James's lamented 
 death, a criticism of some of the views set forth in his Meaning 
 of Truth. My purpose in writing this was to invite Prof. James 
 to furnish certain explanations. And now, especially as the fol- 
 lowing remarks are not a general estimate of his work, and as 
 they give no expression to my feeling of admiration and genuine 
 respect, I have hesitated to publish them. But for the reader 
 who will take them merely for what they are, I think it better to 
 do so. And I will begin with the question of Relativism. 
 
 We must here understand relativism in two senses, (a) In 
 the first of these, truth and reality are simply for this or that 
 finite individual, while (b), in the second meaning of the term, 
 it is some set of individuals on which everything depends, (a) In 
 the first sense Prof. James certainly did not advocate relativism. 
 What he calls Pragmatism and Humanism are obviously com- 
 patible even with an undue disregard of the individual person, 
 and with an exaggerated emphasis laid on the universal side. 
 With regard to Humanism, the tendency of what may be called 
 
 ' See Chap. IX. 
 
 ' These pages appeared originally in Mind for July 191 1 . A few slight 
 alterations have been made. 
 
ON PROF. JAMES'S ' MEANING OF TRUTH ' 143 
 
 Humanism to depreciate the aspect emphasized by ' Personal 
 Idealism,' may be called historical, for it appeared years ago in 
 one part of the Hegelian school. In other words there is no 
 connexion in principle between ' Personal Idealism ' and the 
 doctrines of Pragmatism and Humanism. Certainly, then. Prof. 
 James did not intend to teach relativism in this first sense, 
 though whether his doctrine, when worked out, would have led 
 to that result, I am unable to judge. ^ 
 
 (6) In the second meaning of relativism truth and reality are 
 something merely for this or that set or collection of persons. 
 And, in inquiring how far Prof. James was in this sense a relati- 
 vist, we are brought up short by the ambiguity, which (though 
 invited to do so) he, so far as I know, made no attempt to remove. 
 The only thing, I would submit, which lends plausibiUty to Prof. 
 James's doctrine of Humanism, is the equivocation by which 
 Humanity stands, at discretion, either for the inhabitants of a 
 certain planet or for the whole of finite mind, however and 
 wherever and whenever finite mind appears. If we take Hu- 
 manity in the first sense, as being merely one set of creatures, 
 then relativism seems to follow. How am I to deny that our 
 truth, our goodness and beauty, may be utterly false and bad 
 and ugly to another race of beings, and that this other race is, 
 notwithstanding this, as good as ourselves — if indeed there were 
 any sense in such a comparison ? And, if I cannot deny this, am 
 I not really a relativist ? What is the ground (I ask once more) 
 on which the human race is to dictate to the Universe ? (Cf. 
 Chap. VIII, p. 243.) What is the value of our inference to the 
 nature of reality at large simply from what we happen to know 
 of the history of one set of creatures ? Prof. James's doctrine, 
 I would repeat, to myself seems plausible merely so far as he 
 succeeded (I do not of course mean intentionally) in keeping it 
 ambiguous.^ 
 
 ' The words quoted by Prof. James from myself {Meaning of Truth, p. 71 ) 
 as applying to the ' humanist ', were used by myself of Personal Idealism. 
 See Mind, No. 51, p. 322 (p. 90 of the present volume). 
 
 " Prof. James, in Pragmatism, p. 30, inveighs against the monstrousness 
 of holding that, given certain hideous crimes, good on the whole is realized. 
 He insists, that is, on taking the crime in its abstraction as absolutely real. 
 And then he goes on (Hegel would have smiled) to denounce ' abstrac- 
 tionism '. But, apart from that, on what ground could Prof. James have 
 denied that a crime, however hideous, is no crime at all except for certain 
 
144 APPENDIX II TO CHAPTER V 
 
 Possibly Prof. James really held that our race on this planet 
 is the same thing as all finite mind, or as all the finite mind, at 
 least, that anywhere counts. His Humanism, if so, would have 
 meant nothing new. He would have been in company which 
 to myself is respectable, but, in attempting to make good this 
 thesis, his hands, I think, would have been more than full. And 
 such a conclusion, so far as I know, he never endorsed unequivo- 
 cally. But, apart from some such conclusion, is it not futile to 
 speak of getting to absolute truth by ' simple inductions from the 
 past extended to the future by analogy ' ? {Meaning, p. 267). 
 
 I am not saying that Prof. James's doctrine really consisted 
 in a blind oscillation between two meanings of the word ' human '. 
 He had, I must imagine, a view with two aspects, the connexion 
 between which he did not, and perhaps could not, work out. 
 On the one side this view seems much the same as that made 
 popular by J. S. Mill. It differs, so far as against J. S. MiU Prof. 
 James insisted on continuity. The difference, certainly, is real, 
 but a question remains as to how far it will carry you ? Continuity 
 takes you, in some sense doubtless, beyond the present, but can 
 it take you, and on what ground can it take you, to a real past 
 and a real future ? I will return to this point, and will merely 
 say at present that Prof. James seems to myself to foUow here 
 J. S. Mill to a common bankruptcy. 
 
 But Prof. James's teaching presents another and a very diverse 
 aspect. It suggests to my mind that in a great measure he really 
 shared that view of the world which in the main I, for instance, 
 inherited from Hegel. Prof. James desired to insist that there 
 is much more in human society and in its history, and, I presume, 
 in the Universe at large, than the changing accidents of a mere 
 collection. And he held, I think, that in our own experience we 
 touch intimately, and to a certain extent know, the real character 
 of the whole Universe which there is immanent. Naturally 
 I do not suggest that the difference between asserting and deny- 
 ing the ultimate reahty of change, is a trifling difference. But 
 the necessary consequences, as regards the value of the individual 
 person and his place in the Universe, are surely far from being 
 evident. And in short the radical opposition which Prof. James 
 
 persons, while for other persons (for anything that he really knew) it might 
 be a virtue ? And what other aspect is there in his doctrine to save it 
 from relativism in the extremest sense ? 
 
ON PROF. JAMES'S ' MEANING OF TRUTH ' 145 
 
 took to exist throughout between his own doctrine and that of 
 monistic Absolutism, rested, I venture to think, on what I must 
 call his partial ignorance about the latter. There are certain 
 points in Absolutism which he did not like, and I myself could 
 not say that I like everything in Absolutism. Clearly it is a 
 ' hard ' doctrine. But to expect to get in detail all that you 
 want just precisely as you want it, is to take a position which 
 seems to myself justifiable only when stated with the very last 
 degree of honesty and explicitness. And, apart from such a 
 position, the real question is this. How, if you reject Absolutism, 
 are you going to secure that which you must have, any more cheaply 
 elsewhere ? ^ This second aspect of Prof. James's teaching, in 
 which emphasis is laid on the universal side, appears to myself 
 joined to the former aspect of individualism by no intelligible 
 bond. The connexion in his mind between these two characters 
 of the Universe was, so far as I know, never clearly set forth. 
 
 I will proceed now to offer a few critical remarks on some of 
 the doctrines contained in Prof. James's Meaning of Truth. The 
 misunderstandings which these remarks are likely or certain to 
 involve, may even themselves, I hope, lead to the removal of 
 what, I submit, is real obscurity. 
 
 (i) Prof. James calls his own view the ' pragmatic ' view. 
 If by this he means (as he sometimes seems to mean) merely 
 that view which works best, we have here an attempt to beg 
 the question at issue. The objection taken to Prof. James's 
 account of truth is taken precisely on the ground that this 
 account fails to work theoretically. And practically (cf. pp. 67 
 and 133) Prof. James seems never really to have faced the problem 
 of a genuine working creed. He never, I think, saw what is 
 involved in treating all ideas, without exception, as merely 
 useful. He, so far as I know, never even inquired whether 
 truth in the end has to be consistent with itself. With regard 
 to the practical character of all truth I will say no more here, 
 as Prof. James himself seems willing (pp. 206 foil.) to treat the 
 matter as of no moment. If this is really so, he would be at 
 issue, I presume, with Prof. Dewey, and little or nothing of 
 Pragmatism would, I imagine, be really left but the name. 
 
 ' Prof. James's idea as to Absolutism, that it is a way of getting what 
 you want without paying anything for it, is surely (to any one who knows) 
 a striking revelation of the limits of his knowledge (cf. Chap. V, p. 133). 
 
 1574 L 
 
146 APPENDIX II TO CHAPTER V 
 
 (2) To pass to another point — judgement really, on my view, 
 involves mediation. This aspect of the matter has not escaped 
 Prof. James, but he has, in my opinion, turned truth here into 
 ruinous error. For he has taken intermediation to consist in 
 a temporal process from the idea to a perceived object. To this 
 conclusion, in spite of much obscurity, he seems committed. 
 Where an idea merely leads to an object, we, according to 
 Prof. James, have knowledge. Whether there is a relation of 
 identity in difference between the idea and the object, a relation 
 which is also for the knower, I am unable to say. The importance 
 of both these questions is obvious, but the answer, if there is an 
 answer, remains to me obscure. Apparently we have truth 
 wherever an idea leads to an object.^ 
 
 Any such doctrine is hable to objections which, I think, can 
 never be fairly met. I recognize that I have now my chronic 
 pain for which nothing can be done. I notice that a tree is 
 about to fall upon the head of a distant person. The suggested 
 idea of some action leads in me to its performance. In the third 
 of these cases we have the definition without truth, while in the 
 two former cases we have truth without the definition. ^ With 
 abstract truths, again, the verification in every instance by a 
 process of events leading to a particular object cannot be shown. 
 Or consider truths about the past. Is there a real past, and, if 
 there is such a thing, can it turn into a perception ? Or have our 
 ideas about it, if it is there, really nothing to do with it ? Or, 
 again, is the reality of the past merely ideal ? I shaU have to 
 return to the difficulty raised by these questions. But even with 
 regard to the future Prof. James's view will not work. Suppose 
 that I foretell an earthquake to happen next year or after my 
 death, how does my idea lead to the earthquake, and where 
 does the process of truth fall ? The doctrine that there is no 
 truth apart from the action of some person here and now, if 
 
 1 I am of course prepared to give references throughout, but (since I admit 
 that I do not understand) I think it useless to trouble the reader with 
 them. And I confine myself here to the teaching of the volume mentioned. 
 I can now, in republishing these pages, refer the reader to what follows in 
 this volume. 
 
 ^ In the second case (it may be said) there is a continuous process of 
 fulfilment from the idea to the object, and this is truth. The doctrine 
 here stated will be examined later, pp. 154-6. For the present I would 
 reply that the judgement, ' this tree is about to fall there,' may be complete 
 before the ' object ' exists in fact. 
 
ON PROF. JAMES'S ' MEANING OF TRUTH ' 147 
 
 ■ action ' is taken broadly, I accept, while I reject the view that 
 truth's essence is limited to that action. And this latter view 
 seems hardly even to coincide with Prof. James's teaching.^ 
 
 If what Prof. James meant was merely this, that truth, to 
 be true, must be in vital connexion with the world of particular 
 feelings and perceptions, and in some sense is verifiable in this 
 world, I am of course fully in accord with him. But to offer 
 such a doctrine as something new, and as something which is 
 to make a revolution in philosophy, would be to my mind 
 ridiculous. 
 
 (3) I will noticp now one method by which Prof. James appears 
 to have thought that at least some troubles could be met. This 
 is the old device by which at discretion the potential or virtual 
 is substituted for the actual. As a good ' empiricist ' Prof. 
 James here kept to the tradition of his school. I could not say 
 that he has here done nothing more than blindly follow his 
 blind leaders, but I at least have not been able to discover what 
 more on this point he has done. What has to be proved is, for 
 instance, the existence of actual intermediaries in time. The 
 possibility of such intermediaries does not assert their existence. 
 It asserts something else, and what it really asserts is not a lapse 
 of events.^ 
 
 (4) I will return now to a point of extreme importance. Prof. 
 James is of course against transcendence, but in this very matter 
 he (so far as I can perceive) is threatened with ruin. The question 
 is whether the object-reahty, which he has to know, is not often 
 in a world which should be beyond his knowledge. Take once 
 more the instance of a past or future event. What are we to 
 say with regard to the existence of such a fact ? Does it tran- 
 scend, is it outside of and beyond, the present Reality now im- 
 manent in my knowledge ? To this question, as I have already 
 
 ' Cf. here, p. 129. I cannot venture to attribute to Prof. James the 
 doctrine that the earthquake is a social event to which my idea leads by 
 a human process. 
 
 ' ' A fact virtually pre-exists when every condition of its realization 
 save one is already there ' {Meaning, p. 93). An explosion therefore has 
 pre-existed whether I have, or have not, gone on to apply the match or 
 pull the trigger. But the real question surely is as to what in every such 
 case it is which does actually exist and pre-exist. And here the reader is 
 of course put off with mere phrases. And I ask myself whether this really 
 is to be taken as a great advance in philosophy ? 
 
 L 2 
 
148 APPENDIX II TO CHAPTER V 
 
 explained, I myself reply with an emphatic negative, but Prof. 
 James's answer to it remains to my mind unintelligible. And 
 any inteUigible answer, I submit, must ruin his theory. Let us 
 say, first, that the reaUty of dead Caesar is nothing beyond that 
 which is immanent in what I know now — then what, if so, be- 
 comes of the absolute reality of time and particular events ? 
 How does this latter doctrine agree with the idea that the past 
 is only ideal ? But take a different view, and then what for me 
 now is the past object ? It has become a Thing-in-itself which for 
 knowledge is nothing. And the intermediaries, which lead to 
 this nothing, what are they for me ? Obviously, through nearly 
 all their extent, they again for me are nothing. And to speak of 
 approximating where you can know neither the goal nor the road, 
 appears really to be senseless. The above dilemma, I urge, 
 entails ruin if left unmet, and I cannot believe that it ever was 
 steadily faced by Prof. James. ^ 
 
 We obviously are here concerned with the relation of truth 
 to knowledge and of both to reality. Have they any essential 
 connexion at all ? Can reahty be a something outside which 
 makes no difference ? Can truth have no relation to it, or again 
 a relation which is merely external ? On the other hand, are 
 we ready to bring reality within truth and knowledge, and both 
 within ourselves, and to do this in earnest ? After the criticism 
 of now a century back one might expect that questions such as 
 these could not be ignored. And it certainly would not be true 
 to say of Prof. James that he ignored them. But, if any one can 
 understand his answer, I cannot. 
 
 In a succession of volumes, perhaps too hastily composed 
 and too hurriedly published, Prof. James wrote, I must believe, 
 from a central point of view from which these essays were thrown 
 out. But for a reader to discover this centre by following the 
 opposite direction is far from easy, more especially when the 
 reader stands outside and is perhaps not sympathetic. And if 
 
 ' The question of truth about the past has been discussed by Prof. Dewey 
 in his interesting volume, Influence of Darwin, pp. 159 ff. The result to 
 my mind is failure. If Prof. Dewey would remember that the person whom 
 he calls the ' intellectualist ' has been long ago refuted, and that the real 
 question is as to the nature and truth of his own view, the issue, I think, 
 would become clearer. But nothing, I am sure, can fully clear the issue 
 except a definite statement by Prof. Dewey as to what he means by reality. 
 Why we cannot have this I do not understand. 
 
ON PROF. JAMES'S ' MEANING OF TRUTH ' 149 
 
 the central point of view has never really been worked out, have 
 we, after all, any right to say that in a proper sense it was there ? 
 It is, I think, for those who believe that Prof. James made a 
 revolution in philosophy, to justify that belief by an explanation 
 of his doctrine as to the ultimate nature of reality and truth. 
 And if the mistakes, which I doubtless have here made, serve 
 to contribute to this result, then, however great they are, I shall 
 not regret them. If on the other hand I am told that I have no 
 right to ask for metaphysical doctrine where none was ever 
 offered, I shall content myself with a smile. If there is anything 
 in philosophy of which I am fully assured, it is this, that to seek 
 to discuss the nature of truth apart from a theory of ultimate 
 reality ends and must end in futile self-deception. And I can 
 hardly suppose that the answer suggested above would have 
 satisfied Prof. James. But, however that may be, and even 
 though I fear that they may have robbed us of something better, 
 the later works of Prof. James will have profited philosophy. To 
 have excited inquiry and to have stimulated interest in the 
 highest problems of hfe, is to have succeeded where, I suppose, 
 most philosophers have failed, and where it can always be 
 doubted if any further success is possible. But Prof. James's 
 contribution to psychology will remain, I believe, indubitable. 
 
 APPENDIX III TO CHAPTER V 
 
 ON PROFESSOR JAMES'S ' RADICAL EMPIRICISM ' 
 
 Having read once more Prof. James's article, 'A World of Pure 
 Experience,' as republished in the Essays on Radical Empiricism, 
 I am tempted to add here some remarks on his ultimate meta- 
 physical views. These remarks, though made by one who does 
 not profess to understand, may perhaps be useful. For I am in 
 agreement with so much of Prof. James's premisses that my 
 criticism, however wrong, can hardly be quite external. 
 
 With Prof. James (so much seems plain) there is no reality but 
 experience, and that which falls outside of what is experienced is 
 not real. But is experience the same as that which we should 
 call actual experience, or are there regions of the possible and 
 
150 APPENDIX III TO CHAPTER V 
 
 ideal which also are real ? Can an intellectual construction 
 claim to be an experienced reality ? Prof. James at first sight 
 seems bound to reject any such suggestion, but to me his view 
 is not clear. What (to go for the moment no further ^) are we to 
 say of past and future experiences ? Are these, or either of these, 
 to be called actual facts ? For Prof. James the series of events 
 in time seems to be ultimately real and not a mere construction. 
 If so, this series (it seems) is actually experienced, and, if so, 
 I presume is experienced as present. But then we have to ask, 
 ' experienced by whom and when ? ' The dilemma which con- 
 fronts us is evident and is old. If the real temporal order exists 
 only in a succession of actual experiences, then how is this succes- 
 sion and order itself experienced actually ? If, on the other 
 hand, the whole series is ever present now, then how can its past 
 and future be, as such, ultimately real ? ^ 
 
 Did Prof. James hold, or suppose, that there is, or perhaps 
 some day wiU be, an actual experience in which the whole time- 
 sequence is given as the content of one immediate ' now ', a 
 present in which the succession of our lives and events is at once 
 a passage and yet is all there ? If possibly this was his thought, 
 he never, so far as I know, faced the danger or the ruin with 
 which it threatens the ultimate reality of time. For, if the 
 whole temporal series is nothing but one aspect of the actual 
 ' now ', we are far on our way to deny that this aspect is, as such, 
 ultimately real, or more than a relative appearance. But the 
 reader will, I think, seek help here from Prof. James in vain, 
 unless he can find it in what to me is some obvious conjuring 
 with delusive terms such as ' possible ' and ' virtual '. 
 
 Leaving for the present this unsolved dilemma, I will notice 
 next an ambiguity with regard to the nature of what is ex- 
 perienced. Have we terms and relations given as such, and 
 therefore, as such, ultimately real ? Or is what we actually 
 
 ' See pp. 148, 156, and Index, s.v. Time. 
 
 ' You do not, it seems to me, touch the above difficulty by making 
 consciousness separable from experience. The dilemma, I should say, 
 can be met only by denying, or else by subordinating, the fact of change 
 and succession as it appears in immediate experience. The latter way 
 (that of subordination) is the course which I myself adopt. But neither 
 way, so far as I see, is open to Prof. James. He, apparently, has both 
 (a) to identify the experienced present with all reality, and (b) to keep 
 past and future experiences ultimately real in their character of events. 
 
ON PROF. JAMES'S RADICAL EMPIRICISM 151 
 
 experience, on the contrary, a non-relational whole, a continuous 
 flux, with relative emphases of its diversities, but with no actual 
 relations or terms ? Are terms and relations, in a word, abstrac- 
 tions and mere ideal constructions, or are they given realities ? 
 The above two views to myself are irreconcilable, and to myself 
 Prof. James seems committed to both of them. 
 
 In arguing for Plurahsm and against Monism he urges habitu- 
 ally that terms and mere conjunctive relations, are, as such, 
 immediately experienced ; and indeed any contention short of 
 this would leave his arguments baseless. But while he identifies 
 himself thus with the first view, the second view, that immediate 
 experience is non-relational, seems essential to his doctrine. And 
 yet how to combine these contrary views we are, I think, no- 
 where informed.^ 
 
 The doctrine of Pluralism and of external relations may of 
 course be advocated otherwise. It may be offered as an inference, 
 as a true construction from what is given, and as the one rational 
 account of the world. But this is a different thing from a direct 
 appeal to immediate experience, and a claim to find there terms 
 and conjunctive relations as given facts. Still this is the claim 
 and the appeal which, whenever it suits his purpose, seems made 
 by Prof. James. 2 
 
 There is a point here which it is instructive to notice in passing. 
 Not only is Prof. James concerned to advocate Pluralism and 
 external relations as directly given, but he is concerned no less 
 
 ' In arguing against myself for the ultimate reality of external relations 
 (Radical Empiricism, Essay III, or Pluralistic Universe, Appendix A), 
 Prof. James assumed me to hold that terms are, as such, ultimately real, 
 while relations are not so. He at that time apparently had no idea that 
 the view to which he opposed himself was that both terms and relations 
 are alike, as such, mere abstractions, and neither ultimately real, though 
 of course for certain purposes we use these ideas as true. How could 
 I reply to such an argument ? And what can I say now when I read 
 (Rad. Emp., p. 52), ' Throughout the history of philosophy the subject 
 and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities ' ? 
 
 ^ The reader will not, I hope, take me to suggest that, in order to estab- 
 lish such Monism as I accept, no more is wanted than the rejection of 
 Pluralism (I use this word of course in tbe proper sense). With the 
 rejection of Pluralism I understand that forthwith Monism follows ; but, as 
 to the further character of this Monism, nothing follows forthwith. The 
 One may, so far, be irrational and in a sense incoherent and even discordant. 
 We are, so far, only at the beginning, and, to advance, must make use 
 (as I have shown elsewhere) of a further argument. 
 
152 APPENDIX III TO CHAPTER V 
 
 to maintain the ultimate reality of change as an experienced 
 fact. And, so far as I know, it did not occur to him that these 
 two contentions are apparently in conflict. For, if in change 
 something really is altered, and, if the alteration can consist 
 merely in difference of position, and if in this difference the 
 terms and the relations are neither of them altered— then either 
 we have an alteration where nothing is changed, or else our 
 premisses have been wrong. Something, if so (we shaU have 
 to allow), is concerned in the change, which something is more 
 than and other than the elements admitted by Pluralism. If (to 
 repeat) you hold to reaUty in the form of external terms and 
 relations, you must deny the ultimate reaUty of change as actually 
 given. If, on the other hand, you affirm this latter, you must 
 insist that the experience of change is a non-relational totahty. 
 And, if so, terms and relations become, as such, abstractions, 
 constructions, true perhaps or perhaps vicious, but assuredly in 
 neither case things, as such, actually experienced. How it is 
 possible to avoid this dilemma and simply to maintain both 
 theses at once, I myself do not know, but apparently nothing 
 less is required for the position taken by Prof. James. 
 
 The doctrine which Prof. James would, I think, have pre- 
 ferred is the view that given experience is non-relational, that 
 it is an unbroken fluid totality containing in one " now ' an un- 
 divided lapse, and is in itself foreign to any terms or relations as 
 such. This I also have taken to be the true account of the 
 matter ; and what I would notice here is the fact, that, while 
 urging this view as a fatal objection ignored by Absolutism 
 and Idealism, Prof. James might, like others, have himself learnt 
 it at the very source where according to him it is most unknown. 
 The doctrine in question. Prof. James stated very candidly, has 
 been advocated by myself since 1883.^^ He seems even to give 
 me the credit of having broken away here from the tradition of 
 my school, and of having, conjointly with M. Bergson though at 
 perhaps an earlier date, originated in modern times the true view 
 ignored by and fatal to idealistic Monism. Now for myself (I am 
 of course not concerned with M. Bergson's attitude) I at once, in 
 the same journal, disclaimed, and I now again emphatically dis- 
 claim any such originality. When it was that the view in question 
 was first advocated in modern philosophy, I cannot, I regret to 
 ' See The Journal of Philosophy, &c., for January 1910. 
 
ON PROF. JAMES'S RADICAL EMPIRICISM 153 
 
 say, inform the reader. But that I myself derived it from Hegel 
 is perfectly certain. If I had ever been asked if it was Hegel's 
 teaching, I should have replied that so much at least was in- 
 dubitable. And the feeUngs of the ' ideahst ', forced to hear it 
 proclaimed aloud that this position not only is his ruin, but is 
 also something of which he has lived totally unaware, may be 
 left undescribed. The fact, I presume, is this, that Prof. James, 
 hke his public, failed to reaUze the wealth, the variety and the 
 radical differences, which are to be found in that outburst of 
 German philosophy which came after Kant. 
 
 What is the true issue between Prof. James and those who 
 here follow Hegel ? There is agreement on both sides that 
 immediate experience is the beginning, and the vital question is 
 whether this experience is also the end. Is immediate experience 
 real in the sense that it is all there is which is real ? To this 
 question I will return, but I will first ask as to Prof. James's view 
 of knowledge. For knowledge itself is a fact. 
 
 We have had, so far, the reader will recall, reality taken as 
 immediate experience. We saw indeed that the fatal dilemma 
 as to past and future experience was left unmet. But, leaving 
 this, we have to take reality as being a succession of immediate 
 experiences, and, if so, where in such a world can ideas and 
 knowledge fall ? 
 
 It is better, I think, to begin by asking what, in deaUng with 
 this problem, Prof. James had supplied by others and ready to 
 his hand. He had, in the first place, the identity of reality and 
 experience. He had, next, the doctrine that ideas are what may 
 be called ' symbolical '. While on the one side they are psychical 
 events, on the other side they are self-transcendent and refer 
 to a reality other than themselves. This reality is, on one view, 
 viewed as being, at least in some cases, beyond experience, but 
 on another view, also lying before Prof. James, any such tran- 
 scendence is denied. The actual experience, on this view, is 
 transcended, but transcended only as immediate. The reality, 
 referred to by the content of the idea, is the Universe itself, 
 which Universe is immanent in the immediate experience, and 
 always itself is actually experienced. A past event, for instance, 
 is on one side present, while on the other side its content ideally 
 qualifies Reahty taken in the character of a temporal series 
 
154 APPENDIX III TO CHAPTER V 
 
 beyond the present — this same Reality being also actually present 
 here and now in, and as, immediate experience. 
 
 Now why could Prof. James not adopt a conclusion worked 
 out from premisses so near akin to those which he took up ? 
 The reason is that, if so, reality could hardly be no more than one 
 immediate experience or a succession of such experiences ; and 
 this, on the other hand. Prof. James is bound to maintain. But, 
 then, what according to Prof. James is to become of the fact of 
 knowledge and truth, a fact apparently not included in mere 
 immediate experience ? His answer, however unsatisfactory, will, 
 I think, up to a certain point be found to be instructive and 
 interesting. 
 
 Since only particular events are real. Prof. James denies that 
 an idea can be more, and can be self-transcendent (Rad. Emp., 
 p. 57). The psychical fact must know, without itself referring 
 beyond itself. And what is it to know ? The answer obviously 
 is ' other events ', for there is nothing else to know. And, in 
 order for these events to be real, they (the logic is not mine) must 
 be future. If now, following the same logic, we ask what know- 
 ledge is and where it falls, the answer is that knowledge is essen- 
 tially a temporal process of facts. It falls in, and it is, the 
 mere series of experienced events, beginning with the idea and 
 ending with the object.^ 
 
 This conclusion at first sight seems no more than a paradox, 
 but, as advocated by Prof. James, it became more or less plausible. 
 But the plausibility is gained by two expedients, neither of which 
 will bear the light. The first of these (i) is the covert rein- 
 statement in the idea of that symbolical character, that very self- 
 transcendence, which the doctrine denies. And (ii) the second 
 means to making plausible the view that in knowledge the object 
 is nothing but an experienced future event, is to bury the true 
 issue under a cloud of misleading ambiguities. 
 
 (i) Suppose that I know that somewhere near there is a spring 
 of water. Does my present knowledge consist in my actually 
 
 ' I may remind the reader that the view, that explanation consists 
 merely in showing intermediate sensible detail, is not new. See my 
 Principles of Logic, pp. 490-1. How far in Prof. James's mind his doctrine 
 of knowledge was connected with, and due to, such a view as that held 
 by Bain with regard to the practical character of all belief, I am unable 
 to say. 
 
ON PROF. JAMES'S RADICAL EMPIRICISM 155 
 
 finding this water ? Has it, in order to be Icnowledge now, got 
 to wait for this future event ? Such a contention seems obviously 
 absurd, and it forthwith is covertly modified. With regard to 
 the relation of similarity between the image and the object, 
 I will say no more than that there arise at once well-known, 
 and perhaps fatal, difficulties, nowhere, I believe, faced by 
 Prof. James. What I wish to emphasize here is the point that, 
 while the self-reference of the idea beyond itself is explicitly 
 denied by Prof. James, he uses, and is forced to use, words which 
 re-affirm it. The present idea of water, he says, leads to the 
 finding. There is a continuous advance to the object, with an 
 experience of developing progress, and therefore the object was 
 meant {Rad. Emp., pp. 57, 60, 62). But is it not, I ask, obvious 
 that such language implies at the start, and before the finding, 
 a self-transcendent idea of the water ? 
 
 Let us suppose first, for the sake of argument, that the water 
 happens to be found. The finding of course must be taken, not 
 as one sensibly present experience, but as a series of such ex- 
 periences. And at the start we have, according to Prof. James, 
 nothing which refers beyond itself. But, if so, for ' leading ' you 
 are, I submit, bound to write ' mere priority in succession ', and, 
 as to any experience of progress developing to an end, so far as 
 I see, it is excluded. If the starting-place really leads, it is 
 because that place points, and, if it really points, then, at once 
 and now, it refers beyond itself. From the very first it plainly 
 is self -transcendent and qualifies an object beyond itself, and it 
 needs no process of waiting for something else to happen to it 
 in the future. Knowledge of what is now is not, we may say, 
 what it is, just because something comes later to make the fact 
 that it was. 
 
 It would be useless for me to labour a point which, as I under- 
 stand it, is obvious. But take the experience of a pain decreasing 
 gradually over a space of some minutes. Even this experience 
 is, on Prof. James's view, I should say, impossible. But, in any 
 case, could we say here even plausibly that the beginning knows 
 the end, and that the end, when it comes, makes the knowledge ? 
 Or think of a desire, say for water, which later is satisfied. Here 
 we have, first, an idea qualif3ang an object beyond itself, which, 
 according to Prof. James, is impossible. And next, when the 
 end is fulfilled in fact — is it not monstrous to contend that our 
 
156 APPENDIX III TO CHAPTER V 
 
 desire now has been, and was, the knowledge of this fact's 
 existence ? 
 
 (ii) But suppose that, in looking for the spring which I know 
 to exist, I do not happen to find the water. How, again, if the 
 object is, not merely no future event, but no particular event 
 at all ? What in all such cases (we ask) has become of that inter- 
 mediate series of actual events in which alone knowledge can 
 consist ? Clearly the series is not there ; and, if so, apparently 
 in the whole of these cases there can be no such thing as know- 
 ledge. From this inevitable conclusion, and from the open 
 bankruptcy which follows, Prof. James seeks to escape. But 
 the means which he adopts are (so far as I see) merely the old 
 inherited devices now long ago exposed. Attempts to conjure 
 by the substitution at discretion of ' virtual ' and ' possible ' for 
 ■ actual ', are neither profitable, nor, when once the trick is known, 
 are they even interesting. And in the ingenious discussions, by 
 which Prof. James seeks to recommend his view, I have failed 
 really to find anything more than such attempts. Hence we 
 must conclude that the greater part of our knowledge obviously 
 falls outside of what Prof. James takes to be the essence of all 
 knowledge, while even the residue can be included only by covertly 
 importing that self-transcendent idea which we have been 
 ordered to exclude. It would be difficult, I submit, for any account 
 of the fact of knowledge to break down more completely. 
 
 Passing from this we come to the final question about the 
 nature of reality. Reality, according to Prof. James, appears 
 to be one stream of immediate experiences, and nothing beyond 
 this is real. And Prof. James seems even to wonder how any 
 one like myself can in the main agree with him at the start, and 
 yet leave him in the end {Journal ofPhilos., January 1910). The 
 explanation is, however, very simple. In the first place, if this 
 stream is to be one, there is the doubt about its real unity. Is 
 the whole of Reality, with its past and future, a single actual 
 immediate experience, or not ? We have seen above that in this 
 dilemma Prof. James does not help us, and this one difficulty, to 
 go no further, to my mind is enough. 
 
 But we are here only at the beginning. We have on our hands 
 the whole inteUectual sphere of terms and relations, the world 
 of abstractions and ideal constructions, and the wide region of 
 
ON PROF. JAMES'S RADICAL EMPIRICISM 157 
 
 mere possibilities and fancies and illusions. All this is fact of 
 a kind, and no phrases can banish its existence. Now, is all this 
 mass to be simply predicated of immediate experience ? Ob- 
 viously, in my judgement, this cannot be done, and yet, if I do 
 not do this, there is at once something in reality beyond my 
 reahty. And, if you reply that I am not to predicate, but am 
 to use an ' and ' or ' together ', with this surely there is an end. 
 You have now admitted, beside and beyond immediate experience, 
 another reality ; and still to persist that immediate experience 
 is all there is that is real, seems plainly perverse. 
 
 In one sense I agree that we never can break out and pass 
 beyond feeling. Everything that is real must be felt (cf. Chap- 
 ter VI). But, on the other side, I urge that our felt content is 
 developed in such a way that it goes beyond and conflicts with 
 the form of feeling or mere immediacy. And it is in the character 
 also of this ideal content that we must, I submit, seek to find 
 the full nature of the Real. We must conclude to a higher 
 Reahty which at once transcends, and yet re-includes, the sphere 
 of mere feeling. 
 
 The above result, if we start from the ground accepted by 
 Prof. James, can, so far as I see, be avoided only in one way. 
 The sole remedy is flatly and utterly to deny what I should call 
 the entire fact of the ideal world. Urge that the reality at first 
 is a mere flux diversified by sensible emphases,^ and insist further 
 that, beyond these emphases, there is at any stage absolutely 
 nothing ideal, nothing even in appearance. Hold to this, and, 
 whatever else you may be, you are so far consistent.^ But, even 
 so, against the dilemma of the flux itself, which you know to 
 exist beyond the actual flux felt now — you have still to seek 
 a further medicine, or else to admit that the disease is not curable. 
 And to say that Prof. James would have seriously accepted even 
 the first partial remedy, is more than I myself could af&rm. 
 I can imagine no task more interesting to, and more incumbent 
 
 ^ In Mind, for July 1887, I myself wrote, ' In the beginning there is 
 nothing beyond what is . . . felt simply. . . . There are in short no relations 
 and no feelings, only feeling. It is all one blur with differences, that 
 work and that are felt, but are not discriminated.' But of course, follow- 
 ing Hegel, I was always clear that this beginning is not the whole of our 
 actual world, and cannot possibly be the end. 
 
 ^ As long, that is, as you succeed in maintaining that your own assertion 
 also is no more than a mere sensible emphasis. 
 
158 APPENDIX III TO CHAPTER V 
 
 on, the disciples of Prof, James, than to make an attempt in 
 earnest to explain and to develop his doctrine of Radical 
 Empiricism. 
 
 Judging so far as I can judge, I must doubt that claim, to take 
 high rank as a metaphysician, which has been made not by, but 
 on behalf of, Prof. James. I cannot find in his metaphysical 
 views (as I understand them) much real originaUty, and what 
 I miss, perhaps even more, in his metaphysics is the necessary 
 gjift of patient labour and persistent self-criticism. With all his 
 merits as a philosopher, and assuredly they are great, I cannot 
 think it is as a metaphysician that Prof. James's name will hold 
 its place in the history of thought. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF IMMEDIATE 
 EXPERIENCE 
 
 In this chapter ^ I am to treat of a difficulty which arises 
 in connexion with immediate experience. The scope of the 
 discussion must however be hmited. Problems will be raised 
 on all sides with which here I shall be unable to deal. And 
 even on the main point I must be satisfied, if I have shown 
 how the question presses for an answer. 
 
 I have had occasion often ^ to urge the, clairfis of immediate 
 experience, and to insist that"' what we experience is not 
 merely objects. The experienced will not all faU under the 
 head of an object for a subject. If there were any such 
 law, pain and pleasure would be obvious exceptions ; but 
 the facts, when we look at them, show us that such a law 
 does not exist. In my general feeling at any moment there 
 is more than the objects before me, and no perception of 
 objects will exhaust the sense of a living emotion. And the 
 same result is evident when I consider my will. I cannot 
 reduce my experienced volition to a movement of objects, 
 and I cannot accept the suggestion that of this my volition 
 I have no direct knowledge at all. We in short have experi- 
 ence in which there is no distinction between my awareness 
 and that of which it is aware. There is an immediate feel- 
 ing, a knowing and being in one, with which knowledge 
 begins ; and, though this in a manner is transcended, it 
 
 ' First published in Mind, January 1909. 
 
 ^ See, for instance. Mind, N.S., Nos. 6 and 33. The reader is also re- 
 ferred to the Index of Appearance, s. v. Feeling. The article in Mind, No. 6, is 
 now reprinted as an Appendix to this chapter. Cf. Chap. V, pp. 152, 157. 
 
i6o ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 nevertheless remains throughout as the present foundation 
 of my known world. And if you remove this direct sense 
 of my momentary contents and being, you bring down the 
 whole of consciousness in one common wreck. For it is in 
 ',the end ruin to divide experience into something on one side 
 'experienced as an object and on the other side something 
 not experienced at all. 
 
 The recognition of the fact of immediate experience opens 
 the one road, I submit, to the solution of ultimate problems. 
 But, though opening the road, it does not of itself supply an 
 answer to our questions. And on the other side in itself it 
 gives rise to difficulties. With regard to these there are 
 some points which I have dealt with elsewhere, and other 
 points which perhaps I have failed wholly to see. There 
 are again questions which have come before my mind, but 
 have been passed over, or at most have been touched on by 
 the way. It is one of the latter which in these pages I shall 
 attempt to discuss. The problem was noticed by me years 
 ago, and Prof. Stout in my opinion did well to insist on its 
 urgency.^ This dif&culty may be stated by asking. How 
 immediate experience itself can become an object. For, if it 
 becomes an object, it, so far, we may say, is transcended, and 
 there is a doubt as to how such transcendence is possible. 
 On the one hand as to the fact of immediate experience being 
 transcended we seem really certain. For we speak about 
 it, and, if so, it has become for us an object. But we are 
 thus led to the dilemma that, so far as I know of immediate 
 experience, it does not exist, and that hence, whether it 
 exists or not, I could in neither case know of it. And with 
 such a result the existence of immediate experience becomes 
 difficult to maintain, and the problem which has been 
 raised calls urgently for treatment and solution. 
 
 The solution, if I may anticipate, is in general supplied 
 
 ^ In the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1902-3. I had called 
 attention to the problem and the general mode of its solution in Appear- 
 ance, p. 93, footnote. 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE i6i 
 
 by considering this fact, that immediate experience, how- 
 ever much transcended, both remains and is active. It is 
 not a stage which shows itself at the beginning and then 
 disappears, but it remains at the bottom throughout as 
 funda mental. And, further, remaining it contains within 
 itself every development which in a sense transcends it. 
 Nor does it merely contain all developments, but in its own 
 way it acts to some extent as their judge. Its blind uneasi- 
 ness, we may say, insists tacitly on visible satisfaction. We 
 have on one hand a demand, explicit or otherwise, for an 
 object which is complete. On the other hand the object 
 which fails to include immediate experience in its content, is 
 by the unrest of that experience condemned as defective. 
 We are thus forced to the idea of an object containing the 
 required element, and in this object we find at last theoretical 
 satisfaction and rest. 
 
 This may be stated in general as the solution of our 
 problem, and we might proceed forthwith to work out this 
 solution in detail. I have however thought it better to begin 
 by examining two difficulties well known to psychologists. 
 My object in thus digressing is to show that our problem is 
 not merely metaphysical, recondite and negligible, but that 
 the principles applied in treating it cannot elsewhere be 
 ignored. The reader can, however, if he pleases, omit this 
 whole digression as irrelevant. Of the two difficulties just 
 mentioned the first concerns Attention and the second 
 Introspection. 
 
 I. With regard to the effects of attention there is a 
 familiar puzzle. I am going here to take attention in the 
 sense of noticing, without entering into any inquiry as to its 
 nature.^ We all, when our attention is directed to our ex- 
 tremities or to some internal organ, may become aware of 
 sensations which previously we did not notice. And with 
 
 ' On this I have written elsewhere, Mind, N.S., No. 41, and O.S., No. 43. 
 1574 M 
 
i62 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 regard to these sensations there may be a doubt whether 
 they were actually there before, or have on the other hand 
 been made by our attending. And, though this question may 
 seem simple, it really is difficult. Can we directly compare 
 attention's object with something to which we do not at all 
 attend ? To answer in the affirmative appears not easy. 
 Can we then recall what we have not noticed, and, now at- 
 tending to this, compare it with some other object ? If 
 reproduction necessarily depended on attention, any such 
 process would seem impossible. But, since in any case this 
 view of reproduction must be rejected as erroneous, we may 
 reply confidently that the above comparison is a thing which 
 actually happens. Still, asserting the possibility and the 
 general principle, we have not removed all doubt as to the 
 special fact. For how do I know in a given case that my 
 present attending has not vitally transformed its result ? Am 
 I to postulate that in principle attention does not and cannot 
 alter its object ? Such an assumption, so far as I see, could 
 hardly be justified. Certainly, apart from such an assiunp- 
 tion, we may argue that any effect of attention requires time, 
 and that hence, if the sensation appears as soon as we attend, 
 the sensation must have preceded. And this inference is 
 strengthened when we are able to pass thus repeatedly and 
 with the same result from inattention to its opposite. Still 
 at its strongest an argument of this kind seems far from 
 conclusive. And in any case I cannot think that no more 
 than this is the actual ground of our confidence when we 
 refuse to beUeve that attention has made the thing that we 
 feel. I agree that in some cases we recollect our state before 
 attention supervened, though such a recollection in most 
 cases, I should say, is absent. And again usually, and if 
 you please always, we have the persisting after-sensation or 
 after-feeling of our previous condition. But, all this being 
 admitted, the question as to the actual ground of our confi- 
 dence remains. In order to compare our previous state we 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 163 
 
 ex hyp. are forced now to attend to it, and there is a doubt 
 whether we can assume generally that attention does not 
 alter. We have therefore to ask whether we are in a maze 
 with no legitimate exit, and whether such a result, if accepted, 
 does not throw doubt on the whole subject of this chapter. 
 
 I will state briefly what I take to be the real way of 
 escape, [a) We must first assume that anything remains 
 the same except so far as I have reason to take it as altered. 
 This assumption is everywhere necessary, and may be called 
 fundamental.^ (6) Next we must hold that apart from any 
 attention we may be aware of a change in our condition. 
 Without anything which could in any ordinary sense be 
 called attending, we can experience a difference when 
 a change takes place in our general or special felt state, 
 (c) There is again an experienced change when attention (say 
 to a feeling B) supervenes, and this particular experience is 
 felt otherwise than as a mere change, say from A to B. Hence 
 from the absence of this special feeling, as well as from the 
 presence of the ordinary feeling of change to B, we infer that 
 our sensation B does not depend on attention, but was 
 previously there. We have, that is, on one side a mode of 
 feeling when one sensation. A, merely changes to another 
 sensation, B, while on the other side, when I attend to B, 
 though that attention brings a change of feehng, it does not 
 bring the same mode as goes with such a mere transition as 
 from A to B. I therefore assume that the change made by 
 my attending is not a change to B itself. And we may 
 
 ' I do not mean by this that it is ultimate and self-evident (cf. Appear- 
 ance, pp. 601-2), for, if a thing remains, there must ex hyp. be some change 
 about it. We therefore have to abstract from this change. We find 
 a certain connexion of content in the thing, or between the thing and its 
 context, and we take this connexion as true, and as hence not to be made 
 false by any mere circumstance. Such a truth, like all truth, is an ab- 
 straction, and a doubt may be raised as to its ultimate legitimacy. But 
 this is the principle which underlies and justifies our practical assumption 
 and procedure whenever we assume that something remains the same 
 amid change. 
 
 M 2 
 
i64 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 perhaps add that when, while aheady attending to B, I go on 
 to observe it more specially, I may still fail to gain any f eehng 
 of change either to or from B, though on the other hand 
 I am of course aware of a change in myself. Now I am 
 not suggesting that in the above we have a demonstrated 
 conclusion, but it furnishes, I think, the ground for our 
 view as to attention's limits. Further this view, once 
 suggested, justifies itself in working. And it leaves us with 
 this main result that we have feelings, such as those of change 
 from A to B, and that, though these feelings have not been 
 attended to, they are both real and reproducible. In any 
 case apart from this assumption there seems to be no way 
 of exit from disastrous puzzles. 
 
 I will now fill out this general sketch with further detail, 
 which the reader who does not require it may omit. I feel 
 a change, and that something has happened, say, to my 
 finger. On attending I find that it is bitten by an insect. 
 Of the previous sensation I have possibly enough remaining 
 or reproducible to enable me to know that before the change 
 my finger felt much like the others, and to enable me to 
 repeat the change in idea.^ I now attend to my other 
 fingers, but they do not, on this, become bitten. There has 
 hence been, I can argue, a felt change of my finger and an 
 ensuing attention, the latter being felt as a different change. 
 And by attending to my other fingers I cannot get the same 
 result. I have neither the recalled felt change nor the 
 present effect. My attention always gives me a felt change, 
 but it will not give me these other special feelings, which 
 therefore, I infer, have come to me otherwise. My present 
 attention is in my power, but there are certain things, I find, 
 that will not follow from my present attention. And, 
 generahzing this, I conclude that, prima facie and apart from 
 special evidence, attention does not alter its object. On the 
 
 ' There is, we must remember, an identical basis of feeling in all my 
 
 fingers. 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 165 
 
 other side I tend to assume that, where the felt change from 
 A to B cannot be recalled, there, so far and apart from other 
 evidence, it was absent. We obviously in all the above have 
 no demonstrative proof. For on the one side we cannot 
 prove that attention did not under some unknown conditions 
 in a given case produce the entire result. And on the other 
 side we must admit that, where the felt change of sensation 
 was weak, its existence may now be for us irrecoverable. 
 In arguing therefore from present defect to past absence we 
 may well be deceived. And hence there are many cases 
 where we have to remain doubtful. But generally where, 
 beside .the change I feel in attending, there is another 
 recalled felt change ending continuously in the object, I 
 conclude that the attention did not make this. And this 
 conclusion is strengthened by repetition under varying con- 
 ditions. And it is confirmed by a mass of experience which 
 becomes intelligible through the doctrine that, in general, 
 attention does not make its object. On the other hand, 
 where the above felt change cannot be verified directly or 
 again on sufficient evidence be inferred, I may conclude, to 
 speak in general, that it was absent, and that the attention 
 has more or less produced its object. If, for instance, in my 
 finger certain sensations foUow and follow gradually when- 
 ever I attend, and, further, cease as I cease to attend, and if 
 with this there is no other change recalled or to be inferred, 
 I argue that attention is at least in part the cause. And this 
 conclusion is strengthened and is generalized by experiences 
 the same in principle which can be multiplied at pleasure. 
 And once more, though not incontestable, the conclusion is 
 found to serve. But my object here is not to enter into 
 detail and in consequence to provoke discussion on points 
 intricate and difficult and on which I have no special 
 competence. What I am here concerned with is to urge 
 merely one main result. This problem with regard to atten- 
 tion must prove insoluble except on a certain assumption. 
 
i66 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 the assumption of a felt change not noticed but effective 
 and more or less reproducible. 
 
 II. We may pass now to a kindred difficulty attaching 
 to what is called Introspection. Can I observe my own 
 present state, and, if not that, what in the end can I observe ? 
 And, putting on one side all reference to attention, let us 
 attempt to deal briefly with this puzzle. To say that my 
 present state is not observed and that I depend wholly on 
 memory, leads us (as in part we have already seen) into a 
 position which is not tenable. Let us agree, rightly in my 
 opinion, that I can reproduce that which at the time of its 
 occurrence was not an object, yet where is the warrant that 
 my reproduction is accurate ? I can hardly postulate that 
 here there are no errors, and how are the errors to be cor- 
 rected ? And on the other side, if I can thus remember my 
 past state, it seems strange that I am unable to make it an 
 object while present. The appeal to memory seems there- 
 fore in any case inadmissible ; and further for myself I am 
 unable to verify in introspection this constant presence of 
 memory. To myself, when I try to observe exhaustively, 
 say, some internal sensations, the idea that I am struggling 
 to remember them seems even ridiculous. To myself I 
 appear to be observing something which is, and, apart from 
 certain unsound views, I have found no reason to discredit 
 this appearance. What I feel, that surely I may still feel, 
 though I also and at the same time make it into an object 
 before me. And any view for which this is impossible 
 begins, I think, by conflict with fact, and ends, I am sure, in 
 inability to explain facts. That I cannot make an object 
 of the whole of my felt self all at once, so much is certain in 
 fact, and the principle seems clear.^ But that I can observe 
 nothing of what I now feel, seems the false inference of 
 a perverse theory. 
 
 • The principle involved is this, that, in order to have an object at all, 
 you must have a felt self before which the object comes. 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 167 
 
 But with this we are left face to face with a difficulty like 
 the former one. Introspection is the attempt to observe my 
 actual contents, and thus to take them as quaHfying a con- 
 struction called my self. To do this without residue, we 
 agreed, was impossible, but that limitation need not trouble 
 us. The difficulty and the problem arise in connexion with 
 the general mass that at any moment is felt but certainly is 
 not throughout an object before me. Take an emotional 
 whole such as despondency or anger or ennui. A part of this 
 doubtless consists in that which, whether as sensation or 
 idea, is before my mind. Any such object or objects we can 
 observe, and, when we cannot keep them in view, we can 
 postulate that they remain unaltered except so far as we 
 have reason to suppose a change.^ But in an emotional 
 whole there are other felt elements which cannot be said to 
 be before my mind. And now I desire both to bring these 
 before me and to know that I have accomplished this task 
 correctly. 
 
 With regard to the second of these points we must recall 
 some results already reached. We have to assume that a 
 change in feeling is felt, not in general merely, but as a change 
 of this or that character. When my mood alters I feel, not 
 a mere difference, but my mood to be different. And, on the 
 other side, observation of my mood is felt as a difference but 
 not as an alteration of my mood. We may take it in general 
 to be the case that observation does not alter. ^ Thus, when 
 for instance in despondency I observe my visceral sensations, 
 these feelings are translated into objects, into perceptions 
 and ideas, but none the less, though translated, the original 
 feelings remain. Hence (and this is the point) the persisting 
 
 ■ This is a mere application of the general postulate which we noticed 
 before. It is unnecessary to discuss here our various special grounds for 
 supposing the presence or absence of change. 
 
 ^ On the other side it is true that observation of my feelings may, 
 according to the conditions, go on to increase or to suppress them. But 
 I think that this point may be ignored here. 
 
i68 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 feelings can be felt to jar or to accord with the result of 
 observation. For we have seen that generally in feeling we 
 may experience the disagreement of elements. We have seen 
 that a fresh fact, such as observation itself, must become 
 an element contained in a new felt whole. And thus, when 
 I pass psychically from despondency to despondency 
 observed, I have not only a general sense of change to some- 
 thing new, but I feel more specially the presence or absence 
 of novelty and an agreement or a jar with the object before 
 me. When to my felt emotion, that is, its translation is 
 added, I am aware of a harmony or discrepancy between that 
 addition and what went before and still remains.^ Apart from 
 theory we should all agree that, when despondent or angry, 
 a man can feel that a description of such states is right or 
 wrong, though he may be unable to compare this description 
 with another object. Again we should agree that, when not 
 despondent, a man may assent to a description of despon- 
 dency, because he feels himself, as we say, into it, or may 
 dissent because he cannot do so — and this though in neither 
 case he could assign a special ground. And what happens 
 here, I presume, is that the description excites feeHngs which 
 tend to fill themselves out to the content of the usual felt 
 state. And between this content and the description offered 
 there is then experienced, as above, the sense of agreement 
 or jar. I have not forgotten that, in order to test the truth 
 of a description, a man may appeal to the usages of language, 
 or again possibly may recall some definite action or other 
 
 1 I am in a certain felt state which I go on to observe. The description 
 •which results from the observation is an object added to my former felt 
 state, and is now itself an element in a new felt state. This object gives 
 me (a) a feeling of change, but (b) not a change of my special felt mood, 
 say, anger. The description further, if correct, brings (c) a, sense of har- 
 monious addition without change, and if incorrect, (d) a feeling of incon- 
 gruity. If the incongruity is positive (a), I feel a jarring new element. 
 If it is negative (i8), there is still a sense of discord, since defect has a posi- 
 tive quality. And there is, in this latter case especially, an instabiUty in 
 the object induced by ideal supplementation. This instability is largely 
 the work of that which is merely felt. 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 169 
 
 symptom, or set of symptoms, from the past of himself or 
 another. But, apart from an appeal to present feeling, 
 nothing of this kind, however important it may be, is suffi- 
 cient by itself, I would submit, to account for the facts. 
 
 I will now in passing touch briefly on the question of 
 means. By what means and how am I able in, say, despon- 
 dency to make an object of that which I feel ? I am not 
 inquiring how we come to have an object at all, nor am 
 I even asking as yet how feeling in general can come to be 
 an object. The question is limited at present to the above 
 case of an emotion, but it has a more general bearing which 
 will show itself later. And the point of importance is this. 
 In any emotion one part of that emotion consists already of 
 objects, of perceptions and ideas before my mind. And, the 
 whole emotion being one, the special group of feeling is 
 united with these objects before my mind, united with them 
 integrally and directly though not objectively.^ And this, 
 I think, supplies us with an answer to our question. For 
 when the object-part of our emotion is enlarged by further 
 perception or idea, the agreement or disagreement with 
 what is felt is not merely general and suffused, but is located 
 through the object in one special felt group. And this special 
 connexion and continuity with the object explains, I think, 
 how we are able further to transform what is observed by 
 the addition of elements from what is felt. There are features 
 in feeling (this is the point) which already in a sense belong 
 to and are one with their object, since the emotion contains 
 and unites both its aspects. 
 
 Finally if we reject the idea that what is felt can serve to 
 judge of what is before us, let us consider the position in which 
 we are left. The attempt to fall back on memory, we have 
 seen, resulted in failure, and what else remains to us ? You 
 may say, ' The object satisfies me or not, and that is the 
 
 ' Again even on the object-side of the emotion there will of course be 
 a greater or less extent of non-analysed content. 
 
170 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 whole of it and the end of it.' But assenting to this very 
 largely, if not in the main, I cannot agree that no more is 
 to be said as to the special satisfaction. The object, you may 
 reply, in the end is found to be self-contradictory or har- 
 monious ; but once more here, while agreeing in principle, 
 I cannot sit down content with such a mere generahty. 
 Why, when my mood is incompletely or wrongly described, 
 does the object go on to jar with itself and to be found self- 
 inconsistent ? There is more at work here, we saw, than the 
 associations of language, and there is more even than any 
 redintegration, ideal or active, merely from the object by 
 itself. For, with merely that, there is no accounting for the 
 whole of the agreement or jar that I feel. You may appeal 
 here to ' dispositions ', and may argue that in one case my 
 dispositions are satisfied and in the other case are restless. 
 But if the disposition is not felt or in any way experienced, 
 and to me is absolutely nothing but its effects, such an 
 explanation once more seems insufficient. For in observing 
 my mood I do not seem to be satisfied with the result, or 
 to reject it, for no reason except that I find myself moved, 
 I know not how, in this direction or the opposite. I seem 
 on the contrary to myself to be engaged throughout and to 
 be face to face with actual fact, and, wherever I dissent 
 from or agree to an observed result, I seem to have a reason 
 in this actual fact. And further I do not seem to have a mere 
 general reason, but on the contrary something specific 
 which I directly know and experience. The object before 
 me is unstable and it moves so as to satisfy me ; and in 
 this point and so far we are perhaps all agreed. Where 
 I go on to differ is that I insist that, in addition to other 
 influences (whose working I admit), the object is moved 
 also by that which is only felt. There are connexions of 
 content now actually present in feeling, and these are able 
 to jar with the object before me. And they are able further 
 to correct that object by supplementation from themselves. 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 171 
 
 And this, I submit, is the one account of the matter which 
 on all sides is satisfactory. 
 
 We have now considered the problem offered both by 
 Introspection and by Attention, and we have been led in 
 each case to the same main result. These puzzles are 
 insoluble unless that which I feel, and which is not an object 
 before me, is present and active. This felt element is used, 
 and it must be used, in the constitution of that object which 
 satisfies me, and apart from this influence and criterion 
 there is no accounting for the actual fact of our knowledge. 
 We must go on now to deal more directly with the main 
 question of this chapter. We must ask how immediate 
 experience is able to make a special object of itself. The 
 principles which we have laid down and have hitherto applied 
 will furnish us, I trust, with a satisfactory answer. 
 
 I must however, before proceeding further, try to explain 
 what I mean by immediate experience. And I will begin by 
 pointing out a possible sense of this term which I desire to 
 exclude. The Unconscious or the Subconscious may stand 
 merely for that which I do not notice or notice specially, 
 and it may stand again merely for that which, though I am 
 aware of it, is no object before me. But these words on 
 the other hand may bear a more extreme meaning. The 
 Unconscious may signify something which is more than 
 anything which at any moment I actually feel or in any 
 sense actually am aware of. The Unconscious, in this sense, 
 is still psychical, and it is continuous with my psychical 
 contents, but it is outside all that at any moment I experience 
 as mine. The matter contained in these two compartments, 
 of the Unconscious and Conscious, may itself be to any 
 extent one and indivisible, and may itself thus constitute 
 a single world. But across this matter a line of demarcation 
 is drawn, and while on one side of this line I feel and am 
 aware, on the other side I have no actual experience at all. 
 
172 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 Across this opaque barrier may come to me influences or 
 even messages, but the barrier can never be transparent. The 
 influences or messages, to be anything for me, must take 
 their place as elements in the region of my feehng and con- 
 sciousness, and outside that region I do not experience 
 them. They belong in a word to the Unconscious. On the 
 other hand the barrier, though opaque, is shifting. It may 
 from time to time be moved so as to include elements which 
 before were outside it. And this inclusion does but embrace 
 what before was somehow psychical, though not experienced 
 as mine. In something like this sense the Unconscious, 
 whatever its previous history, has been used very widely 
 and in varying applications by German philosophy since 
 the beginning of the last century. It attained popularity 
 in the well-known work of von Hartmann (1869), and has 
 lately threatened to invade our literature under the specious 
 title of the Subliminal Self.^ 
 
 Against any interpretation here of immediate experience 
 in the above sense I would desire specially to warn the 
 reader. Outside that of which a man is aware there is, I 
 agree, a larger world of experience. The content of this 
 world, I again agree, is in a sense continuous with that 
 
 > Any one who can suppose that Mr. Myers's Subliminal Self was any 
 discovery of his own, must, I think, either be ill informed or else unable to 
 recognize the identity of ideas where the language is modified and the 
 ultimate intention not the same. The term ' Subliminal ' is, I presume, 
 the translation of a Herbartian phrase which has long been current, and 
 with regard to the matter of Mr. Myers's book, while his industry and 
 literary power are both unquestionable and admirable, it would be diffi- 
 cult, I imagine, to produce from it a single new idea. His capacity for 
 philosophical thought can, I think, be easily estimated. Mr. Myers by 
 his own showing was acquainted with von Hartmann' s work. And yet 
 he failed to perceive that, with regard to my subliminal self, the vital 
 question is whether it is really my self at all, and, if so, then how far. He 
 could not see that the problem which most pressed on him was not as to 
 the existence of my self after death, but as to the existence and reality 
 of my self at any time and at all. The conclusion to which I at least am 
 forced is that in Mr. Myers's work there is a collection of everything and any- 
 thing which seemed to him usable prima facie as evidence for his foregone 
 result, and that of inquiry in any other sense there is as good as nothing. 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 173 
 
 which directly fills his consciousness. But he cannot experi- 
 ence the former content immediately, and, were he to do 
 so, then (as it seems to me) the man's self would be de- 
 stroyed. The position of the line dividing these two worlds 
 no doubt may fluctuate. More and less of content may 
 come from time to time within the man's feeling centre. 
 But so long as that centre exists, there is a world within it 
 which is experienced immediately, and a world without it 
 which is not in this sense experienced at all. To call this 
 world the region of the Unconscious, if this merely means 
 that the man cannot be directly aware of it, to myself would 
 be misleading. But in any case this world is outside his 
 immediate experience. Whether tracts of a man's conscious- 
 ness can under any conditions be wholly split off and so 
 exist independently, I am unable to say.^ If, however, this 
 takes place, the principle remains unaffected, for we have 
 forthwith two or more centres of immediate experience not 
 directly connected. I use, in brief, immediate experience to 
 stand for that which is comprised wholly within a single 
 state of undivided awareness or feeling. As against anything 
 ■ unconscious ', in the sense of falling outside, this is im- 
 mediate as being my actual conscious experience. And 
 further it is immediate as against those other special and 
 mediated developments which throughout rest on it, and, 
 while transcending, still remain within itself. I will now, 
 dismissing all further reference to the Unconscious, attempt 
 briefly to explain this difficult and most important sense of 
 immediacy. 
 
 Questions at once arise on some of which we may first 
 touch in passing, {a) Was there and is there in the develop- 
 ment of the race and the individual a stage at which experi- 
 ence is merely immediate ? And, further, do we all perhaps 
 
 ' The part split ofi may still be united in feeling with the rest (see 
 Prof. James, Psychology), and, if so, is not split off wholly. But I do not 
 suggest that an absolute division is impossible. 
 
174 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 at moments sink back to such a level ? We all (at least 
 usually) have in what we experience the distinction of sub- 
 ject and object, or at any rate (it may not mean the same 
 thing) the awareness of an object as a not-self. If we like 
 to take ' consciousness ' as the state in which we experience 
 a not-self, we may thus ask if there ever was or ever is an 
 experience which is in this sense wholly subconscious. In 
 such a state there would be feeling, but there would not be 
 an object present as an ' other '. And we should so far not 
 be aware of any distinction between that which is felt and 
 that which feels. For myself I think it probable that such 
 a stage of mind not only, with all of us, comes first in fact, 
 but that at times it recurs even in the life of the developed 
 individual. But it is impossible for me to enter further on 
 the matter here (see Mind, O.S., No. 47). What I would 
 here insist on is the point that feeling, so understood, need 
 not be devoid of internal diversity. Its content need not in 
 (this sense be simple, and possibly never is simple. By feeling, 
 in short, I understand, and, I believe, always have under- 
 stood, an awareness which, though non-relational, may 
 comprise simply in itself an indefinite amount of difference. 
 There are no distinctions in the proper sense, and yet there 
 is a many felt in one. We may thus verify even here what 
 we may call, if we please, an undeveloped ideality. And, 
 not only this, but such a whole admits in itself a confhct and 
 struggle of elements, not of course experienced as struggle 
 but as discomfort, unrest and uneasiness. We may, I think, 
 go on to add that the whole in feeling can feel itself present 
 in one part of its content in a sense in which it does not so 
 feel itself in another part. And of course change in its con- 
 tents will be felt, though not experienced properly as change. 
 Nor do I see reason to doubt that the laws of Redintegration 
 and also of Fusion (if we admit such a law) will hold in 
 this field. 
 
 (b) I have thought it better to deal so far with the stage, 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 175 
 
 real or supposed, where experience is merely immediate. 
 But, in order to avoid controversy, I shall in this chapter 
 consider this no further. And for our present purpose we 
 need not assume that such a stage of mere feeling is even 
 possible. I shall here take experience to exist always at the 
 level where there is the distinction of object and subject, 
 and a theoretical and practical relation holding between 
 them.^ I do not mean of course that this relation itself 
 always exists for consciousness in the form of a relation 
 proper uniting and dividing two terms. On the contrary 
 we have no such object, I must insist, except so far as we 
 have reached self-consciousness ; and to suppose that we 
 are always self-conscious would to myself seem absurd. It 
 is however impossible for me here to discuss these questions, 
 on which I have entered elsewhere (Appearance. Cf. Mind, 
 N.S., No. 46), and I must pass on to emphasize a further 
 point which seems here all-important. 
 
 (c) Whether there is a stage where experience is merely 
 immediate I have agreed to leave doubtful. Feeling is tran- 
 scended always, if you please, in the sense, that we have 
 always contents which are more than merely felt. But on 
 the other side at no moment can feeling ever be transcended, 
 if this means that we are to have contents which are not 
 felt. In a sense, therefore, we never can at any time pass 
 beyond immediate experience. The object not-self, and 
 again the object and subject related before my mind, all 
 this is more than mere feeling. But again the whole of it 
 would be nothing for me unless it came to me as felt ; and 
 that any actual experience should fall somewhere outside of 
 feeling seems impossible. At every moment my state, what- 
 ever else it is, is a whole of which I am immediately aware. 
 It is an experienced non-relational unity of many in one.^ 
 
 ' W^e may, as was noticed above, speak of this stage as ' consciousness ' 
 in contrast with mere feeling. 
 
 ^ I need not ask here if it is possible for my experience to consist of 
 one single feeling. 
 
176 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 And object and subject and every possible relation and term, 
 to be experienced at all, must fall within and depend vitally 
 on such a felt unity. 
 
 At any moment my actual experience, however relational 
 its contents, is in the end non-relational. No analysis into 
 relations and terms can ever exhaust its nature or fail in 
 the end to belie its essence.^ What analysis leaves for ever 
 outstanding is no mere residue, but is a vital condition of the 
 analysis itself. Everything which is got out into the form 
 of an object implies still the felt background against which 
 the object comes, and, further, the whole experience of both 
 feeling and object is a non-relational immediate felt unity. 
 I The entire relational consciousness, in short, is experienced 
 as falling within a direct awareness. This direct awareness 
 is itself non-relational. It escapes from all attempts to 
 exhibit it by analysis as one or more elements in a relational 
 scheme, or as that scheme itself, or as a relation or relations, 
 or as the sum or collection of any of these abstractions. And 
 immediate experience not only escapes, but it serves as the 
 basis on which the analysis is made. Itself is the vital 
 element within which every analysis still moves, while, and 
 so far as, and however much, that analysis transcends 
 immediacy. 
 
 Everything therefore, no matter how objective and how 
 relational, is experienced only in feeling, and, so far as it is 
 experienced, still depends upon feeling. On the other side 
 the objective and the relational transcend the state of mere 
 feeling and in a sense are opposed to it. But we must beware 
 here of an error. We cannot speak of a relation, between 
 immediate experience and that which transcends itj except 
 by a licence. It is a mode of expression found convenient 
 in our reflective thinking, but it is in the end not defensible. 
 A relation exists only between terms, and those terms, to 
 be known as such, must be objects. And hence immediate 
 
 ' Ct Chap. X. 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 177 
 
 experience, taken as the term of a relation, becomes so far 
 a partial object and ceases so far to keep its nature as a felt 
 totality. 
 
 The relation (so to express ourselves) of immediate 
 experience to its felt contents, and specially here to those 
 contents which transcend it, must be taken simply as a fact. , 
 It can neither be explained nor even (to speak properly) 
 described, since description necessarily means translation 
 into objective terms and relations. We possess on the one 
 side a fact directly felt and experienced. On the other side 
 we attempt a description imperfect and half-negative. And 
 our attempt is justified so far as the description seems true, 
 so far, that is, as though inadequate, it does not positively 
 jar, and again is felt positively to agree with our felt ex- 
 perience. 
 
 (d) There are several points which I cannot discuss here, 
 but may notice in passing. ^ The felt background, against 
 which the object comes, remains always immediate. But, 
 on the other hand, its content may to some extent show 
 mediation. Parts of this content may have at some time 
 been elements included in the object, and may have been 
 internally distinguished into relations and terms. However, 
 none the less now, this relational content forms part of the 
 felt background. Again in the object not-self, on the other 
 side, we may find tracts the contents of which have never 
 been analysed. They are, so to speak, nebulae in which the 
 non-relational form still persists internally, and in which 
 the complexity does not go beyond simple sensuous co- 
 inherence. And, as we saw in the case of an emotion, the 
 matter contained in these nebulae, and in the not-self 
 generally, is continuous as to its content with that matter 
 which remains merely felt. It is impossible, however, here 
 to enlarge on these questions. And I cannot ask here 
 how far the not-self both in its origin and its essence is 
 
 ' Cf. Appearance, chapters ix and x. 
 1574 N 
 
178 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 distinctively practical. Nor can I point out how far and 
 in what sense we have special not-selves depending on 
 various relations, permanent and transitory, to special selves. 
 I must hasten onwards to attempt to deal directly with 
 the main problem of the present chapter. 
 
 I will, however, before proceeding, venture to repeat and 
 to insist upon this main conclusion. Immediate experience 
 is not a stage, which may or may not at some time have been 
 there and has now ceased to exist. It is not in any case 
 removed by the presence of a not-self and of a relational 
 consciousness. All that is thus removed is at most, we may 
 say, the mereness of immediacy. Every distinction and 
 relation still rests on an immediate background of which we 
 are aware, and every distinction and relation (so far as ex- 
 perienced) is also felt, and felt in a sense to belong to an 
 immediate totality. Thus in all experience we still have 
 feeling which is not an object, and at all our moments 
 the entirety of what comes to us, however much distin- 
 guished and relational, is felt as comprised within a unity 
 which itself is not relational. 
 
 We may now approach the two main questions of this 
 j chapter, (i) How can immediate experience ever serve as 
 a criterion ? and (ii) How can immediate experience itself 
 become an object and a not-self, since ex hyp. it essentially 
 is no object ? The first of these questions, after what has 
 gone before, may be dealt with briefly. 
 
 (i) I am not discussing here the general problem of the 
 ultimate criterion. We may perhaps agree that the criterion 
 consists in that which satisfies our wants, and is to be found 
 where we have felt uneasiness and its positive opposite. 
 That in which I feel myself affirmed, and which contents 
 me, will be the general head under which falls reality, 
 together with truth, goodness, and beauty. But I cannot 
 enter further on this here, or inquire as to the special 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 179 
 
 characters of these diverse satisfactions.^ What on the 
 other hand I wish here to emphasize is the point that I do 
 not take immediate experience as being in general the 
 criterion. I do not say that in agreement merely with the 
 content of this we are to find in all cases our answer to 
 the question of truth and reahty. The inquiry as to why 
 an object contents or does not content me, how it satisfies 
 or does not satisfy a demand of my nature, cannot in all 
 cases be met by an appeal to the actual content of my 
 feeling. Hence the problem before us is limited to a special 
 issue. How, we must ask, in the cases where my immediate 
 experience does serve as a criterion of truth and fact, is it 
 able to perform such an office ? 
 
 We have already in the main anticipated the answer. 
 I can feel uneasiness, we found, both general and special 
 apart from any object or at least without regard to any 
 object in particular. Again I can have a sense of uneasiness 
 or its opposite in regard to a particular object before me. 
 I do not, so far, make an object of my uneasiness and hold 
 it before me in one with the object ; but so far, without 
 actually doing anything of this kind, I feel the jarring or 
 unison specially together and in one with the object. And 
 we have now to ask how this disagreement can become 
 a contradiction before me in the object, so that I am not 
 merely dissatisfied with that but can go on to reject it as 
 unreal. 
 
 What is required is that the object should itself become 
 qualified by the same content which was merely felt within 
 me. As soon as this qualification has appeared, I have 
 actually before me in the object that which previously was 
 felt within me to be harmonious or to jar in regard to the 
 
 ' I assume here that goodness is not to be used for the general term 
 which is equivalent to satisfaction in general. But whether goodness is to 
 be used in a wider or a narrower sense, is to myself a question merely of 
 nomenclature. 
 
 M 2 
 
i8o ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 object. The feeling (to speak roughly) remains what it 
 was, but it no longer is merely grouped round and centred 
 in the object. The feeUng itself is also before me in the 
 object-world, and the object now confronts me as being itself 
 satisfactory or discordant. My description, e. g., is seen to 
 come short, or to be otherwise conflicting, when compared 
 with the corrected idea of my actual emotion. 
 
 I will now notice briefly the various ways in which the 
 object can gain its fresh qualification. The object naturally 
 is unstable and in constant change. Apart from what we 
 may call external alteration, there are reactions from the 
 subject. Even where these are non-acquired, they often 
 tend to make the requisite change in the object. And then, 
 as we have seen before, there is redintegration from the object 
 both physical and psychicaL This redintegration again is 
 all-pervasive, and holds good beyond the object-world and 
 within the region of mere feeling. Hence the object, having 
 been continuous with what is felt in me, both generally and 
 in special groups, becomes an ideal centre and bond. It has 
 a tendency both to restore and to qualify itself by associated 
 content whether foregone or present. And further, as soon 
 as this qualification from whatever cause has taken place, 
 the identity of the content before me and within me is felt. 
 Thus I am no longer merely satisfied or in unrest with regard 
 to the object, but the object contains for me and itself is 
 that which I feel must be accepted or rejected. 
 
 We are attempting here to deal briefly with a difficult 
 point which tends on all sides to lose itself in complications. 
 I am endeavouring, therefore, so far as I can, to narrow and 
 simplify the issue. We may feel satisfied or otherwise when 
 we have contents felt to be harmonious or jarring, and further 
 a perceived object may also in feeling be an element and 
 an important element in a special felt group. Then, when 
 the object (as may happen from various causes) itself acquires 
 the content which before in feeling gave satisfaction or 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE i8i 
 
 unrest, I become aware of the perceived object as that which 
 in itself gives satisfaction or discord. And according to 
 the nature of the dissatisfaction and of that which is done 
 to remove it from the object, our general criterion acts in 
 various specific ways. But all that concerns us here is the 
 case where the particular content, which lies in my feeling, 
 is used in order to judge of an object before me. 
 
 We may recur to our former instance of an emotional 
 state. If I shrink from or am attracted by some person, and 
 do not know how this happens, I may endeavour accurately 
 to realize the detail of my feelings, and perhaps to discover 
 the real nature of the conduct which the object suggests. 
 We have here an object, perceived and thought of, and on 
 the other side we have dim uneasy feelings in myself which 
 are not objective and before me. Let, however, the object 
 from any cause — an instinctive action, a chance sensation 
 or an oscillation of emphasis — develop its content in a certain 
 direction, and the situation may at once be changed. That 
 which formerly was but felt in regard to the object has 
 become now, also and as well, a quality of the object. And 
 it may satisfy us because it is that qualification which answers 
 to what we felt and still feel. I know now what my feelings 
 actually were, and whether and how far they were that for 
 which I took them. And I understand now how the person 
 himself has perhaps a character which suggests this or that 
 behaviour towards him. In either case an object has been 
 judged of in accordance with and from the content of 
 immediate experience, and that experience has acted as 
 a criterion of the object. 
 
 (2) From this hurried treatment of a difficult problem I 
 pass on to deal at last directly with the special subject of 
 this chapter. We must ask how immediate experience is 
 able to know itself and to become for us an object. That 
 such knowledge exists in fact seems to me incontestable. 
 
\ 
 
 182 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 Immediate experience certainly cannot make an object of 
 itself throughout and in all its individual detail. And such 
 a result not only fails in fact to be achieved but is impossible 
 essentially. We can, however, set our immediate experience 
 before us not only in partial detail but in its main general 
 character. We can know about it as a positive experience, 
 an awareness of many in one which yet is not relational; 
 and I must attempt to point out the steps by which such 
 a conclusion may be reached. But I am not here offering 
 any genetic account of the matter. That inquiry, however 
 important, may here fortunately be ignored. The idea of 
 immediate experience, once suggested, is, like other ideas, 
 verified by its working. And all that I am concerned with 
 here is to show that the origin of the suggestion is itself not 
 in principle inexplicable. 
 
 (i) We can in the first place have before us as an object 
 the idea of a complete reality. Our actual object, as we saw, 
 is unstable, and its advance (so far as it advances) in a certain 
 main direction tends generally to remove uneasiness and to 
 bring satisfaction.^ Hence we can form (I need not ask how) 
 the idea of an object with all uneasiness removed entirely, 
 an object which utterly satisfies. But this means an object 
 with nothing that is really outside it in the form of an ' else- 
 where ' or a ' not-yet '. The ' elsewhere ' or the ' not-yet ' 
 that falls really outside the object, precludes (this seems 
 obvious) entire satisfaction. We hence are led to think of an 
 object without any external ' elsewhere ' or ' not-yet ', an 
 object which in some sense contains within itself, and already 
 is qualified by, every real possibility. We form in other 
 words the idea of an all-inclusive Reality. And this idea, 
 being set before us, may so far satisfy us as true and real. 
 The Reality with anything outside of it will now not merely 
 be felt as defective, but will in addition be discrepant with 
 
 ' I am not saying that every satisfactory addition to the object is pre- 
 ceded by uneasiness and fulfils a felt need or want. That in my opinion 
 would be going at least beyond the facts. 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 183 
 
 its own idea. And anything now that is suggested or that 
 can be suggested, if it fails to be there in our actual object, 
 must be made somehow of the actual object, if at least that 
 object is to be complete.^ 
 
 (ii) I have thus the idea of an object which is complete 
 and all-inclusive, while on the other hand the object actually 
 before me is incomplete. But this perceived ob j ect is changed 
 and, let us here say, is changed by addition. And, with this, 
 the source of the added elements goes on to become for me 
 a problem, (a) These elements, I proceed to judge, come to 
 me in part from the unknown not-self. This is an inevitable 
 inference, the nature and validity of which it is perhaps not 
 necessary here to discuss. We have hence, in this unknown 
 province, a reality which has the form of an object not-self, 
 but which on the other side is not present actually before 
 me in perception. And this reality must be set down as 
 included within my complete object. (&) Again within that 
 object which I actually perceive there are contained (as we 
 saw) tracts more or less undistinguished internally. These 
 tracts are nebulae the contents of which have on the one hand 
 manifoldness, but on the other hand are more or less without 
 the relational form. They have within them adjectives 
 which sensuously inhere and cohere, though these adjectives 
 have not yet been ordered. But, as our knowledge increases, 
 these sensuous wholes go on more or less to be broken up and 
 
 ' The reader will bear in mind that I am not asking here if the above 
 idea is true. That is a question which here may be ignored. There are 
 two points which I may notice in passing, (a) It may possibly be sug- 
 gested that, instead of taking everything as of the object, I may take it 
 as merely together with the object, and that this exception is fatal. But in 
 this case I reply that the ' together ' has now itself become the object — 
 an object in my judgement most unsatisfactory but still answering the 
 purpose of the text. (6) Again it may be said with regard to the ' not- 
 yet ' that, given a recurrence of a certain character, the ' not-yet ' may be 
 harmless. To this I answer that in such a case the ' not-yet ' qualifies 
 this character which recurs, and in some sense is included within this 
 character, and that taken as really external it still means incompleteness. 
 But, obviously, innumerable difficulties attaching to what is said in the 
 text may occur to the reader, and'must here be passed by. 
 
i84 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 discriminated. And the object, which of course is continuous 
 throughout, appropriates the result of this process. Hence 
 the object now possesses to some extent actually all its 
 contents in a discriminated form, and for the rest it can 
 assume (rightly or wrongly) that the same result, though not 
 actual, is possible. The object will now include for us both its 
 distinguished and undistinguished contents, the latter taken 
 as distinguished ideally though not in actual detail. How 
 far and in what precise sense it is proper to attribute reality 
 to these unmade distinctions, we are not concerned here to 
 inquire. It is enough for us that the idea of the complete 
 object now includes within itself an objective " not-yet ' 
 external to its actual detail, and again an objective ' not-yet ' 
 lying undistinguished within the fact which is given. And, 
 having concluded so much, the self so far is satisfied with the 
 idea before it, and it feels that this idea is somehow true 
 and real. 
 
 Now in the above two cases (we must go on to observe) 
 there is a difference, a difference which is felt. When an 
 addition is made to our object from the outside we feel this 
 addition as new. I do not mean that in this respect it does 
 not matter how the alteration of the object is made, and that, 
 however the addition comes, we have precisely the same 
 feeUng. I admit the diversity, but I must insist that, in 
 spite of this diversity, we have, when the object is added to 
 from outside itself, a specific feeling of newness, and that 
 this feeling differs from that which comes when the object 
 develops itself from within itself. In the latter case (the case 
 of what we called nebulae) the content was actually there 
 though it was not yet distinguished, and the content was 
 already felt as being there ; while in the former case (the 
 case of addition from without) the content was not felt at 
 all. The added features in both cases are felt as new, but in 
 the one case these features arrive from a world which is 
 unfelt, while in the other case the features already were 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 185 
 
 somehow present in my actual awareness. And the difference 
 between the two arrivals shows itself in each case in a 
 different feehng. The reader who finds a difficulty here 
 should recall the results we have accepted as true. In 
 the first place everything, the object included, is actually 
 felt, and, in the second place, a change in feeling itself also 
 is felt. All that we have added here is the conclusion, that 
 in the two cases distinguished above there is in each case 
 a specific felt difference.^ 
 
 (c) But beyond these two cases we have also a third. An 
 addition may be made to our object, but neither from the 
 unknown not-self without it nor from the undistinguished 
 tracts within itself. We saw that, when a felt emotion is 
 described, a man may feel that the description agrees or 
 does not agree with an actual fact of which he is aware. And 
 yet we found that this experienced fact, by which the 
 description is measured, has contents not objectively before 
 the man even in an undistinguished form. The object in its 
 wavering, and in its movement to complete itself through 
 redintegration and otherwise, changes in directions which 
 cause on one side satisfaction and on the other side uneasi- 
 ness. And it is, largely or mainly, because these suggestions 
 are felt to be in unison or discord with something already 
 felt as present, that they are accepted or rejected. In some- 
 thing of the same way (we need not trouble ourselves here 
 with the difference) the beautiful reality may seem to give 
 you what you wanted, though what you wanted you did not 
 know, or may seem to say for you what you always meant 
 and could never express. This experience may doubtless 
 in part be illusory. The want in part may not actually 
 have been there before it was merged in satisfaction, and the 
 meaning may in part never have gone before its expression. 
 But upon the other side the experience certainly conveys 
 
 ' I am of course not supposing that the consciousness which we are 
 considering, knows at the present stage about these feelings all that we 
 from the outside and at a later stage perceive.. 
 
i86 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 to us things that were not perceived but were actually felt 
 within us. Again earlier in this chapter we saw how in psycho- 
 logical introspection my self is put before me as an object, 
 an object to be completed ideally. And its content, we went 
 on to perceive, is filled up in part out of elements which I 
 merely feel, and which in no sense are before me in the shape 
 of an object. And we may once more remind ourselves in 
 general how the object is continuous in substance with the 
 content that merely is present in feeling, and hence tends 
 persistently to complete itself by that content. 
 
 But, the fact being as above, how is the self ever to become 
 aware of this fact or even to suspect its existence ? How 
 is the merely felt to become in that character an object ? In 
 the main, I think, this question has by now been answered. 
 When my object is increased and the addition comes from 
 that which was and is felt, there is, in such a case, first, a 
 positive sense of expansion and of accord. And there is, 
 next, an absence of the feeling of complete otherness and 
 newness. We have not here quite the same experience as 
 when the object is increased from the undistinguished not- 
 self, but we have an experience more or less similar. This 
 felt absence of disturbance, and this positive sense of some- 
 thing the same although new, prevent my attributing the 
 change to that actual object-world which extends beyond 
 my object. Can I then take the change as arising from the 
 undistinguished tracts present within my actual object ? 
 Once more here, we find, the path is closed. For the feeling 
 here, though similar, is not the same as that of which in the 
 present case I am aware. Again, however much I develop 
 the object in idea, I seem always to be left with a sense of 
 defect. Further in some cases (through a persisting after- 
 perception or otherwise) I can reproduce the special object 
 as it was experienced before the addition. And here I find 
 that the new feature does not in fact fall even within the 
 undiscriminated parts of that object. 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 187 
 
 To repeat, my object, felt to be unsatisfactory, is changed 
 and now is qualified by an addition. This addition gives 
 a positive sense of agreement and unison. It is without the 
 sensation of disturbance, and it gives the feeling of identity 
 with what went before. On the other side this feeling differs 
 from that which I experience when the object is developed 
 from its own undistinguished tracts. And in recalling the 
 change of the object, where this is possible, there is, in pass- 
 ing between the earlier and the later object, a feeling of 
 difference. And this difference remains even when I attend 
 to those contents of the object which are not discriminated. 
 For the above reason I cannot set down the change as due 
 to the object even so far as that is undistinguished. 
 
 Generally then my object is added to, and the new matter 
 cannot be taken as without a source. But in the first place 
 the matter is not felt as wholly new but as something 
 already there and mine. And, in the second place, what is 
 new cannot come from the object- world. It goes beyond my 
 actual object, and yet I cannot attribute it to the non- 
 perceived object- world, or again to any non-relational nebula 
 contained within my object. The origin of my experience 
 therefore is non-objective and it is also non-relational ; but, 
 on the other side, positively, it comes to me as something 
 which already was present to me. The idea, therefore, is 
 suggested of an experience neither objective nor relational 
 but, in a word, immediate. And this idea, being suggested 
 (no matter how it is suggested), satisfies me so far, and is 
 accepted as true and real. The process outlined above may, 
 if you please, contain logical flaws. Whether that is or is 
 not the case, I am not concerned to discuss. And the true 
 history and the real genetic origin of the idea reached, you 
 may contend, has escaped me. That would be an objection 
 which once more I am not called on to answer. I claim to 
 have shown how the idea of immediate experience can be 
 brought before the mind, however otherwise normally it 
 
i88 ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 may be brought there. But the idea, once suggested, is 
 verified by its working, and its acceptance does not logically 
 depend upon the manner of its discovery. 
 
 The whole process which I have sketched may be briefly 
 resumed thus. Our actual object fails to satisfy us, and we 
 get the idea that it is incomplete and that a complete object 
 would satisfy. We attempt to complete our object bj^ 
 relational addition from without and by relational distinction 
 from within. And the result in each case is failure and 
 a sense of defect. We feel that any result gained thus, no 
 matter how all-inclusive so far, would yet be less than what 
 we actually experience. Then we try the idea of a positive 
 non-distinguished non-relational whole, which contains more 
 than the object and in the end contains all that we experi- 
 ence. And that idea, as I have endeavoured in these pages 
 to show, seems to meet our demand. It is not free from 
 difficulty, but it appears to be the one ground on which 
 satisfaction is possible. 
 
 The reader who accepts such an account of volition els 
 I, for instance, have offered elsewhere,^ may perhaps find our 
 main result more evident when viewed from the practical 
 side. Will, according to such an account, is on one hand 
 the self-realization of an idea, but on the other hand it 
 cannot be resolved into any complex of elements existing 
 before the mind. We have in volition a positive experience, 
 which is more than any sensation or idea or any mere set 
 of sensations and ideas with their relations and movements. 
 If you take my state of mind before the volition, followed 
 by the actual satisfaction with its awareness of agency, and 
 if you attempt to confine all this within the limits of what 
 takes place before me in the objective field, the result is 
 failure. You perceive forthwith that in your analysis there 
 is something left out, and that this something is a content 
 
 ' Mind, N.S., Nos. 44, 46, 49. Cf. Nos. 40, 41, 43. 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 189 
 
 which is experienced positively. The felt outgoing of myself 
 and from myself has in short been ignored. And hence 
 comes a consciousness of defect in the object as described, 
 and a desire for its completion. On the other side, since the 
 whole experience is integrally one, the objective side naturally 
 tends to complete itself ideally and to fill itself out from 
 what merely is felt. And the suggestion of a defect thus 
 remedied, when once it has been made, is found so far to 
 satisfy. But I would remind the reader that, neither here 
 nor in what precedes, am I offering a true genetic account of 
 the matter.^ 
 
 In some such manner it, however, seems possible to reach 
 the idea of immediate experience. That experience we have 
 seen is a positive non-relational non-objective whole of 
 feeling. Within my immediate experience falls everything 
 of which in any sense I am aware, so far at least as I am 
 aware of it. But on the other side it contains distinctions 
 which transcend its immediacy. This my world, of feeling 
 and felt in one, is not to be called ' subjective ', nor is it to 
 be identified with my self. That would be a mistake at once 
 fundamental and disastrous. Nor is immediate experience 
 to be taken as simply one with any ' subliminal ' world or 
 any universe of the Unconscious. However continuous it 
 may be with a larger world, my immediate experience falls, 
 as such, strictly within the limits of my finite centre. But 
 again to conclude from this that what falls within these 
 limits is merely myself, would be an error entailing in the 
 end theoretical ruin. The above idea of immediate experi- 
 ence is not intelligible, I would add, in the sense of being 
 explicable ; but it is necessary, I would insist, both for 
 psychology and for metaphysics. 
 
 The genesis of the idea, I should agree, in the main may be called 
 practical. I should presume it to arise when the self is identified with 
 the body, and when we become aware of something experienced within 
 the body which is not the body nor yet things within it or outside it. 
 To set down this experience as being further, like pleasure and pain, 
 non-relational, is of course a step taken only by a later reflection. 
 
igo ON OUR KNOWLEDGE OF chap. 
 
 Its larger application would go far beyond the scope of 
 these pages. Nothing in the end is real but what is felt, and 
 for me nothing in the end is real but that which I feel. To 
 take reality as a relational scheme, no matter whether the 
 relations are ' external ' or ' internal ', seems therefore im- 
 possible and perhaps even ridiculous. It would cease to be 
 so only if the immediacy of feeling could be shown to be 
 merely relational. On the other side relations in fact do 
 exist and immediacy in fact is transcended.^ And, just as 
 we cannot explain the possibility of finite centres of feeling, 
 so we cannot explain how this transcendence of feeling is 
 possible. But the fact remains that feeling, while it remains 
 as a constant basis, nevertheless contains a world which in 
 a sense goes beyond itself. And when we seek for a unity 
 which holds together these two aspects of our world, we 
 seem to find given to us nothing but this unity of feeling 
 which itself is transcended. Hence, as I have urged else- 
 where, we are driven to postulate a higher form of unity, 
 a form which combines the two aspects neither of which can 
 be excluded. That such a form is given to us directly in 
 i any experience ^ I have never pretended. On the other hand 
 against its possibility I have nowhere found a conclusive 
 objection. And because this satisfies our demands, and 
 because nothing but this satisfies them, I therefore conclude 
 that such an idea, so far as it goes, is final and absolute 
 truth. But, however that may be, I trust that the humbler 
 
 1 We never in one sense do, or can, go beyond immediate experience. 
 Apart from the immediacy of ' this ' and ' now ' we never have, or can have, 
 reality. The real, to be real, must be felt. This is one side of the matter. 
 But on the other side the felt content takes on a form which more and 
 more goes beyond the essential character of feehng, i. e. direct and non- 
 relational qualification. Distinction and separation into substantives and 
 adjectives, terms and relations, alienate the content of immediate experi- 
 ence from the form of immediacy which still on its side persists. In other 
 words the ideality, present from the first, is developed, and to follow this 
 ideality is our way to the true Reahty which is there in feeling. 
 
 " Given, that is, adequately and as required. I am not forgetting the 
 claim of, e. g., our aesthetic experience. 
 
VI IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 191 
 
 contentions of this chapter may in their way be useful. I 
 have felt throughout that everything here which I have been 
 able to say, could and should have been somehow put more 
 simply. But if, while so far agreeing with me, the reader is 
 nevertheless led to reflect further on this difficult theme, my 
 main end will have been accomplished. The problem which 
 has occupied us, however sterile and baffling it may appear, 
 threatens, if left unresolved, to bring danger or even theo- 
 retical destruction. 
 
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VI 
 
 CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE i 
 The idea of writing a few remarks on this head was suggested 
 to me by Mr. Ward's article on Modern Psychology. These 
 remarks are not intended as a contribution to the subject, and 
 certainly not as a hostile criticism. We must all feel grateful to 
 Mr. Ward for his interesting discussion, and for myself I feel 
 sympathy with its general drift. And, as Mr. Ward has not yet 
 worked out his positive view as to the Subject, it would be absurd 
 in me to offer to criticize that view beforehand. But what has 
 struck me is that in the discussion assumptions are used which, 
 if true, are very far from appearing self-evident. And, though in 
 his own mind doubtless Mr. Ward is prepared with a defence of 
 them, I do not find that he has done anything to prepare the 
 reader. Hence I thought it might be well to call attention to 
 some points which seem ignored, but which to my mind appear 
 to be fundamental. 
 
 The main assumption seems to be the identification of experi- 
 ence with consciousness. Now, if by consciousness we under- 
 stand the being of an object for a subject, this assumption, I 
 should say, is at least disputable. To my mind consciousness is 
 not coextensive with experience. It is not original, nor at any 
 stage is it ever all-inclusive, and it is inconsistent with itself in 
 such a way as to point to something higher. 
 
 (i) On the inconsistency of consciousness I can partly refer to 
 Mr. Ward, but I must also state the case briefly in my own way. 
 We have an object, a something given, and it is given to the 
 subject. Is the subject given ? No, for, if so, it would itself be 
 an object. We seem, then, to have one term and a relation 
 without a second term. But can there be a relation with one 
 
 ' These pages were first published in Mind for April 1893. It is with 
 some hesitation that I have resolved to reprint them, but it seemed to me 
 clear that, if republished, they should be left unaltered. Whether Prof. 
 Ward has anywhere, since the above date, discussed the points raised in 
 this paper, I regret to be unable to inform the reader. In his interesting 
 and valuable work The Realm of Ends, lately published, he appears to 
 myself still to ignore a view which, if it stands, tends to unsettle the 
 foundation of his main theories. For his article see Mind, N.S., No. 5. 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 193 
 
 term ? No ; this appears to be self-contradictory, and, if we 
 assert it, we must justify and defend our paradox. But, again, 
 can a term be known only as a term of a relation or relations, 
 while it is not, in any aspect, known otherwise ? No, once more ; 
 this is impossible, and in the end unmeaning. Terms are never 
 constituted entirely by a relation or relations. There is a quality 
 always which is more than the relation, though it may not be 
 independent of it. We may, of course, for certain purposes 
 abstract and use working fictions, as we do, for instance, in the 
 case of atoms and ether. But, outside natural science, it is a 
 serious error to mistake these useful fictions for realities. And 
 anything like a point without a quality in the end seems to be 
 unreal, and ' constitution by relations ' a misleading phrase. 
 But, once more, can we have a relation, one term of which is 
 contained in the experienced and the other not ? No ; for a term, 
 which is not in some sense experienced, seems nothing at aU. 
 If in itself it falls outside the experienced, then it appears to be 
 unmeaning, and it cannot therefore consistently be said to exist. 
 Or at least we must continue to hold this, until our difficulties 
 are met. And they are not met by the mere repetition of those 
 every-day distinctions which we have been forced to set down as 
 barely relative. 
 
 And now, leaving the terms, consider the relation. Is there, 
 in the end, such a thing as a relation which is merely between 
 terms ? Or, on the other hand, does not a relation imply an 
 underlying unity and an inclusive whole ? And then, once again, 
 must not this whole be experienced or be nothing ? Here are 
 points surely which at least require some discussion. But con- 
 sciousness must lead to self-consciousness, where possibly these 
 difficulties are lessened. If the object is given to me, then I also 
 must be given, and on reflection I so find myself. I find myself 
 given not in the abstract but as concrete experienced matter. 
 Both terms are now objects, experienced with their relation, and 
 the question is whether the difficulties are now less. We must 
 reply in the negative. The correlated terms are for a subject 
 which itself is not given. The correlation falls in the experience 
 of this new subject, which itself remains outside that object. 
 And of the relation to this new subject the old puzzles are true. 
 This relation must have two terms, terms more than their relation ; 
 and the ' more ' again must be experienced, or else be nothing. 
 
 1574 o 
 
194 APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VI 
 
 Any attempt to pass from within the experienced to that which 
 in itself is not experienced, seems quite suicidal. The distinction 
 between the experienced and experience seems in the end totally 
 inadmissible. And the infinite regress is but an actual uiuremoved 
 contradiction. It is itself an absolute irrational limit. 
 
 (2) The form of consciousness thus seems in hopeless contra- 
 diction with itself. But is it necessary to identify experience 
 and consciousness ? Here is a question which seems worth some 
 consideration. Now consciousness, to my mind, is not original. 
 What comes first in each of us is rather feeling, a state as yet 
 without either an object or subject. FeeUng here naturally does 
 not mean mere pleasure and pain ; and indeed the idea that these 
 aspects are our fundamental substance has never seemed, to me 
 at least, worth discussing. I have ventured to consider it an 
 absurd perversion of the older view. Feeling is immediate 
 experience without distinction or relation in itself. It is a unity, 
 complex but without relations. And there is here no difference 
 between the state and its content, since, in a word, the experi- 
 enced and the experience are one. And a distinction between 
 cognition and other aspects of our nature is not yet developed. 
 Feeling is not one differentiated aspect, but it holds all aspects in 
 one. And, though a view of this kind naturally calls for explana- 
 tion and is open to objection, I am forced to doubt the wisdom of 
 ignoring it wholly. For, if it is difficult, it seems hardly so diffi- 
 cult as to take, for instance, our inward Coenesthesia as through- 
 out our object. And a reference to Volkmann's book would show 
 that it owns, more or less, the endorsement of well-known names. 
 But, if it is not false, then the identification of consciousness 
 and experience is a wrong assumption. 
 
 (3) But consciousness at all events, it may be urged, at a 
 certain stage exists. Doubtless, but feehng on this account does 
 not wholly cease to exist, and the experienced is therefore always 
 more than objects together with pain and pleasure. Everything 
 experienced is on one side felt, and the experienced is, also in part, 
 still no more than felt. I fully admit the need here for explana- 
 tion and defence, 1 but I cannot admit that such a view deserves 
 
 ^ One point to be noticed is that the products of relation and distinction 
 apparently come to be experienced without their process. In this way 
 relational complexes may be experienced immediately, and, in a secondary 
 sense, felt. Such felt masses can be attached to the object of conscious- 
 ness, but to a far larger extent they qualify the background [p. 177]. 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 195 
 
 to be ignored. The real subject, we may say, is always felt. It 
 can never become wholly an object, and it never, at any time 
 and in any case, ceases also to be felt. And on this felt back- 
 ground depends the unity and continuity of our lives, lost hope- 
 lessly by Associationism, and lost no less hopelessly by the 
 identification of experience with consciousness. Our personal 
 sameness consists in the ideal identity and the continuity of the 
 experienced. Nothing more is wanted, and anything more, if it 
 were possible, would, at least so far as we are concerned, be 
 nothing. And the opposite of this, I venture again to urge, 
 should not be assumed as self-evident. 
 
 For, in dealing with the puzzles of consciousness and self-con- 
 sciousness, the difference brings important consequences. Those 
 puzzles consisted in the internal difficulties of the relation and 
 its terms, and then again in the fact of the relation itself. An 
 experienced relation seems to involve an experienced whole, but 
 this whole is at once supplied by feeling. For consciousness is 
 superinduced on, and is still supported by, feeling ; and feeling is 
 itself an experienced whole. And the difficulty of the relation 
 and its terms might from the same basis be dealt with, though 
 naturally I cannot attempt to work this out here. I will how- 
 ever try briefly to point out where the solution lies. There is a 
 doubt, first, whether consciousness must imply self-consciousness. 
 Can there, in other words, be an object, unless that object bears 
 the character of a not-myself ? In this latter case the ' object ' 
 itself wiU be but part of the whole object, for it will be given as 
 one term in relation with another given term. This question to 
 some slight extent, perhaps, is one of language, but for our 
 present purpose it may be left unanswered wholly. The solution 
 of the problem in any case remains the same. And that solution 
 lies in the fact that between the felt subject and the object there 
 is no relation at all. Whether the object contains, or does not 
 contain, a self and not-self in connexion, on either view there is 
 still a real felt subject. And the object qualifies this subject, but 
 there is emphatically no experience of a relation between them. 
 And when by reflection a relation seems given, the experience has 
 been changed. That relation is now part of a new ' object ' ; 
 and with that new object we have a felt subject, with which it is 
 experienced, but to which it is not related. 
 
 The above statement, I am well aware, calls for much 
 
 o 2 
 
196 APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VI 
 
 explanation, but the only proper explanation would be a full treat- 
 ment of the matter. What an ' object ' is, and how it differs from 
 the rest of the experienced, how a content becomes an object, 
 and how the transition is made from feeling to consciousness— 
 these are problems which in a small space could not be dealt 
 with. But, assuming an object in the sense of a something/or me, 
 I will say a few words on this preposition. The word ' for ' 
 without doubt asserts a relation, and in addition it asserts a 
 relation in space ; and, if so, clearly in language I contradict 
 myself, when I deny that the object implies a spatial or any 
 relation. And, if all metaphors are to be pressed, then I, and 
 I think all of us, in the end must keep silence. But the question 
 surely is whether such a contradiction is more than formal. And 
 the question is whether on some matters, in order to speak ac- 
 curately, one has not to use metaphors which conflict with and 
 correct each other. Believing this to be the case I repeat that 
 the felt subject, in and for which the object exists, is not related 
 to it and yet is experienced with it. 
 
 The object in self-consciousness (for it is better to take that 
 stage at once) is two concrete terms in relation with each other. 
 The whole of it consists in content, in presented elements more 
 or less qualified and extended by thought. What the content 
 is on each side is not here my concern. My concern is to deny 
 that this whole ' object ' is related to the subject, and yet to 
 assert that it is there for the subject and present in it and to it, 
 and that the subject itself is also experienced. 
 
 The object-content is no longer in unbroken unity with the 
 felt whole, but this breach itself is not, and cannot be, an object. 
 It can become an object for reflection ; but, in becoming one, it 
 generates a new experience and a fresh felt subject. The subject 
 always is felt, and neither itself, nor its actual distinction from 
 the object, can be got out and placed before it as an object. And 
 there is no distinction here between the experience and what is expe- 
 rienced.^ For the subject always is experienced because it is felt. 
 
 ' For the outside observer, I may be asked, is there no distinction of 
 this kind ? Unquestionably there is, but what it is, is a matter for dis- 
 cussion. If the observer takes the experiencing subject to be more than 
 what is at one time experienced, taken together and in connexion with 
 its experienced past — he may possibly be right. But I must remind him 
 that, if he assumes this, he is not arguing against any one. He is merely 
 assuming without argument that he is unquestionably right and we are 
 certainly wrong. 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 197 
 
 This view, briefly and, I must confess, obscurely indicated, 
 does not of course remove all difficulties. But the difficulties it 
 leaves are, I believe, not more than difficult. The elements we 
 must deal with are at any rate contained in one world ; while 
 to make a passage in any sense from one world to another will 
 remain, I venture to think, entirely impossible. And this view, 
 again, is surely not prima facie absurd. It is hard for one, who 
 like myself learnt and tried to teach it now many years ago, to 
 judge on this point, but I would appeal to the reader. Take 
 such an experience as ordinary desire. Beside pleasure and pain 
 we have in this state, I presume, a relation of something, that is, 
 to an idea in me. These terms we may certainly agree to call 
 objects, and, in some cases and in one sense, we may agree also 
 to say this of the relation between them. But, beside the above, 
 is there nothing experienced in desire ? I should say, yes, the 
 whole experience is felt as one, and in that unity there is a 
 background which is not an object. Desire, for me, is a felt 
 whole containing terms and a relation, and pleasure and pain. 
 But it contains beside an indefinite mass of the felt, to call which 
 an object strikes my mind as even ludicrous. And I would ask 
 the reader if this view is so irrational that it may safely be ignored, 
 and that the opposite of it may, without any discussion, be 
 assumed. 
 
 And my purpose in writing is not at present to explain and 
 justify this view, but to emphasize the fact that it exists. And 
 I would venture on a respectful remonstrance against approaching 
 these questions with undiscussed alternatives. I do not suggest 
 that Mr. Ward is not famihar with all that I have set down, or 
 that in his own mind he is not fully prepared to deal with and 
 dispose of it. But his readers, I think, are left without informa- 
 tion. And the consequences, if so, must be injurious to the 
 study of philosophy. When, for example, Mr. Ward assumes, 
 or appears to assume, of unity and continuity, that, because they 
 are not in separate presentations, they are in, or come from, a 
 subject outside the experienced — he can hardly realize the nature 
 of the shock he administers. For unity and continuity, many of 
 us have learnt, are always ideal. They consist wholly in content, 
 or else they are nothing. And they come from content, or else 
 they do not come at all. And any assertion of the opposite, we 
 are ready to contend, is inconsistent with itself. We may be 
 
igS APPENDIX TO CHAPTER VI 
 
 mistaken doubtless in all this, and Mr. Ward doubtless is prepared 
 to show us how our positive doctrine is wrong, and our negative 
 criticism mistaken. And when he produces, as I hope he soon 
 will produce, his doctrine about the Subject, and its true con- 
 nexion with the change and sequence of phenomena, I trust he 
 will take some account of our errors. I do not know what his 
 doctrine will be, but it could hardly lose in clearness if it were 
 defined against such criticism as, I presume, Hegel would have 
 launched against it. And I do not say this for myself, who claim 
 no right to assistance, and whose mind is, I suppose, presumably 
 ossified. But with regard to the younger men, some of whom 
 are growing up more or less in the same general view, the case is 
 different. And they will hardly be helped by a tacit assimiption 
 that their conclusions, positive and negative, are not worth 
 discussing. 
 
 As for the Associationist, if he is not confuted, he surely never 
 will be ; and I am sure that, however much confuted, he will 
 never be convinced. Our business is, I suppose, not to be troubled 
 about that, but to try to gain a positive result which on all sides 
 will bear criticism. And is it not almost time to say, Let the dead 
 bury their dead ? But, whether in metaphysics or in psycho- 
 logy, perhaps I hold the Associationist far cheaper, and differ 
 from him more radically than Mr. Ward would think justifiable. 
 For in principle Mr. Ward, I should say, has not broken with 
 Associationism. The question of principle, to my mind, is about 
 the nature of the universal in being and knowledge. But with 
 that question Mr. Ward, as soon as he makes a serious attempt 
 to work out his view of the identical (?) subject, will have to deal. 
 Then I may find that these well-meant remarks have been super- 
 fluous, since any truth they may contain has been included and 
 provided for. I offer them, notwithstanding, in the meantime, 
 not as hostile criticism nor yet as positive doctrine. For I admit 
 that there are difficulties attaching to the problem, which I cannot 
 at present, to my mind, altogether remove. But I offer the 
 above as some considerations, which ought not, in any case 
 and by any view, to be quite ignored. 
 
SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE TO CHAPTER VI 
 
 In republishing the two foregoing articles I would call atten- 
 tion to the metaphysical importance of their doctrine. Most 
 of us, no doubt, agree that in metaphysics we start, in some sense, 
 from what is given, and that hence the question as to what is 
 given at the start is fundamental and vital. And the divergence 
 of the answers, stated or impUed, is a point which we are bound 
 to recognize and deal with. There is, for instance, a well-known 
 view that, whatever is given at first, it is not the One Reality ; 
 and that hence the One must be reached, if at all, by some super- 
 vening process. Our beginning, it is asserted, is with the mere 
 Many. Or we may hear that we have to start with the correla- 
 tion of subject and object, which correlation, we find later, we 
 cannot transcend. 
 
 Disagreeing otherwise, I would emphatically endorse this 
 last result. If what is given is a Many without a One, the One 
 is never attainable. And, if what we had at first were the mere 
 correlation of subject and object, then to rise beyond that 
 would be impossible. From such premisses there is in my 
 opinion no road except to total scepticism. This is the ground, 
 inherited of course from others, on which I may say that I have 
 based myself always. If you take experience as above, then 
 all the main conclusions which I advocate are assuredly wrecked. 
 And nothing, I presume, is gained by simply urging against 
 myself and others a result on which we ourselves have consistently 
 stood. 
 
 But what is more important to discuss is, I should say, the 
 truth of the premisses. The doctrine that what is given at the 
 start is a mere Many or a mere correlation, is, we contend, a fatal 
 error. This, we maintain, is no genuine fact, but is a funda- 
 mental perversion of the fact. And while we are ready to inquire 
 as to what would follow from any premisses alleged, we insist 
 that the truth of the premisses is first in question, and we submit 
 
200 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE TO CHAPTER VI 
 
 that, after all, it is perhaps better to begin by asking as to the 
 nature of what is actually experienced. 
 
 Any one who has read the foregoing papers (not to speak of 
 what I have written elsewhere),'- will, I think, see that for me 
 at no stage of mental development is the mere correlation of 
 subject and object actually given. Wherever this or any other 
 relation is experienced, what is experienced is more than the 
 mere relation. It involves a felt totality, and on this inclusive 
 unity the relation depends. The subject, the object, and their 
 relation, are experienced as elements or aspects in a One which 
 is there from the first. And thus to seek to extrude the One from 
 what at first is experienced, is in every case to mistake for fact 
 what really is sheer abstraction. 
 
 Everywhere, and not only here, a mere relation is in my 
 view an abstraction, which never is given and could never be 
 real. The experienced fact is not the mere terms and the 
 relation. Over and above these it involves another aspect of 
 given totality, and without this aspect the experienced fact is 
 not given. And the same remark, of course, applies to the con- 
 tention that what is first given is a bare Many. 
 
 I regret to repeat here once more what I have urged through 
 so many years and so often. But, as long as what I hold to be 
 fundamental fact is so much ignored, I have no choice but from 
 time to time to repeat what to me seems indubitable. 
 
 As to what would follow if I am here in error, and if a mere 
 Many or a bare correlation were actually given, I will add a few 
 words. Relations (this, I presume, must follow) would be at 
 least as real as their terms and would have ultimate reality. 
 What, however, is to be said about the experienced ' together- 
 ness ' of terms and relations, I do not know. Not only does the 
 ' together ' seem to me, on this ground, to fall outside of know- 
 ledge and reality, but the whole fact of experience and know- 
 ledge has to my mind become non-existent and even impossible. 
 Whether, if we start from the above basis, any subject could ever 
 become aware of any other subject, I will not offer to discuss. 
 But that the God of Theism could have his place in such a world, 
 unless that world were radically changed, to myself seems 
 inconceivable. 
 
 1 I would refer the reader to an article in Mind, July 1887, as well as 
 to my published volumes. 
 
CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPERIENCE 201 
 
 But is it not better, I would ask once more, to begin by 
 a discussion as to what is actually given in experience ? Is it not 
 better to recognize that on this point there is no agreement, and 
 little more than a variety of conflicting opinions ? The opinion 
 which I myself, with others, have adopted, may of course be 
 erroneous. But obviously I cannot desert it because certain 
 doctrines, on the rejection of which it long ago was based, are 
 assumed to be true. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE i 
 
 The welcome article by the Editor in Mind, No. 65, con- 
 tains, we shall all agree, much food for reflection. Profiting, 
 I hope, by all of it, there is nevertheless much from which 
 I am forced to dissent. And in what follows here I shall 
 try to deal with one point of disagreement. We can, I 
 trust, isolate this point, at least sufficiently for a separate 
 discussion. 
 
 Prof. Stout denies, I understand, that coherence will work 
 as a test of truth in the case of facts due to sensible percep- 
 tion and memory. Mr. Russell again has taken the same 
 line in his interesting article on Truth in the Proceedings 
 of the Aristotelian Society for 1907. This is the issue to 
 which here I confine myself, neglecting the question as to 
 other truths whose warrant also is taken as immediate. 
 What I maintain is that in the case of facts of perception 
 and memory the test which we do apply, and which we 
 must apply, is that of system. I contend that this test 
 works satisfactorily, and that no other test will work. And 
 I argue in consequence that there are no judgements of sense 
 which are in principle infallible. 
 
 There is a misunderstanding against which the reader 
 must be warned most emphatically. The test which I ad- 
 vocate is the idea of a whole of knowledge as wide and 
 as consistent as may be. In speaking of system I mean 
 always the union of these two aspects, and this is the sense 
 and the only sense in which I am defending coherence. If 
 we separate coherence from what Prof. Stout calls compre- 
 
 ' This chapter appeared first as an article in Mind for July 1909. 
 
VII ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE 203 
 
 hensiveness, then I agree that neither of these aspects of 
 system will work by itself. How they are connected, and 
 whether in the end we have one principle or two, is of 
 course a difficult question. I hope to return to this,^ but it 
 is impossible for me to touch on it here. All that I can do 
 here is to point out that both of the above aspects are for 
 me inseparably included in the idea of system, and that 
 coherence apart from comprehensiveness is not for me the 
 test of truth or reality. 
 
 So much being premised, I will proceed not to argue in 
 detail against Prof. Stout and Mr. Russell, but to endeavour 
 to explain the real nature of that view which I advocate. ^ 
 For the sake of clearness let me begin by mentioning some 
 things in which I do not believe. I do not believe in any 
 knowledge which is independent of feeling and sensation. 
 On sensation and feeling I am sure that we depend for the 
 material of our knowledge. And as to the facts of percep- 
 tion, I am convinced that (to speak broadly) we cannot 
 anticipate them or ever become independent of that which 
 they give to us. And these facts of perception, I further 
 agree, are at least in part irrational, so far as in detail is 
 visible. I do not believe that we can make ourselves inde- 
 pendent of these non-rational data. 
 
 But, if I do not believe all this, does it follow that I have 
 to accept independent facts ? Does it follow that perception 
 and memory give me truths which I must take up and keep 
 as they are given me, truths which in principle cannot be 
 erroneous ? This surely would be to pass from one false 
 extreme to another. Our intelligence cannot construct the 
 world of perceptions and feelings, and it depends on what is 
 given — to so much I assent. But that there are given facts, 
 of perception which are independent and ultimate and above 
 
 ^ See Chap. VIII. 
 
 ^ In speaking of this common view as mine, I merely wish to indicate 
 to the reader that I have no right to commit others to every detail of 
 my case. 
 
204 ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE chap. 
 
 criticism, is not to my mind a true conclusion. On the 
 contrary, such facts to my mind are a vicious abstraction. 
 We have, I should say, the aspect of datum, and we have the 
 aspect of interpretation or construction, or what Prof. Stout 
 calls implication (p. 27). And why, I ask, for the intelligence 
 must there be datum without interpretation any more than 
 interpretation without datum ? To me the opposite holds 
 good, and I therefore conclude that no given fact is sacro- 
 sanct. With every fact of perception or memory a modified 
 interpretation is in principle possible, and no such fact 
 therefore is given free from all possibility of error. 
 
 The reason for maintaining independent facts and infallible 
 judgements, as I understand it, is twofold, (i) Such data, it 
 may be said, can be actually shown. And (2) in any case 
 they must exist, since without them the intelligence cannot 
 work. Prof. Stout is identified,^ I think, only with the 
 second of these contentions. 
 
 (i) I doubt my ability to do justice to the position of the 
 man who claims to show ultimate given facts exempt from 
 all possible error. In the case of any datum of sensation 
 or feeling, to prove that we have this wholly unmodified by 
 what is called ' apperception ' seems a hopeless undertaking. 
 And how far it is supposed that such a negative can- be 
 proved I do not know. What, however, is meant must be 
 this, that we somehow and somewhere have verifiable facts 
 of perception and memory, and also judgements, free from 
 all chance of error. 
 
 I will begin here by recalling a truth familiar but often 
 forgotten, a truth of which Prof. Stout does not fail to 
 remind us. In your search for independent facts and for 
 infallible truths you may go so low that, when you have 
 descended beyond the level of error, you find yourself below 
 the level of any fact or of any truth which you can use.^ 
 What you seek is particular facts of perception or memory, 
 ■ Mind, No. 6s, p. 28. ^ Cf. Chap. V, p. 108. 
 
VII ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE 205 
 
 but what you get may be something not answering to that 
 character. I will go on to give instances of what I mean, 
 and I think that in every case we shall do well to ask this 
 question, ' What on the strength of our ultimate fact are we 
 able to contradict ? ' 
 
 (a) If we take the instance of simple unrelated sensations 
 or feelings, a, b, c — supposing that there are such things — 
 what judgement would such a fact enable us to deny ? We 
 could on the strength of this fact deny the denial that a, b 
 and c exist in any way, manner or sense. But surely this is 
 not the kind of independent fact of which we are in search. 
 
 (b) From this let us pass to the case of a complex feeling 
 containing, at once and together, both a and b. On thq 
 ground of this we can deny the statement that a and b cannot 
 or do not ever anyhow co-exist in feeling. This is an ad- 
 vance, but it surely leaves us far short of our goal. 
 
 (c) What we want, I presume, is something that at once 
 is infallible and that also can be called a particular fact of 
 perception or memory. And we want, in the case of per- 
 ception, something that would be called a fact for observa- 
 tion. We do not seem to reach this fact until we arrive 
 somewhere about the level of ' I am here and now having a 
 sensation or complex of sensations of such or such a kind '. 
 The goal is reached ; but at this point, unfortunately, the 
 judgement has become fallible, so far at least as it really 
 states particular truth. 
 
 (a) In such a judgement it is in the first place hard to say 
 what is meant by the ' I '. If, however, we go beyond feel- 
 ing far enough to mean a self with such or such a real exis- 
 tence in time, then memory is involved, and the judgement 
 at once, I should urge, becomes fallible (cf. Mind, N.S., 
 No. 30, p. 16, and No. 66, p. 156). ^ Thus the statement 
 made in the judgement is liable to error, or else the state- 
 ment does not convey particular truth. 
 
 ' Chapters XII and XIII, pp. 371-2. 384, of the present volume. 
 
2o6 ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE chap. 
 
 (/3) And this fatal dilemma holds good when applied to 
 the 'now' and 'here'. If these words mean a certain 
 special place in a certain special series or order, they are 
 liable to mistake. But, if they fall short of this meaning, 
 then they fail to state individual fact. My feeling is, I agree, 
 not subject to error in the proper sense of that term, but on 
 the other side my feeling does not of itself deliver truth. 
 And the process which gets from it a deliverance as to 
 individual fact is fallible. 
 
 Everywhere such fact depends on construction. And we 
 have here to face not only the possibility of what would 
 commonly be called mistaken interpretation. We have in 
 addition the chance of actual sense-hallucination. And, 
 worse than this, we have the far-reaching influence of ab- 
 normal suggestion and morbid fixed idea. This influence 
 may stop short of hallucination, and yet may vitiate the 
 memory and the judgement to such an extent that there 
 remains no practical difference between idea and perceived 
 fact. And, in the face of these possibilities, it seems idle to 
 speak of perceptions and memories secure from all chance of 
 error. Or on the other side banish the chance of error, and 
 with what are you left ? You then have something which 
 (as we have seen) goes no further than to warrant the asser- 
 tion that such and such elements can and do co-exist — some- 
 how and somewhere, or again that such or such a judgement 
 happens — without any regard to its truth and without any 
 specification of its psychical context. And no one surely 
 will contend that with this we have particular fact. 
 
 The doctrine that perception gives us infallible truth rests 
 on a foundation which in part is sound and in part fatally 
 defective. That what is felt is felt, and cannot, so far as felt, 
 be mistaken — so much as this must be accepted. But the 
 view that, when I say ' this ', ' now ', ' here ', or ' my ', what 
 I feel, when so speaking, is carried over intact into my judge- 
 ment, and that my judgement in consequence is exempt 
 
VII ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE 207 
 
 from error, seems wholly indefensible. It survives, I venture 
 to think, only because it never has understood its complete 
 refutation. 1 That which I designate, is not and cannot be 
 carried over into my judgement. The judgement may in a 
 sense answer to that which I feel, but none the less it fails 
 to contain and to convey my feeling. And on the other hand, 
 so far as it succeeds in expressing my meaning, the judge- 
 ment does this in a way which makes it liable to error. Or, 
 to put it otherwise, the perceived truth, to be of any use, 
 must be particularized. So far as it is stated in a general 
 form, it contains not only that which you meant to say but 
 also, and just as much, the opposite of that which you 
 meant. And to contend for the infallibility of such a truth 
 seems futile. On the other side so far as your truth really 
 is individualized, so far as it is placed in a special construc- 
 tion and vitally related to its context, to the same extent the 
 element of interpretation or implication is added. And, with 
 this element, obviously comes the possibility of mistake. 
 And we have seen above that, viewed psychologically, parti- 
 cular judgements of perception immune from all chance of 
 error seem hardly tenable. 
 
 (2) I pass now to the second reason for accepting infallible 
 data of perception. Even if we cannot show these (it is 
 urged) we are bound to assume them. For in their absence 
 our knowledge has nothing on which to stand, and this want 
 of support results in total scepticism. 
 
 It is possible of course here to embrace both premisses and 
 conclusion, and to argue that scepticism is to be preferred 
 to an untrue assumption. And such a position I would press 
 on the notice of those who uphold infallible judgements of 
 sense and memory. But personally I am hardly concerned 
 in this issue, for I reject both the conclusion and the 
 
 ' I am of course referring here to Hegel. This is a matter to which 
 I shall return (see Chapters VIII and IX). I am naturally not attempting 
 to deal here with the whole subject of Error (see Chap. IX). 
 
2o8 ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE chap. 
 
 premisses together. Such infallible and incorrigible judge- 
 ments are really not required for our knowledge, and, since 
 they cannot be shown, we must not say that they exist. 
 
 In maintaining that all sense- judgements are liable to 
 error it would be better no doubt first to discuss the nature of 
 error. But, since this is impossible here, let me state how 
 much I take to be admitted or agreed on. I understand 
 it to be admitted that some judgements of perception are 
 fallible, and that the question is simply whether this descrip- 
 tion applies to all such judgements without exception. But, 
 if some at least of these judgements are to be called fallible, 
 what are we to understand by that word ? We each of us 
 have a world which we call our ' real ' world in space and 
 time. This is an order, how made and based on what, it is 
 impossible here to inquire.^ But facts of sense are called 
 imaginary or erroneous, when in their offered character they 
 do not belong to this ' real ' order in space or time. They 
 all belong to it of course as facts in some one's mental 
 history, but otherwise they do not qualify the ' real ' order 
 as they claim to qualify it. We therefore relegate them to 
 the sphere of the erroneous or the imaginary, unless we are 
 able to modify and correct their claim so that it becomes 
 admissible. So much as this I must take here to be admitted 
 on both sides, though it is more than possible, I fear, that 
 I may have thus unknowingly perverted the issue. Still, 
 unless the question by some means is cleared, I see no 
 way of proceeding. And the issue, as I understand it, will 
 now be as follows. Are there any judgements of perception 
 or memory, purporting to qualify the ' real ' world, which 
 must necessarily qualify that world as they purport to 
 qualify it ? Or on the other hand are all such ' facts ' 
 capable in principle of being relegated to the world of error, 
 unless and until they are corrected ? 
 
 This I take to be the issue, but there is a distinction 
 
 1 See Chapters III and XVI. 
 
VII ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE 209 
 
 which, before proceeding, the reader must notice, the dis- 
 tinction between my experience and my world and the world 
 in general. It is one thing to say that there are truths 
 which in and for my personal experience are fundamental 
 and incorrigible, and it is another thing to assert that the 
 same truths are infallible absolutely. This distinction will 
 become clearer as we advance, for I will begin by confining 
 the question to my personal experience. Is there any truth 
 of perception which here is fundamental and infallible, and 
 incapable of being banished to the world of fancy ? 
 
 I agree that we depend vitally on the sense-world, that 
 our material comes from it, and that apart from it know- 
 ledge could not begin. To this world, I agree, we have for 
 ever to return, not only to gain new matter but to confirm 
 and maintain the old. I agree that to impose order from 
 without on sheer disorder would be wholly impracticable, 
 and that, if my sense-world were disorderly beyond a certain 
 point, my intelligence would not exist. And further I agree 
 that we cannot suppose it possible that all the judgements 
 of perception and memory which for me come first, could in 
 fact for me be corrected. I cannot, that is, imagine the 
 world of my experience to be so modified that in the end 
 none of these accepted facts should be left standing. But 
 so far, I hasten to add, we have not yet come to the real 
 issue. There is still a chasm between such admissions and 
 the conclusion that there are judgements of sense which 
 possess truth absolute and infallible. 
 
 We meet here a false doctrine largely due to a misleading 
 metaphor. My known world is taken to be a construction 
 built upon such and such foundations. It is argued, there- 
 fore, to be in principle a superstructure which rests upon 
 these supports. You can go on adding to it no doubt, but 
 only so long as the supports remain ; and, unless they re- 
 main, the whole building comes down. But the doctrine, I 
 have to contend, is untenable, and the metaphor ruinously 
 
 1574 P 
 
210 ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE chap. 
 
 inapplicable. The foundation in truth is provisional merely. 
 In order to begin my construction I take the foundation as 
 absolute — so much certainly is true. But that my construc- 
 tion continues to rest on the beginnings of my knowledge is 
 a conclusion which does not follow. It does not follow that, 
 if these are allowed to be fallible, the whole building col- 
 lapses. For it is in another sense that my world rests upon 
 the data of perception. 
 
 My experience is solid, not so far as it is a superstructure 
 but so far as in short it is a system.^ My object is to have 
 a world as comprehensive and coherent as possible, and, in 
 order to attain this object, I have not only to reflect but 
 perpetually to have recourse to the materials of sense. I 
 must go to this source both to verify the matter which is old 
 and also to increase it by what is new. And in this way I 
 must depend upon the judgements of perception. Now it is 
 agreed that, if I am to have an orderly world, I cannot 
 possibly accept all ' facts '. Some of these must be rele- 
 gated, as they are, to the world of error, whether we succeed 
 or fail in modifying and correcting them. And the view 
 which I advocate takes them all as in principle fallible. On 
 the other hand, that view denies that there is any necessity 
 for absolute facts of sense. Facts for it are true, we may 
 say, just so far as they work, just so far as they contribute 
 to the order of experience. If by taking certain judgements 
 I of perception as true, I can get more system into my world, 
 then these ' facts ' are so far true, and if by taking certain 
 ' facts ' as errors I can order my experience better, then 
 so far these ' facts ' are errors. And there is no ' fact ' 
 which possesses an absolute right. Certainly there are 
 
 ' I would venture here in passing to question in principle the truth of 
 a thesis advanced by Prof. Stout (pp. 34-5). Prof. Stout maintains that 
 a proposition may be guaranteed by other propositions, and yet itself 
 lend these no support. But if any proposition has a consequence which 
 is not discordant with what we already know, this consequence is surely, 
 so far as it goes, a support, however small, to the proposition from which it 
 follows. I however agree that the amount of such support may be trifling. 
 
VII ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE 211 
 
 truths with which I begin and which I personally never 
 have to discard, and which therefore remain in fact as 
 members of my known world. And of some of these cer- 
 tainly it may be said that without them I should not know 
 how to order my knowledge. But it is quite another thing 
 to maintain that every single one of these judgements is in 
 principle infallible. The absolute indispensable fact is in 
 my view the mere creature of false theory. Facts are valid 
 so far as, when taken otherwise than as ' real ', they bring 
 disorder into my world. And there are to-day for me facts 
 such that, if I take them as mistakes, my known world is 
 damaged and, it is possible, ruined. But how does it follow 
 that I cannot to-morrow on the strength of new facts gain 
 a wider order in which these old facts can take a place as 
 errors ? The supposition may be improbable, but what 
 you have got to show is that it is in principle impossible.^ 
 A foundation used at the beginning does not in short mean 
 something fundamental at the end, and there is no single 
 * fact ' which in the end can be called fundamental absolutely. 
 It is all a question of relative contribution to my known 
 world-order. 
 
 ' Then no judgement of perception will be more than 
 probable ? ' Certainly that is my contention. ' Facts ' are 
 justified because and as far as, while taking them as real, 
 I am better able to deal with the incoming new ' facts ' and 
 in general to make my world wider and more harmonious. 
 The higher and wider my structure, and the more that any 
 particular fact or set of facts is implied in that structure, the 
 more certain are the structure and the facts. And, if we 
 could reach an all-embracing ordered whole, then our cer- 
 tainty would be absolute. But, since we cannot do this, we 
 have to remain content with relative probability. Why is 
 this or that fact of observation taken as practically certain ? 
 
 '■ A possible attempt to do this will be discussed towards the close of 
 the chapter, p. 216. 
 
 P 2 
 
212 ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE chap. 
 
 It is so taken just so far as it is not taken in its own right. 
 (i) Its validity is due to such and such a person perceiving 
 it under such and such conditions. This means that a cer- 
 tain intellectual order in the person is necessary as a basis, 
 and again that nothing in the way of sensible or mental 
 distortion intervenes between this order and what is given. 
 And (ii) the observed fact must agree with our world as 
 already arranged, or at least must not upset this. If the 
 fact is too much contrary to our arranged world we pro- 
 visionally reject it. We eventually accept the fact only 
 when after confirmation the hypothesis of its error becomes 
 still more ruinous. We are forced then more or less to re- 
 arrange our world, and more or less perhaps to reject some 
 previous ' facts '.^ The question throughout is as to what 
 is better or worse for our order as a whole. 
 
 Why again to me is a remembered fact certain, supposing 
 that it is so ? Assuredly not because it is infallibly delivered 
 by the faculty of Memory, but because I do not see how to 
 reconcile the fact of its error with my accepted world. Un- 
 less I go on the principle of trusting my memory, apart from 
 any special reason to the contrary, I cannot order my world 
 so well, if indeed I can order it at all. The principle here 
 again is system (cf . Chapters XII and XIII) . 
 
 The same account holds with regard to the facts of 
 history. For instance, the guillotining of Louis XVI is 
 practically certain, because, to take this as error, would 
 entail too much disturbance of my world. Error is possible 
 here of course. Fresh facts conceivably might come before 
 me such as would compel me to modify in part my know- 
 ledge as so far arranged. And in this modified arrangement 
 the execution of Louis would find its place as an error. But 
 the reason for such a modification would have to be con- 
 siderable, while, as things are, no reason exists. And take 
 again the case of an historical fact which is called more or 
 
 ' Cf. Appearance, p. 543, note. 
 
VII ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE 213 
 
 less isolated. Mr. Russell^ has instanced the honourable 
 death of a late prelate, and has urged (as I understand) that 
 on any view such as mine I have just as much reason 
 to believe that this prelate was hanged. The fact is sup- 
 posed to be isolated, and on mere internal evidence either 
 alternative is taken, I presume, as equally probable. Now, 
 of course I agree that we have innumerable cases where on 
 mere internal evidence we are unable to distinguish between 
 fact and fancy, but the difficulty that is supposed to arise 
 I am unable to see. For the criterion with me is not mere 
 absence, within the limits of this or that idea, of visible dis- 
 crepancy. The question with me everywhere is as to what is 
 the result to my real world. [Appearance, chap, xvi, and 
 p. 618.) Now, confining myself to a certain case, the acceptance 
 on the one side of the mere fancy or on the other side of the 
 attested fact may, so far as I see, be in itself the same thing 
 to my world. But imagine my world made on the principle 
 of in such a case accepting mere fancy as fact. Would such 
 a world be more comprehensive and coherent than the world 
 as now arranged ? Would it be coherent at all ? Mr. 
 Russell, I understand, answers in the affirmative (p. 33) , but 
 it seems to me that he has misconceived the position. To 
 take memory as in general trustworthy, where I have no 
 special reason for doubt, and to take the testimony of those 
 persons, whom I suppose to view the world as I view it, 
 as being true, apart from special reason on the other side — 
 these are principles by which I construct my ordered world, 
 such as it is. And because by any other method the result 
 is worse, therefore for me these principles are true. On the 
 other hand to suppose that any ' fact ' of perception or 
 memory is so certain that no possible experience could justify 
 me in taking it as error, seems to me injurious if not ruinous. 
 On such a principle my world of knowledge would be ordered 
 worse, if indeed it could be ordered at all. For to accept all 
 
 ' On the Nature of Truth, pp. 33, 35. 
 
214 ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE chap. 
 
 the ' facts ', as they offer themselves, seems obviously im- 
 possible ; and, if it is we who have to decide as to which 
 facts are infaUible, then I ask how we are to decide. The 
 ground of validity, I maintain, consists in successful con- 
 tribution. That is a principle of order, while any other 
 principle, so far as I see, leads to chaos.^ 
 
 ' But,' it may still be objected, ' my fancy is unlimited. 
 I can therefore invent an imaginary world even more orderly 
 than my known world. And further this fanciful arrangement 
 might possibly be made so wide that the world of perception 
 would become for me in comparison small and inconsider- 
 able. Hence, my perceived world, so far as not supporting 
 my fancied arrangement, might be included within it as 
 error. Such a consequence would or might lead to con- 
 fusion in theory and to disaster in practice. And yet the 
 result follows from your view inevitably, unless after all you 
 fall back upon the certainty of perception.' 
 
 To this possible objection, I should reply first, that it has 
 probably failed to understand rightly the criterion which I 
 defend. The aspect of comprehensiveness has not received 
 'here its due emphasis. The idea of system demands the 
 inclusion of all possible material. Not only must you in- 
 clude everything to be gained from immediate experience 
 and perception, but you must also be ready to act on the 
 same principle with regard to fancy. But this means that 
 you cannot confine yourself within the Hmits of this or that 
 fancied world, as suits your pleasure or private convenience. 
 You are bound also, so far as is possible, to recognize and 
 to include the opposite fancy. 
 
 This consideration to my mind ruins the above hypothesis 
 on which the objection was based. The fancied arrange- 
 
 ^ To the question if the above principle is merely ' practical ' , I reply, 
 ' Certainly, if you take " practice " so widely as to remove the distinction 
 between practice and theory." But, since such a widening of sense seems 
 to serve no useful purpose, I cannot regard that course as being itself 
 very ' practical '. I answer therefore that the above principle is certainly 
 not merely practical. 
 
VII ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE 215 
 
 ment not only has opposed to it the world of perception. It 
 also has against it any opposite arrangement and any con- 
 trary fact which I can fancy. And, so far as I can judge, 
 these contrary fancies will balance the first. Nothing, there- 
 fore, will be left to outweigh the world as perceived, and the 
 imaginary hypothesis will be condemned by our criterion. 
 
 And, with regard to the world as perceived, we must 
 remember that my power is very limited. I cannot add to 
 this world at discretion and at my pleasure create new and 
 opposite material. Hence, to speak broadly, the material 
 here is given and compulsory, and the production of what 
 is contrary is out of my power. After all due reservations 
 have been made, the contrast in this respect between the 
 worlds of ' fact ' and of fancy will hold good. You cannot, 
 as with fancies, make facts one to balance another at your 
 pleasure. And (if we are to go still further) the riches of 
 imagination even as regards quantity are deceptive. What 
 we call our real world is s_o superior in wealth of detail that 
 to include it, as outweighed in quantity, within some arrange- 
 ment which we merely fancy, is to my mind not feasible. 
 The whole hypothesis which we have considered seems to 
 have been shown on more than one ground to be untenable. 
 
 But if I am asked, ' Were it otherwise, what becomes of 
 your criterion ? ' though I think the question unfair, I will 
 answer it conditionally. In that supposed case I would 
 modify my criterion. I would say, ' The truth is that which 
 enables us to order most coherently and comprehensively 
 the data supplied by immediate experience and the intuitive 
 judgements of perception '.^ But this answer, I repeat, is 
 
 ' As I am not committed to this answer, I can hardly be called on to 
 explain it further. But I may remind the reader that immediate ex- 
 perience and perceptional judgement is not all of one kind. Aesthetic 
 perceptions, for instance, will not fall under the head of mere fancies. 
 Where the ' fancy ' represents some human interest, it ceases, in propor- 
 tion to the importance of the interest, to be mere fancy or, properly, 
 fancy at all. Cf. Chap. XII, p. 365. 
 
 Again, to pass from this to another point, I may be asked whether the 
 
2i6 ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE chap. 
 
 merely conditional, and I do not believe that the condition 
 holds good. For I beUeve that our criterion, apphed with- 
 out modification, gives its proper place to mere fancy. And 
 in any case (need I add ?) it does not follow that particular 
 judgements of perception and memory, all or any of them, 
 are infallible. 
 
 But there is an objection which perhaps for some time has 
 been troubhng the reader. ' After all ' (he may say) ' my 
 experience has got to be mine. If you went beyond a certain 
 point in modifying my known world, it might possibly be 
 a superior world but it would be no world for me. And 
 from this it follows that something, and something given, 
 is in my world fundamental, and that, while my world 
 remains mine, this something is indispensable and infallible. 
 And the fact, if it is fact, that I cannot produce this element 
 fails to show that it is not there.' Now it is one thing, 
 I reply, to allow the existence of a fundamental element, 
 and it is another thing to admit this in the form of an 
 infallible judgement. I wish to emphasize this distinction 
 and to insist that, if there is to be an infallible judgement, 
 that judgement must be produced. On the other hand, I do 
 not seek to deny in every sense the fact of the fundamental 
 element. We are here in a region which so far is perhaps 
 little understood, but for our purpose fortunately the whole 
 question is irrelevant. 
 
 We must remind ourselves of the distinction which we 
 laid down above. Conceivably a judgement might be funda- 
 mental and infallible for me, in the sense that to modify it or 
 
 instance of a man in collision with a new environment to which he can- 
 not adapt himself presents no difficulty to our general criterion. In our 
 case none, I reply, since we hold all such knowledge for relative. A 
 difficulty arises only in the case of those who take judgements as absolute. 
 We must, however, remember that, in the above instance of collision 
 between inner and outer worlds, it would be wrong to assume that the 
 man who prefers his inner world goes always against the weight of his 
 immediate and intuitive experience. 
 
VII ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE 217 
 
 doubt it would entail the loss of my personal identity, while 
 yet to another mind that modification or that doubt might 
 be possible and necessary. Of course I do not mean that 
 anything which is something for me, could by a wider ex- 
 perience be taken as something which in no sense exists. I 
 mean that the character in which it offers itself to me in 
 judgement might by a wider experience be seen to need 
 correction, and might, apart from that correction, be classed 
 as error. I am speaking here (the reader will remember) 
 about particular ' facts ' of feeling, perception or memory. 
 And with regard to these I do not see the way by which 
 I am to pass from relative to absolute infallibihty, and I do 
 not know how to argue here from an assumed necessary 
 implication in my personal existence to a necessity which 
 is more than relative. Am I to urge that a world in which 
 my personal identity has been ended or suspended has ceased 
 to be a world altogether ? Apart from such an argument 
 (which I caimot use) I seem condemned to the result that 
 all sense-judgements are fallible. 
 
 The repugnance excited by this conclusion seems due to 
 several grounds. Our immediate experience is not falhble, 
 and this character (we have seen) is mistakenly transferred 
 to those judgements which claim to deliver that experience. 
 And further we had the false identification of knowledge 
 with a mechanical superstructure supported by an external 
 foundation. But behind this we have the demand for abso- 
 lute reality in the shape of self-existent facts and of indepen- 
 dent truths. Unless reality takes this form it seems to be 
 nowhere, and so we go on to postulate absolute knowledge 
 where no more than probability is attainable. Again, if the 
 conclusion and the principle advocated here are accepted, 
 the whole Universe seems too subject to the individual 
 knower. What is given counts for so little and the arrange- 
 ment counts for so much, while in fact the arranger, if we 
 
2i8 ON TRUTH AND COHERENCE chap, vii 
 
 are to have real knowledge, seems so dependent on the 
 world. But the individual who knows is here wrongly iso- 
 lated, and then, because of that, is confronted with a mere 
 aHen Universe. And the individual, as so isolated, I agree, 
 could do nothing, for indeed he is nothing. My real per- 
 sonal self which orders my world is in truth inseparably one 
 with the Universe. Behind me the absolute reality works 
 through and in union with myself, and the world which 
 confronts me is at bottom one thing in substance and in 
 power with this reality. There is a world of appearance 
 and there is a sensuous curtain, and to seek to deny the 
 presence of this or to identify it with reality is mistaken. 
 But for the truth I come back always to that doctrine of 
 Hegel, that ' there is nothing behind the curtain other than 
 that which is in front of it '.^ For what is in front of it is 
 the Absolute that is at once one with the knower and behind 
 him. 
 
 The conclusion advocated in these pages is, however, but 
 limited. With regard to the two aspects of coherence and 
 comprehensiveness I have in these pages not asked if they 
 are connected in principle. I have merely urged that it is 
 necessary to use them in one, and that here and here alone 
 we have the criterion of perceived and remembered truth. 
 And I have argued that in principle any judgement of per- 
 ception or memory is liable to error, and I have urged that, 
 if this is not so, the right conclusion is to chaos. But to 
 some of the points here left unsettled I shall return. 
 
 ' I believe these to be Hegel's words, but I cannot give any reference 
 for them. Almost the same words will, however, be found in Phano- 
 menologie (second edition), p. 126. This is the last page of the division 
 marked A. III. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION i 
 
 In the preceding chapter I pointed out how coherence and 
 comprehensiveness are the two aspects of system, and I 
 attempted to justify the claim of system as an arbiter of 
 fact. In the chapter which follows I am to endeavour to 
 show how system stands to contradiction. The question is 
 difficult and could in any case here be dealt with but im- 
 perfectly, and the reader again must excuse me if I approach 
 it by a circuitous route. 
 
 What in the end is the criterion ? The criterion of truth, 
 I^hould say, as of everything else, is in the end the satis- 
 faction of a want of our nature. To get away from this test, 
 or to pass beyond it, in the end, I should say, is impossible. 
 But, if so (the suggestion is a natural one), why should we 
 not set forth, or try to set forth, the satisfaction of our nature 
 from all sides, and then accept and affirm this statement as 
 truth and reality ? That in practical life we should do this, at 
 least in some sense, I am fully agreed. But I cannot on the 
 other hand endorse generally such an answer in philosophy, 
 
 ' The present chapter appeared first in Mind for October 1909. I 
 would take this opportunity to say that, with regard to the principle of 
 non-contradiction as a. test of truth, I agree in the main with what Prof. 
 Bosanquet has urged in his Individuality and Value, pp. 49 foil, and 
 265 foil. One contradicts oneself in principle in asserting that there is 
 no beauty or virtue, as much as in asserting that there is no truth. Cer- 
 tainly, as Prof. Bosanquet points out, if a man chooses to deny the fact 
 of beauty or virtue, you cannot, with that denial, formally convict him 
 out of his own mouth, as you can if he asserts that there is no truth. 
 And in this latter case there is a superiority in what may perhaps be 
 called theoretical elegance. Still in philosophy our real object is not the 
 dialectical confutation of an opponent. Our real object is the under- 
 standing of facts which cannot reasonably be denied. 
 
220 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION chap. 
 
 for I am unable to see how by such a plan we avoid theo- 
 retical shipwreck. 
 
 Truth to my mind is a satisfaction of a special kind, and, 
 again, it is a satisfaction which, at least at first sight, is 
 able to oppose itself to others. But, however that may be, 
 truth seems to differentiate itself clearly from other satis- 
 factions. And philosophy, I at least understand, has to meet 
 specially this special need and want of truth. To say that 
 philosophy's mission is to find ideas which satisfy all sides 
 of my being, and that the truth of these ideas does not other- 
 wise matter, remains to my mind untenable. Ideas which 
 are inconsistent, chaotic and discordant must, I think, by 
 philosophy in the end be rejected as false. The doctrine 
 that there is no truth in the last resort but the general 
 working of ideas, whatever is otherwise the character of 
 these ideas, is, or may be, acceptable, I once more agree, 
 as a practical creed. But on the other side, with such a 
 doctrine, it seems to me, there is an end of philosophy 
 (cf. pp. 66, 132). 
 
 To philosophize at once with all sides of my nature is, if 
 you will, what I desire. But I at least do not perceive how 
 I am to go about to accomplish this feat. If you agree with 
 me that truth is special, then I am at a loss to see how to 
 aim at it, or to find it, or to verify its presence, by some 
 general movement of my being. On the other hand, to 
 produce ideas at the dictation of all my particular wants is 
 a thing which certainly I understand. But to maintain that, 
 whatever the intellect may say or feel about these ideas, 
 they are all none the less true, is to me ruinous theoretically. 
 It seems the sheer denial, ultimately, of intellectual satis- 
 faction and truth. There is to be, in other words, no more 
 philosophy except in the sense of a collection of useful ideas. 
 The value of such a collection I do not seek to disparage, 
 though the value disappears, I would insist, so far as the 
 collection is one-sided. Still, if philosophy has to end here, 
 
VIII COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION 221 
 
 there is, I would repeat, in the proper sense to be no more 
 philosophy. 
 
 Hence I have to remain so far in my old position.^ If there 
 is to be philosophy its proper business is to satisfy the 
 intellect, and the other sides of our nature have, if so, no 
 right to speak directly. They must make their appeal not j 
 only to, but also through, the intelligence. In life it is other- 
 wise, but there is a difference between philosophy and life. 
 And in philosophy my need for beauty and for practical 
 goodness may have a voice, but, for all that, they have not 
 a vote. They cannot address the intellect and insist, ' We 
 are not satisfied, and therefore you also shall not be satisfied.' 
 They must be content to ask and to repeat, ' Are you in 
 fact satisfied with yourself as long as we remain unsatisfied ? 
 It is for you to decide, and we can only suggest.' Hence, 
 I conclude, I can philosophize with my whole nature, but 
 I cannot do this directly. On one hand the appeal is to the 
 intellect, but on the other hand every aspect of my being 
 can and does express itself intellectually. And the question 
 is how far, in order to reach its special end which is truth, the 
 intelligence has to adopt as true the various suggestions 
 which are offered. How far, in order to satisfy itself, must 
 its ideas satisfy all our needs ? 
 
 In the above I am of course not assuming that the intellect 
 is something apart, working by itself, and, so to speak, shut 
 up in a separate room. On the contrary those who teach the 
 implication of all sides of our being with and in what we 
 call thought, deny no doctrine held by me. All that I main- 
 tain is that we have a specific function, as such verifiable in 
 fact, and claiming to possess special rights of its own. I 
 insist that, unless we take that claim seriously, speculation is 
 impossible. And, if any one differs from me here, I would go on 
 to urge that he is in conflict with fact, and rests on inconsis- 
 tency. And the result, I think, is confusion or total obscurity. 
 
 '■ Appearance, chap. xiv. 
 
222 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION chap. 
 
 I retain therefore, on the whole (if I may repeat this), my 
 former position. All that I would modify is the importance, 
 perhaps one-sided, which was given to pain, and the em- 
 phasis on the special doubt which arose here from our 
 ignorance.^ I would not withdraw what I said as mistaken, 
 but I should certainly prefer now to state the case otherwise. 
 The better way, I think, is to point out that all sides of our 
 nature press for satisfaction, and, if left unsatisfied, will 
 manifest themselves so in idea. We cannot, I think, 
 reasonably suppose an aspect of our being left somewhere 
 outside and able to say nothing directly or indirectly. That 
 this is not possible we could hardly prove, but its probability 
 seems really trifling. Every element of my nature then will 
 find a voice. Every side of my being will represent itself as 
 satisfied in idea and in reality, if not in what we call fact. 
 And influenced, as we must be, by these claims within us 
 and before us, we undoubtedly in a sense philosophize with 
 the whole of our nature. But from this I still see no short 
 cut to the conclusion that any need of our nature satisfied in 
 idea, is truth. The way of logical proof to my mind must on 
 the contrary be indirect. Suppose, that is, the intellect 
 completely satisfied and truth really attained, can you have 
 with this the idea or ideas of other needs unfulfilled ? These 
 ideas, if so, will be there, and they will not be true, but, at 
 least apparently in conflict with the truth. For to admit 
 them as necessary and as good, certainly does not in itself 
 seem to make them true. And the real issue is whether, if 
 left outside and not included in the truth, these ideas do not 
 make truth imperfect in itself. The intellect has to satisfy 
 its own requirements, and the question is whether, if the 
 above ideas are not included but somehow conflict, those 
 requirements are satisfied. And the further question is 
 whether the ideas can possibly be included without being 
 taken as true. 
 
 '■ Appearance, chap, xix, and pp. 609-12. 
 
VII COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION 223 
 
 It is obviously necessary therefore to inquire what does 
 or would satisfy the intellect. Such an inquiry I am not 
 undertaking in this chapter, but I may state the view which 
 has commended itself to my mind.^ Truth is an ideal 
 expression of the Universe, at once coherent and compre- 
 hensive. It must not conflict with itself, and there must be 
 no suggestion which fails to fall inside it. Perfect truth in 
 short must realize the idea of a systematic whole. And 
 such a whole, we saw (Chap. VII), possessed essentially the 
 two characters of coherence and comprehensiveness. I will 
 therefore, without pausing here to raise and discuss diffi- 
 culties, go on at once to ask as to the cormexion between 
 these two characters. Have we in comprehensiveness and 
 coherence two irreducible principles, or have we two aspects 
 of one principle ? 
 
 If we can adopt a well-known view the answer is plain. 
 The whole reality is so immanent and so active in every 
 partial element, that you have only to make an object of 
 anything short of the whole, in order to see this object pass 
 beyond itself. The object visibly contradicts itself and goes 
 on to include its complementary opposite in a wider unity. 
 And this process repeats itself as long as and wherever the 
 whole fails to express itself entirely in the object. Hence 
 the two principles of coherence and comprehensiveness are 
 one. And not only are they one but they include also the 
 principle of non-contradiction. The order to express your- 
 self in such a way as to avoid visible contradiction, may be 
 said in the end to contain the whole criterion. 
 
 No one who has not seen this view at work, and seen it 
 applied to a wide area of fact, can realize its practical 
 efficiency. But, for myself, if this solution of our puzzle ever 
 satisfied me entirely, there came a time when it ceased to 
 satisfy. And when attempting to discuss first principles this 
 
 ' Appearance. Cf. Chap. V and elsewhere. 
 
224 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION chap. 
 
 was not the answer which I offered.^ However immanent 
 in each element the whole is really, I cannot persuade 
 myself that everywhere in the above way it is imma- 
 nent visibly. I cannot perceive that everywhere with each 
 partial object we can verify the internal contradiction, and 
 a passage made thus to a wider unity of complementary 
 opposites. And, this being so, the question as to our two 
 principles of coherence and comprehensiveness requires, so 
 far as I am concerned, a modified answer. 
 
 To a large extent partial objects are seen (I at least can- 
 not doubt this) to develop themselves beyond themselves in- 
 definitely by internal discrepancy. Everything, so far as it 
 is temporal or spatial, does, I should say, thus visibly tran- 
 scend itself, though, if there are many orders of time and 
 space, the same self-transcendence will not hold between 
 them. But I will not seek here to urge a principle as far as 
 it will go, when I admit that, so far as I can see, it will not 
 go to the end. The visible internal self-transcendence of 
 every object is a thing which, as I have said, I cannot 
 everywhere verify. 
 
 And the principle which in my book I used and stated was 
 the following. Everything which appears must be predicated 
 of Reality, but it must not be predicated in such a way as to 
 make Reality contradict itself.^ I adhere to this principle, 
 and I will go on briefly to justify it with special reference 
 to what we have called comprehensiveness and coherence. 
 There are two main questions, I think, to which answers 
 here are wanted, (i) If my object is really defective, and if 
 it cannot develop itself for me beyond itself by internal 
 
 > Appearance, 1893. I have perhaps fallen in places into inconsistency, 
 but there was, I think, no doubt in my mind as to which of the two answers 
 was the right one. There is, however, a, natural tendency to pass from 
 really to visibly, and this tendency may perhaps at times have asserted 
 itself unconsciously. 
 
 ^ This is of course not the same thing as taking up a suggestion (what- 
 ever it may be), and then, if you fail to see that it is visibly inconsistent, 
 forthwith calling it real (p. 213). 
 
VIII COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION 225 
 
 contradiction, how otherwise can it do this ? (2) How and 
 in what sense does an isolated object make Reality contra- 
 dict itself ? 
 
 (i) The object before me is not the whole of Reality, nor 
 is it the whole of what I experience. The Universe (I must 
 assume this here) is one with my mind, and not only is this 
 so, but the Universe is actually now experienced by me as 
 beyond the object. For, beside being an object, the world 
 is actually felt, not merely in its general character but more 
 or less also in special detail.^ Hence, as against this fuller 
 content present in feeling, the object before me can be ex- 
 perienced as defective. There is an unspecified sense of 
 something beyond, or there may even arise the suggestion in 
 idea of the special complement required. We may perhaps 
 hesitate to say that the defective object itself suggests its 
 own completion, and we may doubt whether the process 
 should be called Dialectic. But at any rate a process such 
 as the above seems to furnish the solution of our problem. 
 Exactly how that idea comes by which the partial object is 
 made good, is, on the view we have just sketched, a matter 
 of secondary moment. The important point is that with' 
 the object there is present something already beyond it, 
 something that is capable both of demanding and of furnish- 
 ing ideal suggestions, and of accepting or rejecting the ^ 
 suggestions made.^ i 
 
 On a view such as this the essential union of comprehen- 
 siveness with coherence seems once more tenable. We have 
 not only connexions in the object-world, temporal, spatial 
 
 ' The reader is referred here specially to Chap. VI. 
 
 " See further Principles of Logic, pp. 381-2, as well as the chapter 
 just referred to. The reader should bear in mind that we may have {a) 
 a detail or (6) a general character which is wanting in the object and 
 which is actually felt by me. Beyond this there is the question whether 
 content, not actually now felt by me, can be suggested by a reaction of 
 the whole reality which is one with me. I am myself ready to accept 
 even this further possibility, but I would urge on the reader the impor- 
 tance here of maintaining in any case the above distinctions. Cf. Chapters 
 VI and XI. 
 
 1574 Q 
 
226 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION chap. 
 
 and other relations, which extend for us the content of a 
 partial object. We have also another world at least to some 
 extent actually experienced, a world the content of which is 
 continuous with our object. And, where an element present 
 in this wor4d is wanting to our object, dissatisfaction may 
 arise with an unending incompleteness and an endless effort 
 at inclusion. The immanent Reality, both harmonious and 
 all-comprehending, demands the union of both its characters 
 in the object. The reader will notice that I assume here 
 (a) that everything quahfies the one Reahty, {b) that, when 
 one element of the whole is made an object, this element 
 may be supplemented even apart from visible inconsistency, 
 and (c) that, to know Reahty perfectly, you must know the 
 whole of it, and that hence every partial object is imperfect. 
 To this last point I shaU return, but will proceed first to deal 
 with the question asked as to Contradiction. 
 
 (2) For, the reader may object, ' Suppose for the sake 
 of argument that I admit the above, I still do not see how 
 Contradiction comes in. Why am I to add with you that 
 the test of truth is its ability to quaUfy Reality without self- 
 contradiction ? ' In repljdng to this I will first dispose of a 
 point which possibly is obvious. If, in speaking of Reality, 
 you say ' R is mere a ', and if then, while you say that, an- 
 other qualification, b, appears and is accepted, you contradict 
 yourself plainly. To this your answer, I presume, will be, 
 ' Yes, but I was careful not to say " mere a ". I merely 
 said " a" , and between these two assertions there is a vital 
 difference.' The question as to this vital difference may 
 perhaps be called here the real issue. It is contended 
 against me that I may first say ' Ra ' and then later ' R& ' 
 and then later ' Re ' without any contradiction. For a, b 
 and c may be separate, or, if related, they may be conjoined 
 externally. Hence ' a with b ' (it is urged) is quite con- 
 sistent with ' a ', since ' a ' remains unaffected. It will 
 
VIII COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION 227 
 
 hence be absurd to argue that by merely saying ' a ' the 
 presence of ' 6 ' is denied. 
 
 My object here is to explain the sense of the doctrine 
 which I advocate far more than to make this doctrine good 
 against all possible competitors. And hence, if in what 
 follows I seem to the reader to be assuming all that has to 
 be proved, I must ask him to bear this warning in mind. 
 Certainly I must assume here that the view of judgement 
 which I hold is correct, and it is on this view that what 
 follows is really founded. I have at least seen no other view 
 of judgement which to myself seems tenable, but this is a 
 point on which I cannot attempt to enter here. I assume 
 then that in judgement ideas qualify Reality, and further 
 that in judgement we have passed beyond the stage of mere 
 perception or feeling. The form of qualification present in 
 these cannot, as such, be utilized in judgement. And the 
 question is whether in judgement we have any mode of 
 qualification which is in the end consistent and tenable. 
 I do not think that we have any.^ 
 
 ' What follows in the text may perhaps be summed up thus. In 
 feeling (with which we start) we have an immediate union of one and 
 many, where the whole immediately qualifies the parts, and the parts the 
 whole and one another. In judgement this immediate unity is broken up, 
 and there is a demand for qualification otherwise. This ' otherwise ' 
 involves distinction and a relational plurality ; and that, because simple 
 qualification is now impossible, entails mediation and conditions. And, 
 because in judgement we cannot completely state the conditions, we are 
 forced into an indefinite process of bringing in new material and new 
 conditions. The end sought by judgement is a higher form of immediacy, 
 which end however cannot be reached within judgement. 
 
 It may perhaps assist the reader if I put the whole matter as follows. 
 Take any object, and you find that, as it is, that object does not satisfy 
 your mind. You cannot think it as real while you leave it just as it 
 comes. You are forced to go outside and beyond that first character, 
 and to ask, What, Why, and How. You must hence take your first object 
 as included with something else in some wider reality. There is thus 
 a demand so far, we may say, for comprehension. 
 
 On the other hand you want to know the object itself and not some- 
 thing else. Therefore, while going beyond the object, you must not 
 leave it but must still follow it. If you merely conjoin it with something 
 outside that is different and not itself, this in principle is contradiction. 
 
 Q 3 
 
228 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION chap. 
 
 In all predication I assume that the ultimate subject is 
 Reality, and that in saying ' Ra ' or ' R6 ' you quaUfy R by 
 a or b. My contention is that, in saying ' R« ', you quahfy 
 R unconditionally by a, and that this amounts to saying 
 ' mere a '. For is there, I ask, any difference between R and 
 a ? Let us suppose first that there is no difference. If so, 
 by saying first Ra and then Kb you contradict yourself 
 flatly. For a and b, I presume, really are different, and 
 hence, unless R is different from a and b, what you (how- 
 ever unwillingly) have done is to identify a and b simply. 
 But the simple identification of Jhe diverse is precisely that 
 which one means by contradiction.^ If on the other hand, 
 when I say Ra, I suppose a difference between R and a, 
 then once more I am threatened with contradiction, for I 
 seem now to have simply quaUfied R by a, the two being 
 1 diverse. The reader will recall that we are concerned here 
 with judgement and not with mere feeling or perception. 
 And the question to be answered is how in judgement we are 
 to quaUfy one thing by another thing, the two things being 
 (different. 
 
 A natural answer is to deny that the judgements, Ra and 
 Rb, are unconditional. That, it will be urged, was never 
 meant. But, if it is not meant, I ask, ought it to be said, 
 except of course for convenience and by a licence ? Let it 
 
 Hence what you want is connexion and implication, where the object is 
 its own self as contributing to a reaUty beyond itself. That now is co- 
 herence and comprehensiveness in one. 
 
 Of course the critic who ignores what Prof. Bosanquet and myself have 
 urged as to the real meaning of contradiction, must expect to miss the 
 sense of the doctrine which we advocate, each in his own way. Take a 
 diversity (here is the point), a diversity used simply to qualify the same 
 subject, and with that you have contradiction, and that is what contra- 
 diction means. The ' And ' (see p. 231), if you take it simply as mere 
 ' And ', is itself contradiction. The reader should consult further the early 
 part of Chap. XI. 
 
 ' For a discussion of the nature of contradiction the reader is referred 
 to Mind, N.S., No. 20, reprinted (with omissions) in Appearance since 1897, 
 and may now be directed especially to Prof. Bosanquet's Individuality 
 and Value, pp. 223 foil. 
 
viii COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION 229 
 
 then be understood that the above judgements hold good 
 because R is somehow different from a and from b, and that 
 the assertion is made under this condition, known or, I 
 suppose, here unknown. The assertion then will really be 
 ' 'R.{x)a ' and ' R(:ii;)6 ', the x being of course taken to qualify 
 R. But, if so, apparently ' Ra ' is true only because of 
 something other than a which also is included in R. R is 
 a only because R is beyond a, and so on indefinitely. Merely 
 to say a is therefore, if our view of judgement is sound, 
 equivalent to denying the above and to saying mere a ; and 
 that, since R is beyond mere a, seems inconsistent with 
 itself. Contradiction therefore so far has appeared as the 
 alternative to comprehensiveness, and the criterion so far 
 seems to rest on a single principle. 
 
 If, in other words, you admit that the assertion ' Ra ' is 
 not true unless made under a condition, you admit that no 
 knowledge in the form Ra can be perfect. Perfect know- 
 ledge requires that the condition of the predicate be got 
 within the subject ; and, seeking to attain this end (which, 
 I assume, can never be completely realized) , we are driven to 
 fill in conditions indefinitely. The attempt to deny this, so 
 far as we have seen, seems to force you to the conclusion 
 that a makes no difference to R and that h makes no differ- 
 ence to either. And, if so, upon our view of judgement you 
 have said nothing, or else have fallen into self-contradiction. ^ 
 
 ' I will remind the reader once more that the above argument assumes 
 that in judgement what is asserted is taken to qualify Reality, and that 
 there is no other way of asserting. To those who believe in another way 
 the above argument is not addressed. The same thing may again be put 
 thus. The assertion of any object a is R3. Here, if R is not different 
 from a, you have really no assertion. But, if R is different, you either 
 deny this difference and so have a false assertion, or else you qualify R (that 
 is, a higher R) both by a and this difference. Hence you have now asserted 
 a manifold. But, as soon as you assert of R a manifold (however you have 
 got it), there arises at once a question as to the ' how '. You cannot fall 
 back on mere sense, because in judgement you are already beyond that ; 
 and on the other hand again you cannot simply identify. Hence you have 
 to seek ideal conditions, and this search has to go on indefinitely. The 
 above statement of course does not claim to show how these special 
 
230 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION chap. 
 
 The general position here taken must, so far as I see, 
 be attacked either by falling back on designation or by the 
 acceptance of mere external relations. I will say something 
 more on these alternatives lower down, but will for the 
 present seek to explain further the view which I hold. 
 Judgement on that view is the qualification of one and the 
 same ReaUty by ideal content. And, if we keep to this, we 
 must go on to deny independent pieces of knowledge and 
 mere external relations. The whole question may, perhaps, 
 be said to turn upon the meaning and value of the word 
 ' and '. Upon the view which I advocate when you say ' R 
 is a, and R is 6, and R is c ', the ' and ' qualifies a higher 
 reality which includes R« R& Re together with ' and '. It 
 is only within this higher unity that ' and ' holds good, and 
 the unity is more than mere ' and '. In other words the 
 Universe is not a mere ' together ' or ' and ', nor can ' and ' 
 in the end be taken absolutely. Relatively — that is, for 
 limited purposes — we do and we must use mere ' and ' and 
 mere external relations,^ but these ideas become untenable 
 when you make them absolute. And it would seem use- 
 less to reply that the ideas are ultimate. For the ideas, 
 I presume, have a meaning, and the question is as to what 
 becomes of that meaning when you try to make it more 
 than relative, and whether in the end an absolute ' and ' is 
 thinkable. 
 
 That on which my view rests is the immediate unity 
 
 conditions wliich you want are supplied. The process, that is, so far does 
 not point to the particular complement which is required. Again, the 
 reader must not understand me to suggest that, given a single feeling or 
 sensation, we could by any logical process pass beyond it. I am on the 
 contrary assuming that at the stage of judgement we are beyond any 
 single feeling or sensation, if ever we were confined to one. In the foregoing 
 the word ' logical ' has been used (perhaps improperly) in a narrow sense, 
 to mean simply a visible process of intrinsic implication. See above, 
 p. 227, note. 
 
 ' How the ' and ' is to stand to the external relations seems doubtful. 
 If ■ and ' itself is an external relation, then obviously, to unite it to its 
 terms, you seem to want a further ' and ', and so on indefinitely. 
 
VIII COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION 231 
 
 which comes in feehng,^ and in a sense this unity is ultimate. 
 You have here a whole which at the same time is each and 
 all of its parts, and you have parts each of which makes a 
 difference to all the rest and to the whole. This unity is not 
 ultimate if that means that we are not forced to transcend 
 it. But it is ultimate in the sense that no relational think- 
 ing can reconstitute it, and again in the sense that in no 
 relational thinking can we ever get free from the use of it. 
 And an immediate unity of one and many at a higher remove 
 is the ultimate goal of our knowledge and of every endea- 
 vour. The aspects of coherence and comprehensiveness are 
 each a way in which this one principle appears and in which 
 we seek further to reaUze it. And the idea of a whole some- 
 thing of this kind underlies our entire doctrine of judgement. 
 You may seek, and I agree that it is natural to seek, for 
 another view as to judgement and truth. But, so far as 
 I see, that effort has resulted and will result in failure. 
 
 Judgement, on our view, transcends and must transcend 
 that immediate unity of feeling upon which it cannot cease 
 to depend. Judgement has to qualify the Real ideally. 
 And the word ' idea ' means that the original unity has so 
 far been broken. This is the fundamental inconsistency of 
 judgement which remains to the end unremoved, and which 
 in principle vitiates more or less all ideas and truth. For 
 ideas cannot qualify reality as reality is qualified immediately 
 in feeling, and yet judgement seeks in vain to escape from 
 this foregone method. And thus, aiming to reconstitute 
 with its ideas the concrete whole of one and many, it fails, 
 
 ' Cf. Appearance, p. 569, and Chap. VI of this volume. In my view (I 
 am here of course in the main following Hegel) the ' and ' is a developed 
 and yet degraded form of the immediate unity, and throughout implies 
 that. Make the contents of the felt totality both objective and relational, 
 and then abstract from any special character of the relations and any 
 special character of the totality — and you have got what you mean by 
 'and'. But the point to be emphasized here is that, if you abstract 
 altogether from the totality, you have destroyed your ' and ' The ' and ' 
 depends essentially upon the felt totality, and of course cannot generate 
 its own foundation. 
 
232 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION chap. 
 
 and it sinks through default into the abstract identity of 
 predicate with subject. But this is a result at which it did 
 ! not aim and which it cannot accept as true. Judgement in 
 the form ' Ra ' never meant that between R and a there is no 
 difference. What it meant was to predicate its idea of, and 
 to reconstitute with its idea, the old immediate reahty. But 
 since that whole and its way of unity were not properly ideal, 
 and since now we are in the world of truth and ideas, the 
 judgement has failed to express itself. The reality as con- 
 ditioned in feeling has been in principle abandoned, while 
 other conditions have not been found ; and hence the judge- 
 ment has actually asserted unconditionally a of R and R of 
 a. And such an assertion, it perceives, is false. The way to 
 remedy its falsehood is to seek the conditions, the new ideal 
 conditions, under which ' Ra ' is true. To gain truth the 
 condition of the predicate must be stated ideally and must be 
 i included within the subject. This is the goal of ideal truth, 
 a goal at which truth never arrives completely ; and hence 
 every truth, so long as this end is not attained, remains more 
 or less untrue. 
 
 Every partial truth therefore is but partly true, and its 
 opposite also has truth. This of course does not mean that 
 any given truth is merely false, and, of course also, it does 
 not mean that the opposite of any given truth is more true 
 than itself. These are obvious, if natural, misunderstandings 
 of our view. But surely it should be clear that you can both 
 affirm and deny ' R{x)a ' so long as x remains unspecified. 
 And the truth on one of these two sides surely becomes 
 greater in comparison, according as on that side, whether of 
 affirmation or denial, you are able to make the conditions 
 more complete. But, as long as and so far as the conditions 
 remain incomplete, the truth is nowhere absolute. ' It is 
 possible to produce sparks by striking flint ' is, I under- 
 stand, offered as an instance of unconditional truth.^ But 
 • Prof, stout in Mind, N.S., 65, p. 42. 
 
VIII COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION 233 
 
 the opposite of this truth surely is also true. The thing 
 clearly, I should have said, is possible or not possible ac- 
 cording to the conditions, and the conditions are not suffi- 
 ciently expressed in the judgement. You have therefore so 
 far a truth which can at once be affirmed and denied, and 
 how such a truth can be absolute I fail to perceive. The 
 growth of knowledge consists (as we saw) in getting the 
 conditions of the predicate into the subject. The more 
 conditions you are able to include, the greater is the truth. 
 But so long as anything remains outside, the judgement is 
 imperfect and its opposite also is true. Certainly the truth 
 of the opposite becomes progressively less, and may even be 
 negligible, but on the other hand it never disappears into 
 sheer and utter falsehood.^ 
 
 I cannot attempt to deal here with the alleged absolute 
 judgements to be found, for instance, in arithmetic,^ but I 
 must touch on the claim of designation to offer logical 
 truth.' I mean by designation the essential qualification of 
 our meaning by pointing, or by the equivalent use of such 
 terms as ' this ', ' now ', ' here ', or ' my '. That in fact we 
 
 ' For a discussion of the nature of Error see Chap. IX. 
 
 ^ The question as to mathematical truth appears to be as follows : 
 (i) Are there really independent, self-consistent, self-contained principles 
 from which the conclusions are developed, and (ii) can these conclusions 
 be developed without inconsistency ? The second of these questions I 
 am through ignorance of the subject unable to discuss. With regard to 
 the first all I can do here is to remind the reader that there is an emphasis 
 on ' self-contained '. Unless the whole process is completely intelligible 
 per se, it depends on an unknown condition (however apparently constant) 
 in my mind or elsewhere. ' A is such that 6 is c ' may (we have seen) be 
 perfectly compatible with the statement that ' A is such that 6 is not c '. 
 The question is whether the ' such ' is completely specified and got within 
 the judgement itself. 
 
 ^ What Prof. Stout calls ' implicit cognition ' I take to fall under the 
 head of designation. Otherwise the instance which he gives (on p. 44) 
 is far from helping his case. For if the ' I give you, &c.' is true, surely it 
 is obvious that ' I do not give you ' also is true, so far at least as our know- 
 ledge goes. I understand Prof. Stout really here to rely on the * this ', 
 in other words on designation. 
 
234 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION chap. 
 
 are forced to use designation and cannot in life possibly 
 get on without it, I suppose, is obvious. We may set this 
 much down, I presume, as universally accepted. And how 
 far in our knowledge, if at all, we are able to get free from it, 
 I do not propose here to discuss (see Chapters III and IX). 
 We have to deal here with designation merely in regard to 
 its ultimate logical value. 
 
 At the entrance of philosophy there appears to be a point 
 where the roads divide. By the one way you set out to seek 
 truth in ideas, to find such an ideal expression of reahty as 
 satisfies in itself. And on this road you not only endeavour 
 to say what you mean, but you are once for all and for ever 
 condemned to mean what you say. Your judgements as to 
 reality are here no less or more than what you have expressed 
 in them, and no appeal to something else which you fail to 
 make explicit is allowed. When, for example, you say 
 ' this ', the question is not as to what you are sure is your 
 meaning if only you could utter it. The question is as to 
 what you have got, or can get, in an ideal form into your 
 actual judgement. And, when you revolt against the con- 
 clusion that ' this ' appears to be a mere unspecified univer- 
 sal, when you insist that you know very well what ' this ' 
 meant, and protest that your object was something other 
 than such illogical trifling and child's play — our answer is 
 obvious. What are you doing, we ask, with us here on this 
 road ? You were told plainly that on this road what is 
 sought is ideas, and that nothing else here is current. You 
 were warned that, if you enter here, you are committed to 
 this principle. If you did not understand, whose is the 
 fault ? And as to your protests and ' refutations ', they 
 may count elsewhere but they count for nothing with us. 
 If you cannot show that on our own principle our conclusion 
 is wrong, then for us you have said nothing. Our whole 
 way doubtless may be a delusion, but, if you choose to take 
 this way, your judgement means what ideally it contains ; 
 
VIII COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION 235 
 
 and, contrariwise, what you have not expUcitly expressed 
 and included in it is not reckoned. And, if so, no possible 
 appeal to designation in the end is permitted. ' This,' ' my,' 
 ' now ' and the rest will mean once for all exactly what thej 
 internally include and so express. Your meaning has always 
 on demand to be made explicit and stated intelligibly withir 
 the judgement. 
 
 This I take to be the way of philosophy, of any philosophy 
 which seeks to be consistent. It is not the way of life or oi 
 common knowledge, and to commit oneself to such a prin- 
 ciple may be said to depend upon choice. The way of lift 
 starts from, and in the end it rests on, dependence upon feel- 
 ing, upon that which in the end cannot be stated intelligibly 
 And the way of any understanding of the world short o: 
 philosophy still rests on this basis. Such understanding 
 may despise feeling, and may claim to have risen into i 
 higher region, but in the end it will be inconsistent and b( 
 found to stand on that which, taken as truth, does noi 
 satisfy. Outside of philosophy there is no consistent course 
 but to accept the unintelligible, and to use in its service 
 whatever ideas seem, however inconsistently, to work best 
 And against this position, while it is true to itself, I hav( 
 nothing to say ; though I regret that to be true to itself i; 
 a thing so seldom within its power. For worse or for bette: 
 the man who stands on particular feeling must remain out 
 side of philosophy. If you are willing to be inconsisten 
 (this is now an old story) you can never be refuted, and tha 
 is why philosophy can be said to depend upon choice. Oi 
 the other hand the impulse to truth is strong, and thi 
 abnegation often too difficult, and the reason for thi 
 abnegation often, if not always, invisible without somi 
 training in philosophy. And hence the way of life, and o 
 ordinary knowledge, obscurely conscious of its own imper 
 fection, for ever seeks to complete itself by that which, if i 
 aimed to be consistent, would be philosophy. 
 
236 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION chap. 
 
 On the other side even within philosophy itself the counter 
 tendency is irrepressible. Even if you harden your heart to 
 accept the view that philosophy, as against life, is one-sided, 
 and has to remain mere understanding, yet, even with this, 
 you may revolt against the rule of mere ideas. If we have 
 certainty anywhere, this seems obvious, we have certainty in 
 feehng. Whatever else may be doubted, at least we know 
 what we feel. And that is why to some persons vohtion 
 appears specially to give indubitable fact, for volition ob- 
 viously is felt. And it seems monstrous, when we seek for 
 truth, to leave certainty behind. But what is often forgotten 
 here is that the certainty belongs to feehng only as that is 
 actually felt. To translate this certainty unmodified into 
 ideas seems impossible ; and how you are at once to trans- 
 pose it into another mode and still use it as a test, I have 
 failed to understand. And this is my position here against 
 the use of designation as logical truth. I appreciate the 
 certainty, the knowledge beyond all words and ideas, that 
 may belong to ' mine ' and ' this '. I recognize that in 
 life and in ordinary knowledge one can never wholly cease 
 to rest on this ground. But how to take over into ultimate 
 theory and to use there this certainty of feeling, while still 
 leaving that uniransformed, I myself do not know. I admit 
 that philosophy, as I conceive it, is one-sided. I understand 
 the dislike of it and the despair of it while this its defect is 
 not remedied. But to remedy the defect by importing bodily 
 into philosophy the ' this ' and ' mine ', as they are felt, to 
 my mind brings destruction on the spot. To import them 
 half-translated and ambiguously hybrid may give immediate 
 relief but no less entails certain ruin. And my conclusion 
 therefore is that at all costs consistency is better. If philo- 
 sophy remains one-sided that is perhaps after all a sign 
 that it is following its own business. And, until better 
 informed, that is all that I wish to say with regard to 
 designation. 
 
VIII COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION 237 
 
 Apart from designation what remains as an alternative to 
 the view which I advocate ? The alternative, it seems to 
 me, is to maintain a plurality of self-contained pieces of ideal 
 knowledge. That course, even if we can regard the ultimate 
 reaUty as being somehow a kind of passive but all-contain- 
 ing reservoir, leads in principle inevitably to Pluralism. And 
 Pluralism, to be consistent, must, I presume, accept the 
 reality of external relations. Relations external, not rela- 
 tively and merely in regard to this or that mode of union, 
 but external absolutely must be taken as real. To myself 
 such relations remain unthinkable, and it would be natural 
 for me to end this chapter by enlarging on that head. But 
 my chief difficulty here is that, perhaps from defective know- 
 ledge, I am not acquainted with any sufficient attempt to 
 explain and justify the proposed alternative.^ A scheme of 
 external relations in the first place is confronted by the 
 apparent fact of feeling with its immediate unity of a non- 
 relational manifold. To attempt to deny this fact, or again 
 to leave it somewhere outside, seems ruinous ; but how on 
 the other hand it is to be included in the scheme I do not 
 know. And the external relations themselves, if they are 
 
 ^ Such a work we may, I hope, expect from Mr. Russell. I do not 
 understand that at present he has offered any view which could fairly be 
 taken as an account of first principles. In such an account obviously it 
 would not be permissible to introduce ideas, ultimate or otherwise, with- 
 out in each case discussing whether the ideas are consistent with all the 
 rest which is accepted. In a subordinate subject one can of course start 
 with a ' save as hereinafter provided ', and in this way preclude objections 
 as to inconsistency. But in dealing with first principles such a course 
 is clearly inadmissible. I am not, however, proposing here to criticize 
 a doctrine which, I confess, I do not understand. And I trust I shall not 
 be taken as disparaging the remarkable contribution which Mr. Russell, 
 I am sure, has made to philosophy. The general tendency which he so 
 ably represents has long been as good as unadvocated among us, and 
 there has thus been, I agree, a very serious defect in the main body of 
 pur speculation. Whatever the result, Mr. Russell's inquiries should do 
 a service to philosophy which, I imagine, it would not be easy to over- 
 estimate. On the inconsistency of some of the ideas used by him I hope 
 to touch later in this volume (Chapters IX and X). For ' external 
 relations ' see the references in the Index. And cf . Prof. Bosanquet's 
 Logic, vol. ii, chap. ix. 
 
238 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION chap. 
 
 to be absolute, must, I suppose, be thinkable apart from any 
 terms. Such a position, to my mind impossible in principle, 
 seems, when you consider the variety and detail of the rela- 
 tions required, to be more than staggering. On the other 
 side, if the relations apart from terms are not thinkable, 
 obviously, I should have said, they have ceased therewith to 
 be external absolutely. Your ultimate has now become a 
 unity of terms and relations. And in any case, even if the 
 relations are really external, there is the problem as to how 
 somehow in fact we take them together with their terms. 
 Further there is the difficulty caused by the fact of know- 
 ledge. If the world, as a whole, has the above character 
 and also is so known, is the fact of our knowledge of the 
 world's general character compatible with the fact of the 
 world's being thus ? Or, from the other side, if external 
 relations were absolute, could we get to know that they 
 were so except by a vicious argument ? These are perhaps 
 the main questions which press on any attempt to advocate 
 external relations, and I do not know where these questions 
 have been answered. External relations, if they are to be 
 absolute, I in short cannot understand except as the sup- 
 posed necessary alternative when internal relations are 
 denied. But the whole ' Either-or ', between external and 
 internal relations, to me seems unsound. 
 
 Philosophy perhaps may be called an attempt, possibly in 
 the end an unsuccessful attempt, to escape from the fallacy 
 of false alternative. To assume, if external relations are 
 unthinkable, the possibility of a scheme of relations founded 
 on and based in their terms, or again to pass from the rejec- 
 tion of internal relations as illusory to the acceptance of sheer 
 j externality, seem counterpart fallacies. The alternative in 
 i each case, if it is to stand, must justify itself independently. 
 And in neither case to my mind is the justification likely to 
 ' succeed. To myself it seems that ultimate reality is supra- 
 relational. We find it first below relations, and again rela- 
 
VIII COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION 239 
 
 tions are necessary to its development, and yet the relations 
 cannot rightly be predicated of the original unity. They 
 remain in a sense contained in it, but none the less again 
 they transcend it. And the natural conclusion in my judge- 
 ment is to a higher unity which is supra-relational. In such 
 a unity the imperfect relational scheme and the imperfect 
 whole of feehng are both included and absorbed. And I 
 have advocated this conclusion, certainly not on the ground 
 that it seems to explain everything, but because it appears 
 to me to leave nothing really outside, while it loads us with 
 nothing in the end worse than the inexplicable. My object, 
 though I do not say that I never joined in aiming higher, is 
 to be left with something which is positive and all-compre- 
 hending and not in principle unthinkable. 
 
 Criticism therefore which assumes me committed to the 
 ultimate truth of internal relations, all or any of them, is 
 based on a mistake. I cannot accept, for instance, the rela- 
 tion of subject and predicate as an adequate expression of 
 reality. It evidently fails to carry over consistently into a 
 higher region the felt sensible unity of the one and many. 
 And there is no possible relational scheme which in my view 
 in the end will be truth. The apprehended fact of terms in 
 relation cannot itself, I am sure, be reconstituted ideally. 
 In any mere relational synthesis there will be something left 
 out, or else imported surreptitiously from elsewhere, and 
 there will be ensuing inconsistencies which are rooted in and 
 which point to incompleteness. I had long ago made it 
 clear (so I thought) that for me no truth in the end was 
 quite true, and I had myself (as I fancied) pointed out and 
 dealt with the consequent dilemma. But it is in the nature 
 of things, I presume, that there should always be some critics 
 who know better. 
 
 The ideas which we are compelled to use are all in vary- 
 ing degrees imperfect, and certainly this is the case with 
 internal relations. They seek to hold on to the initial felt 
 
240 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION chap. 
 
 fact of identity in difference, and they point to a higher 
 consummation beyond themselves and beyond all relations. 
 But, at least in the end, they cannot, I should say, be thought 
 consistently. On the other side external relations, except 
 relatively and within certain hmits, cannot in my opinion 
 be accepted. They first of all seem to break wholly with 
 the sensible fact, with that felt union of the diverse with 
 which we begin. External relations not only dissolve its 
 immediate totahty, but they appear to wish to leave its car- 
 cass lying, so to speak, somewhere unexplained outside of 
 truth and reality. And, having destroyed the starting-place, 
 they further cut us off in principle (so far as I see) from any 
 advance to a higher unity. The totality they seem to offer 
 (though I hardly know what this is, or indeed whether or 
 how it is offered) does not satisfy our ultimate desire, and, 
 themselves unthinkable, the construction they build seems 
 joined by inconsistency. This, at least until better in- 
 formed, is what I am forced to think of external relations if 
 taken as absolute. 
 
 Amongst ideas which, though imperfect, must necessarily 
 be used, I may mention here the ideas of identity and differ- 
 ence. Identity must not on the one side be confused with 
 resemblance, nor again on the other side can it be taken a,s 
 abstract. There is, for instance, in the end no such positive 
 idea, at least to my mind, as mere numerical sameness or 
 diversity. On either of the above alternatives (I do not offer 
 to argue the point here) identity is destroyed. On the other 
 hand, when you take it otherwise as one aspect of the con- 
 crete union of sameness and difference, identity, when you 
 think it out, becomes inconsistent. It leads at either end to 
 an infinite process, and the same again is the case with 
 diversity. These ideas therefore cannot be ultimate, and 
 we naturally desire to get beyond them to something wholly 
 consistent. Yet, if we find we cannot do this, the ideas still 
 must be accepted. They will remain the best means we 
 
VIII COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION 241 
 
 possess of approximating to the truth, or of removing our- 
 selves, if you prefer that, from the furthest extreme of error. 
 They are not ultimately true, but they are truer far than 
 what is offered in their stead.^ 
 
 Coherence and comprehensiveness then we have found to 
 be each an integral aspect of system. In practice they may 
 diverge, but they remain united in principle. And system 
 is connected essentially with contradiction and its absence. 
 For what is inconsistent is so far unreal, and a diversity, 
 judged unconditionally to be real, we found was inconsistent, 
 and such internal discrepancy tends to involve an indefinite 
 passage beyond self. Further, apart from this, an object 
 which is short of the whole tends naturally, we may say, 
 to suggest its complement. And, since that suggested 
 complement is absent in fact, reality thus contradicts itself. 
 How the suggestion is made we have inquired. The object 
 itself may through its own internal content pass for us 
 visibly beyond its own limits, or, on the other hand, the 
 addition may come to us from that whole which we feel. 
 
 ' The above was written in June 1908, and since then Prof. James's 
 Pluralistic Universe has appeared, containing some controversial refer- 
 ences on the subject of identity. I have, however, left the text as it 
 stood, and will merely add that I cannot accept Prof. James's account of 
 the difference on this point between himself and me. My difficulty with 
 Prof. James has been that from time to time I am led to suppose that he 
 is advocating a view opposed radically to mine, and then later discover 
 that he holds the very view which I have defended against him. And 
 hence I am inclined to suspect that this may be the case elsewhere. Prof. 
 James asserts, for instance, ' external ' relations as absolute ; but I am 
 forced to doubt whether he, any more than myself, believes in such things 
 except as relative (see above, p. 151). And, while professing Pluralism, to 
 myself Prof. James appears really to be a Monist, or, at most, a Dualist. 
 Again, if there is any difference between the ' pragmatic ' doctrine of free 
 will and that which I, for instance, have advocated since 1876, I cannot 
 find in what it consists. And other examples could be given. Hence, 
 things being thus between Prof. James and myself (though I admit that 
 this may arise from my own failure to understand), it seems to me that 
 explanation is wanted far more than controversy. Our differences may 
 perhaps on the whole be small when compared with the extent of our 
 agreement. But apart from further information it would be hardly in 
 my power to form an opinion on this point. 
 
 1574 R 
 
242 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION chap. 
 
 And this whole, as felt, may contain, we saw, actually a 
 special detail, or again a general character which was want- 
 ing in the object ; or the whole may be present to us even 
 more vaguely as a something beyond, a something which is 
 not satisfied with what is before us. But when the sugges- 
 tion is made, however it is made, we have a fresh predicate 
 of Reality. Our object has thus become more comprehen- 
 sive, and we must endeavour now to include this fresh 
 predicate within it consistently. 
 
 With the various questions which arise there is obviously 
 here no space to deal. There is however one point on which 
 I will venture to add a few words. The reader naturally 
 may ask what on the whole the above conclusion is to mean. 
 Does it mean that I am forthwith to set down everything 
 that I want as real ? The answer is. Not so, if by ' every- 
 thing ' you understand ' all that you want and exactly as you 
 want it '. We have been compelled to conclude to the actual 
 satisfaction of all sides of our being, and hence doubtless 
 everything that we need must be included in reality. But, 
 this being agreed on, the question remains as to the sense 
 of such inclusion. Now to say that such or such a detail 
 cannot be left entirely outside is one thing, and it is another 
 thing to insist that, when included, this detail maintains 
 untransformed its special character. The burden of proof 
 in my opinion lies here with the assertor, and that burden is 
 likely too often to strain or to overpass his power. 
 
 It is after all an enormous assumption that what satisfies 
 us is real, and that the reality has got to satisfy us. It is 
 an assumption tolerable, I think, only when we hold that the 
 Universe is substantially one with each of us, and actually, 
 as a whole, feels and wills and knows itself within us. For 
 thus in our effort and our satisfaction it is the one Reality 
 which is asserting itself, is coming to its own rights and 
 pronouncing its own dissent or approval. And our confidence 
 rests on the hope and the faith, that except as an expression, 
 
VIII COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION 243 
 
 an actualization, of the one Real, our personality has not 
 counted, and has not gone here to distort and vitiate the 
 conclusion. Hence our confidence is but the other side of 
 our wilUngness, so far as is possible, to suppress irrelevancy 
 and to subordinate self-will. And, wherever this is felt, 
 there is little desire to insist that what we want must be real 
 exactly so as we want it. Whatever detail is necessary to 
 the Good we may assume must be included in reality, but 
 it may be included there in a way which is beyond our 
 knowledge and in a consummation too great for our under- 
 standing. On the other sidC; apart from the belief that the 
 ultimate and absolute Real is actually present and working 
 within us, what are we to think of the claim that reality is 
 in the end that which satisfies one or more of us ? It seems 
 a lunatic dream from some cell the walls of which are like 
 a bubble against the inroad of fact. The ideas and wishes 
 of ' fellows such as I crawling between heaven and earth ', 
 how much do they count in the march or the drift of the 
 Universe ? 
 
 ' One or more of us men ' — between these two things, so 
 far as I see, there is httle difference. We have heard, at least 
 in this connexion, surely too much about the social nature 
 of mankind and about the accumulated funds of humanity. 
 Offered as an explanation of our confidence, wise or stupid, 
 as an account, that is, of how it comes to exist, these con- 
 siderations of course have their value. But offered as a 
 justification, how can they be anything but worthless ? We 
 know how joint action with its fellows, and even that re- 
 duplicated sense of self which comes from the perception of 
 its kind, gives assurance to the humblest. But we know 
 again how this assurance can prove to be illusory. The 
 gardener's spade and the unheeding footstep have long ago 
 pointed the moral which at least to my mind has not some- 
 how grown obsolete. Its force to my mind is not lessened 
 by that vapouring, new or old, about Humanity, which, if it 
 
 R 2 
 
244 COHERENCE AND CONTRADICTION chap, viii 
 
 were not ambiguous, would be scarcely sane. We have here 
 to choose, I imagine, between two courses. We must either 
 hold to a view of the criterion which succeeds in separating 
 it from our demand for human satisfaction ; or, if we cannot 
 do this (as I cannot), we must once and for all abandon and 
 reject any special prerogative for human beings. Where 
 humanity stands in the scale of being we do not know, and 
 it seems presumptuous to fancy that we ever can learn. And 
 such knowledge for us, so far as we can see, would be useless. 
 But the meanest creature has its absolute right. 
 
 The spirit of the worm beneath the sod 
 
 In love and worship blends itself with God. 
 
 And not only in love and worship does such union hold, but 
 in will also and in the knowledge and enjoyment of beauty 
 and truth. And, if we believe this, the result should be at 
 once both confidence and humility. Our truth, such as it is, 
 has its indispensable part in the one transcendent Experience, 
 and is so far secure. But that any particular truths of ours, 
 as we conceive them, should be unconditioned and absolute, 
 seems hardly probable. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR AND 
 CONTRADICTION i 
 
 In the following pages I am to offer some remarks on the 
 subject of Appearance, Contradiction and Error. I have 
 probably nothing to say here which I have not said before, 
 and there is nothing, I imagine, in what I have said which 
 could be called original. I, however, offer these remarks 
 because they seem to me to be wanted, because, that is, the 
 general view which I have adopted seems still partly mis- 
 understood. I am not seeking here to argue with any one 
 who wishes to criticize rather than to understand. I address 
 myself to those whose interest in these topics is impersonal, 
 to those who desire to make their own every way, however 
 imperfect, in which these matters are apprehended. 
 
 I propose here first to say something as to the general 
 foundation on which I stand. I shall next deal briefly with 
 the relation of Error to Appearance. From this I shall go 
 on to discuss at length what may be called the relative and 
 absolute views of Error. I shall then examine a difficulty 
 with regard to Contradiction, and shall finally remark on the 
 general reality of Appearance and Degree. The reader who 
 finds here too much repetition of what to him is familiar, 
 will, I hope, accept the explanation which has been offered 
 above. 
 
 The way of taking the world which I have found most 
 
 ^ First published in Mind for April 1910, and, with the exception of 
 some small additions and of the Supplementary Notes, written rather 
 more than a year previously. There are some further questions as to 
 the nature of Truth which will be dealt with in the chapter which follows. 
 
246 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 tenable i.s to regard it as a single Experience, superior to 
 relations and containing in the fullest sense everything which 
 is. Whether there is any particular matter in this whole 
 which falls outside of any finite centre of feeUng, I cannot 
 certainly decide ; but the contrary seems perhaps more prob- 
 able.i We have then the Absolute Reahty appearing in and 
 to finite centres and uniting them in one experience. We 
 can, I think, understand more or less what, in order for this 
 to be done, such an experience must be. But to comprehend 
 it otherwise is beyond us and even beyond all intelligence. 
 The immanence of the Absolute in finite centres, and of 
 finite centres in the Absolute, I have always set down as 
 inexplicable. Those for whom philosophy has to explain 
 everything need therefore not trouble themselves with my 
 views. Whether on the other hand the doctrine which I 
 hold is intelligible and thinkable, depends, I should say, on 
 the meaning which you like to give to these ambiguous 
 terms. To myself this doctrine appears at least to have 
 a positive sense and meaning which I am able clearly to 
 apprehend. And in the main I inherited this doctrine from 
 others, and find myself sharing it with others, to whom it 
 seemed and seems intelligible. But in what follows I of 
 course am speaking only for myself. 
 
 No one, I think, will understand such a view if he makes 
 a mistake as to the given fact from which in a sense it starts. 
 There are those for whom the outer world is one given fact, 
 and again the world of my self another fact ; and there are 
 others for whom only one of these two facts is ultimate. It 
 is in philosophy a common doctrine that there is immediate 
 certainty only on the side of my self, a basis from which I 
 should have thought that Sohpsism must demonstrably 
 follow. If you start from the absolute reahty of your self, 
 you need not puzzle yourself as to how you are to leave this 
 ground and leap to a transcendent Reahty. You may, 
 
 ' But on this difficult point see Chap. XI, pp. 350-1. 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 247 
 
 I think, wait till you have shown how knowledge of anything 
 at all beyond the hmits of your own self is more than an 
 illusion. But in truth neither the world nor the self is an 
 ultimately given fact. On the contrary each aHke is a con- 
 struction and a more or less one-sided abstraction. There 
 is even experience in feeling where self and not-self are not 
 yet present and opposed ; ^ and again every state where 
 there is an experience of the relation of not-self to self, is 
 above that relation. It is a whole of feeling which contains 
 these elements, and this felt containing whole belongs to 
 neither by itself. ' Subject and object ', you say perhaps, 
 ' are correlated in experience ' ; and, I presume, you would 
 agree that we have here one experience which includes the 
 correlation. But are we to say that this experience itself 
 is a mere correlation ? Such a doctrine to myself seems 
 untenable and it seems contrary to the given fact. The 
 given fact to me is a single whole of feeUng, within which 
 the above distinction and division holds. This totality is 
 the property of neither side, but it contains and is superior 
 to each. And to emigrate somewhere beyond such a whole 
 as this seems clearly impossible. In short on our view we 
 may go on to say that the Absolute Reality is in a sense 
 the given fact, and that to leap to it from fact by tran- 
 scendence is unmeaning. Within the Absolute you transcend 
 the lower and partial forms in which it appears, in order to 
 reach those which are truer. But as for transcending the 
 Absolute to gain my finite centre, or my finite centre to gain 
 the Absolute — everything of such a kind to me is mere non- 
 sense. These ideas start by supposing that to be true which 
 we think most false, and by assuming that to be given which 
 for us is the one-sided product of a vicious abstraction. 
 
 From the first, if we are to speak of transcendence, my 
 finite centre is transcended. From the first and throughout 
 it is one thing directly with the all-embracing Universe, and 
 
 > See Chap. VI. 
 
248 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 through the Universe it is indirectly one thing in varjdng 
 degrees with all other centres. ^ Nothing in the end therefore 
 is simply private ; the most intimate feeling and the simplest 
 experience of a pleasure or pain is experienced by the whole 
 Universe. The idea of some inner recess or sunken depth 
 from which the one Reality is or can be shut out, is the mere 
 creature of false theory. It is a perversion of the truth, an 
 important truth, that each centre has an experience which is 
 never directly one with that of other centres. 
 
 Certainly I speak of my finite centre, and with this an 
 emphasis may be laid on the ' my ', and, with this, the road 
 that leads to Solipsism once more seems opened. But it is 
 forgotten here that my self, the self that I take as a thing 
 which endures in time and which I go on to oppose to the 
 world, is an ideal construction. It is a construction which is 
 made on and from the present feehng of a finite centre. The 
 work of construction is performed by that centre and by the 
 Universe in one, and the result depends for its origin and 
 existence wholly on this active unity. From the other side 
 we naturally speak of the feeling centre from which my self 
 is developed, and with which it remains throughout con- 
 tinuous, as ' its '. And this expression is true so far as it 
 means that this centre is not directly one with others, and 
 that the material and the agency out of and by which my self 
 is made, is to that extent private. But we turn our truth 
 into sheer error when we maintain that my self is an inde- 
 pendent substantive, to which the rest of the world belongs 
 somehow as an adjective, or to which other self-sufficient 
 Reals are externally related. Such a position, we have seen, 
 cannot be defended. That foundation and agency from and 
 by which my self is generated, and through which alone it 
 persists, is one thing with the whole Universe. My self may 
 
 ' I cannot accept the view that my self in relation with other selves is 
 a fact immediately given. For this point and for what follows see further 
 in Chap. XIV. 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 249 
 
 rightly be called a necessary and even an indispensable 
 element in the world. But its ultimate substantiaUty and 
 closed privacy seem to be no more than false inferences. 
 
 It would not, I think, be well for me to enlarge further on 
 points where I could do little but repeat what I have said 
 elsewhere. My object here is not so much to argue that the 
 above views are correct, as to urge that any criticism of such 
 views merely from the outside will touch no one who has 
 understood them. I fully agree that difficulties are left 
 which, if you Uke to say so, must be swallowed. The fact 
 of an all-embracing, supra-relational, absolute experience 
 you may call, if you please, ' un verifiable '. I do not know 
 what this word means, and, so long as its meaning is un- 
 known, I do not care to object to it.^ But I hold to the 
 above fact because to me it is the necessary conclusion from 
 what is certainly given. And I hold to it because on this 
 ground it seems to me possible, far better than on other 
 grounds, to do justice to the various aspects of life. And 
 when I hear, for instance, that in the Absolute all personal 
 interests are destroyed, I think I understand on the con- 
 trary how this is the only way and the only power in and by 
 which such interests are really safe. For after all, whether 
 we wish it or not, we have got somehow to believe in some- 
 thing, and, at least in philosophy, I suppose we wish to 
 beheve in something self-consistent. And when, rejecting 
 the Absolute, I consider the alternatives that are offered me, 
 my mind is affected as follows. I not only find these alter- 
 natives to be untenable and self-inconsistent, but I at least 
 
 ' I should myself suppose that no philosopher ever did hold a doctrine 
 which he did not take to be in some sense verifiable. And no one, I should 
 have thought, ever honestly advocated ideas, unless he thought that these 
 ideas served some purpose, and so were useful and worked, and naturally 
 possessed the character required for such working. I do not know why 
 certain critics, in order to grapple more effectively with the Absolute, 
 should apparently think it well to begin by divesting themselves of every- 
 thing like ordinary Common Sense. On the other hand I gratefully 
 welcome the existence of various criticisms, which, whether they seem to 
 me to be justified or not, are at least thoughtful and sane. 
 
250 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 cannot understand how any one, who reaUzes what in the 
 end they mean, can suppose them to be compatible with the 
 satisfaction of all our highest demands.^ If to satisfy such 
 interests is ' to work ', then these alternatives to my mind 
 do not work. But I must end these introductory reflections, 
 such as they are, and approach the special subject of our 
 chapter. 
 
 I. In dealing with Error we are at once led to ask how 
 it stands to Appearance. Is all appearance to be called 
 error ? I will venture here to repeat briefly what I have 
 stated elsewhere.^ The term ' appearance ' has a twofold 
 meaning. If you take it as implying an object and the 
 appearance of something to some one, then aU appearance 
 is at once both truth and error ; for appearance in this sense 
 involves a judgement however rudimentary. But the term 
 is used also in a much wider sense, and you have appearance 
 wherever, and so far as, the content of anything falls outside 
 of its existence, its ' what ' goes beyond its ' that '. You 
 have reality on the other hand so far as these two aspects 
 are inseparable, and where one may perhaps be said to 
 reconstitute the other. Now in every finite centre (on our 
 view) the Whole, immanent there, fails to be included in 
 
 '■ One hears, for instance, that our spiritual interests require the abso- 
 lute reality of time ; and there seems often to be literally no idea that such 
 a, doctrine is contrary to that which we most care for. 
 
 The Moving Finger writes ; and, having writ. 
 Moves on : nor all thy Piety nor Wit 
 Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, 
 Nor all thy Tears wash out a word of it. 
 
 Surely, as an ultimate truth, this is as abhorrent to our hearts as it should 
 be false in our philosophy. And, if on the other side you emphasize the 
 ultimate truth of chance and change, and urge that lapse and instability 
 invade even the past, I do not see that you have gained anything. If 
 there is to be no supreme spiritual Power which is above chance and 
 change, our own spiritual interests surely are not safeguarded. But, with 
 any such Power, it seems to me nonsense to talk of the absolute reality 
 of time. 
 
 ' Appearance, pp. 163-6, 485-6, and Index. 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 25: 
 
 'that centre. The content of the centre therefore is beyonc 
 itself, and the thing therefore is appearance and is so fa: 
 what may be termed ' ideal '. It has what later become: 
 for us a meaning, a meaning which is used as an idea, as ai 
 adjective which qualifies that which is other than its owi 
 being. And thus by anticipation all appearance may bi 
 called error, because, when you go on to think of it as beinj 
 true, you are led (at least on my view) to recognize that it i: 
 false. So far indeed as you confine yourself to what is felt 
 you have no recognized contradiction (I shall return to this) 
 nor anything which for you appears, or can for you be eithe: 
 true or false. For these qualities in the proper sense exis 
 only in judgement. Since however we can go on to judg( 
 of everything, all appearance may thus be called alread] 
 true or false. And in the end for myself all appearance is a 
 once both truth and error. 
 
 To pass from this point, there is, I have contended, in al 
 truth the separation of idea and being, the loosening of tha 
 which an idea itself is from that which it means and stand: 
 for. And in my opinion this breach is at once essential an( 
 fatal to truth. For truth is not perfect until this sundering 
 of aspects is somehow made good, until that which in fact is 
 forms a consistent whole with that which it stands for anc 
 means. In other words truth demands at once the essentia 
 difference and identity of ideas and reality. It demands (w( 
 may say) that the idea should in the end be reconstituted bj 
 the subject of the judgement and should in no sense whateve: 
 fall outside. But the possibility of such an implication in 
 volves, in my view, a passage beyond mere truth to actua 
 reality, a passage in which truth would have completed itsel 
 beyond itself. Truth, in other words, content with nothing 
 short of reality, has, in order to remain truth, to come shor 
 for ever of its own ideal and to remain imperfect. ^ But 01 
 
 ' Thus when I think of the Absolute, in which all ideas are in the ent 
 real, that truth and thought does not, in my judgement and for me, re 
 constitute the psychical being of my idea. Everything, that is, implie 
 
252 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 the other side there is no possible judgement the predicate 
 of which Can fail somehow to qualify the Real ; and there is 
 hence no mere error. 
 
 There are, we may say, two main views of error, the ab- 
 solute and the relative. According to the former view there 
 are perfect truths, and on the other side there are sheer 
 errors. Degrees of truth and error may, on this view, in 
 a sense be admitted, but in the end you have ideas which 
 are quite right, and again other ideas which are quite wrong. 
 This absolute view I reject. I agree that in hmited spheres 
 and for some working purposes its doctrine holds good, but 
 I find it untenable ultimately. Ultimately there are, I am 
 convinced, no absolute truths, and on the other side there 
 are no mere errors. Subject to a further explanation, all 
 truth and all error on my view may be called relative, and 
 the difference in the end between them is one of degree. 
 This doctrine at first sight may perhaps seem paradoxical, 
 but, when its real meaning is perceived, I think the paradox 
 disappears. And I will venture here to repeat and to 
 enlarge on that which I have advocated elsewhere. 
 
 If there is to be sheer truth, the condition of the assertion 
 must not fall outside the judgement. The judgement must 
 be thoroughly self-contained. If the predicate is true of the 
 subject only by virtue of something omitted and unknown, 
 such a truth is defective. The condition left out is an x 
 which may be filled in diversely. And, according to the way 
 in which the unspecified condition is actually filled in, either 
 the judgement or its denial is true. The judgement there- 
 fore, as it stands, is ambiguous, and it is at once true and 
 false, since in a word it is conditional. 
 
 The more the conditions of your assertion are included in 
 your assertion, so much the truer and less erroneous does 
 
 everything else. But in a judgement you fail to include the condition on 
 which your idea is true of the Real. And you also fail to include the 
 condition on which your judgement, itself as a fact, exists. And these 
 two disabilities in the end are one. 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 253 
 
 your judgement become. But can the conditions of the 
 judgement ever be made complete and comprised within the 
 judgement ? In my opinion this is impossible. And hence 
 with every truth there still remains some truth, however 
 Uttle, in its opposite. In other words, you never can pass 
 wholly beyond degree. 
 
 For (a) the limited self-contained subject to which you 
 seek to attach the predicate, is not in the end real as so 
 limited. And (&) further, even if it were so, there remains 
 a difhculty with regard to predication. The separation of 
 the predicate from the subject seems at once to be necessary 
 and yet indefensible. These obstacles in the way of perfect 
 truth are on my view irremovable. 
 
 [a) All judgement (I have argued elsewhere) predicates its 
 idea of the ultimate Reality.^ Certainly I do not mean by 
 
 ' At the same time the very form of predication prevents any judgement 
 from being perfectly true {Appearance, p. 544). Subject to this condition 
 the above doctrine to my mind holds good. There is an objection, raised 
 by Mr. Russell {Principles of Math., p. 450), that on this view you cannot 
 say that 'ReaUty is real' or that 'Existence exists'. No truth (I have 
 just stated) can upon my view be perfectly true, but, apart from that, 
 I should find it easier to deal with this objection if I were told the sense 
 in which any one ever could want to say that Reality is real. To affirm 
 that Reality has the character of reality, I presume, is harmless, while 
 to suggest that Reality is a member of a class ' real ', to my mind is 
 monstrous. And it would be of course wrong to call it ' real ', in some 
 sense which would restrict it. With regard to ' Existence exists ', once 
 more, until I know exactly what that means, I can hardly reply. What 
 I can say is this, that to place ' Existence ' itself within the sphere of 
 existence would be clearly indefensible. There are, however, several 
 other objections raised by Mr. Russell {ibid., p. 448), which I think I 
 understand, and to which I will reply briefly, (i) It is (as we have seen) 
 true that predication is in the end self-contradictory, (ii) It is true that 
 relations {a) do, and (6) do not, presuppose their terms. Terms (o) must 
 be, and (6) cannot be, different through being related. And within any 
 related term there is a diflEerence which sets up an endless process, (iii) 
 It is true that to predicate of the Absolute involves contradiction, because 
 it involves an unjustified difference between subject and predicate. It 
 implies that the Absolute as subject is not the Absolute but a distinction 
 made within it, and so on indefinitely. While admitting or rather urging 
 all this, I do not agree with Mr. Russell that I have failed to see and to 
 meet it. 
 
 There is an objection raised by Prof. Taylor, in the Proceedings of the 
 
254 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 this to deny that there is a Umited subject. On the con- 
 trary in all judgement the subject is in some sense limited. ^ 
 But, notwithstanding the presence of this narrowed subject, 
 I urge that the assertion is made of the Universe. For the 
 judgement affirms reahty, and on my view to affirm reality 
 is to predicate of the one Real. This one Reahty I take to 
 be a whole immanent in all finite subjects, immanent in such 
 a way that nothing finite can be real by itself. Thus, with 
 every finite subject, the content of that subject is and passes 
 beyond itself. Hence every assertion made of the subject 
 imphes that which is not contained in it. The judgement in 
 other words is made under a condition which is not specified 
 and is not known. The judgement, as it stands, can there- 
 fore (as we saw) be both affirmed and denied. It remains 
 conditional and relative only. Our advance in knowledge 
 
 Aristotelian Society, vol. ix, p. 205, to which I have to make much the 
 same reply. Certainly I myself am not a class and cannot (to speak 
 strictly) be a predicate, but then again, to speak strictly, I cannot be a 
 subject either. Our relational logic (no matter of what kind) is in the 
 end not adequate to reality. It is adequate neither to my self nor the 
 Universe, nor on the other side to any given fact of sensuous perception 
 or of feeling. From this I do not see that any conclusion follows which 
 is contrary to that which I hold. For such a conclusion would (as I 
 understand) be required other premisses which I should reject. 
 
 I should be glad to carry out here a sort of promise, and to discuss the 
 arguments advanced by Prof. Dewey, in Mind, No. 63, but I do not find 
 that this is possible. Any objection resting on the antithesis of ' formal ' 
 and ' material ' I obviously cannot deal with, unless suppUed by Prof. 
 Dewey with a clear statement as to the meaning to be given to these 
 ambiguous terms. And as the idea of truth's plunging us into contra- 
 dictions is to Prof. Dewey obviously inconsistent with the idea of its also 
 pointing to an end above and beyond them, and also realizing that end 
 progressively, though always imperfectly — and as on the other hand all 
 this to me is consistent, and was offered to and urged on the reader as 
 consistent and true^there is really nothing to be discussed by me, and 
 no more to be said but to leave the issue to the reader. But I am ready 
 to admit that, though I seldom read anything written by Prof. Dewey 
 without pleasure, when it comes to first principles I seldom succeed in 
 understanding him. On some of the points referred to in this foot-note 
 I shall once more touch in the Supplementary Notes appended to this 
 chapter. And the reader must, on the whole subject, be requested to read 
 Prof. Bosanquet's Logic (Ed. II), vol. ii, chap. viii. 
 
 ' See Chap. XI, pp. 331 foil. 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 255 
 
 consists, we may say, in further specifying the conditions ; 
 but, though in this way truth is increased, it at no point can 
 become absolute. This is the principle and the foundation 
 of the relative doctrine of error and truth. 
 
 Now you may object that in the judgement the condition, 
 though it may not be stated, is understood. It is left out 
 (you may say) merely for the sake of convenience. But, if 
 so, the judgement, as it stands, is I presume admitted to be 
 imperfect. And when you urge that the conditions are 
 understood, I reply that, if so, they can be stated. But (I 
 will return to this) I maintain that you are really unable to 
 state the conditions. You cannot in the end specify them, 
 and you cannot show how far, being completely specified, 
 they would modify your subject and your judgement. The 
 conditions therefore, which you call ' understood ', remain 
 in the most fatal sense unknown. And the only consistent 
 course which remains is to deny wholly that these conditions 
 exist. Reality consists of (we must not say in) an uncon- 
 ditioned plurality. Reality is not R but r, r, r. There are 
 thus a number of self-contained subjects, and it is of one of 
 these that you make your assertion, which is hence absolutely 
 true. How can it be conditional in a world where nothing 
 like a condition or an implication exists, or indeed could 
 have any meaning ? This I take to be the real absolute 
 view of truth, and I will return to it lower down. 
 
 (&) I will now go on to notice the difficulty which attaches, 
 not merely to the subject of a judgement, but to the predica- 
 tion itself. If the predicate is different from the subject, 
 what is the sense and the justification of their unity ? And, 
 if the predicate is not different, is there any sense left at all ? 
 If we take the ' is ' as mere identity, the assertion disappears. 
 It once more vanishes if the ' is ' is understood as mere 
 difference. And the question is whether we have any other 
 way of taking the ' is ' which in the end satisfies us and is 
 tenable. We do not, in my opinion, possess any other way. 
 
256 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 We start (if I may once more repeat this) from the 
 immediate union of one and many, of sameness and differ- 
 ence, which we have given to us in feeUng and in the in- 
 herence of quahties in a sensuous whole. This immediate 
 union is of necessity dissolved in our judgement, and it 
 never in any judgement is completely made good. The 
 higher form of union, which satisfies at once our feeling, 
 sense, and intelhgence, is not found, in my opinion, within 
 truth itself. It lies beyond and on the other side of judge- 
 ment and intelhgence. It is a goal to which always we may 
 be said to draw nearer, but which never is reached wholly. 
 And the reason is that in sense and feehng the unity of 
 sameness and difference is not unconditioned. It is con- 
 ditioned, but it is conditioned for us unintelligibly. The 
 ' how ' of the union remains unknown. But in intelligence 
 and judgement the use of an unknown ' how ' does not 
 satisfy. An assertion made under an unknown condition, 
 we have seen, admits the assertion of the opposite. Hence 
 our aim is to replace the sensuous ' is ' by a full statement of 
 the conditions under which the predicate and subject are 
 connected. But, our statement remaining incomplete, the 
 connexion remains in part unintelligible. The ' is ' of our 
 judgement against our will is left in part still untransformed. 
 But the consequence is that, since we can no longer use the 
 sensuous whole of feeling, and since certainly we do not 
 mean to affirm bare difference, all that we have left is mere 
 identity — which again certainly we do not mean. We wish 
 to discover how the subject and predicate are in one. The 
 object of intelhgence is to find the complete conditions under 
 which the predicate is (we may say) equated to the subject. 
 And, as long as we stop short of these, our judgement may 
 perpetually advance in truth, but in the end any judgement 
 remains erroneous and untenable. This difficulty is not 
 removed by the acceptance of finite realities independent and 
 self-contained. It is a difficulty inherent in predication itself. 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 257 
 
 In general, then (to pass from this point), every error upon 
 our view contains some truth, since it has a content which 
 in some sense belongs to the Universe. And on the other 
 side all truths are in varying degrees erroneous. The fault 
 of every judgement may be said to consist in the taking its 
 subject too narrowly or abstractly. The whole of the con- 
 ditions are not stated. And hence, according to the way in 
 which you choose to fill in the conditions (and no special 
 way belongs to the judgement), the assertion and its opposite 
 are either of them true. Again, all judgements may be 
 condemned on the ground that they take the subject too 
 widely. The subject turns out to be the ultimate Reality, 
 at which the judgement did not aim specially, and so has 
 missed its genuine aim. The subject in other words is not 
 confined as we desired to confine it. But these two defects 
 obviously are in principle one. Their root is the indissoluble 
 connexion of our limited subject with the ultimate Reality, 
 the discrepancy between these two subjects, and our in- 
 ability to close this breach by ' conditions '. Our judgement 
 makes its predicate real, but when it is asked how, being 
 real, its predicate differs from the Reality, it fails in the end 
 to answer inteUigibly. The same fault again shows itself 
 when we consider the form of predication. That form in 
 principle transcends the immediate totality of sense and 
 feehng, and is therefore condemned to seek another way in 
 which sameness and difference are united. This way (we 
 have seen) consists in the discovery and statement of expUcit 
 and complete conditions. And the search for these con- 
 ditions, driving (on our view) the judgement beyond any 
 finite subject, fails of perfect success. The full implications 
 of any judgement in the end fall beyond our understanding. 
 This discrepancy of the whole with the finite centre, a dis- 
 crepancy imphcit only in feeling, becomes visible in the form 
 of judgement. The discrepancy is not removed within the 
 region of truth proper, and that region is hence throughout 
 
 1574 s 
 
258 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 affected more or less by error. And the difference between 
 error and truth will in the end consist in degree. 
 
 In the above statement the words " in the end ' must be 
 emphasized. It is an old objection that, if you believe in an 
 Absolute, all distinctions are lost, and, since everything 
 comes to the same, nothing in particular is left. And I admit 
 that the relative view of error and truth may be held and 
 taught one-sidedly. But, rightly understood, it compre- 
 hends, and on a lower plane it justifies, the absolute view. 
 In the realm of the special sciences and of practical hfe, and 
 in short everywhere, unless we except philosophy, we are 
 compelled to take partial truths as being utterly true. We 
 cannot do this consistently, but we are forced to do this, 
 and our action within limits is justified. And thus on the 
 relative view there is after all no colhsion with what may be 
 called Common Sense. Before explaining this more fully 
 I will once more point out the real essence of that absolute 
 view which I reject. 
 
 Error, upon this view, will consist in the deviation of the 
 idea, whether by excess or defect, from that reahty at which 
 it aims. It is impossible for me here to be precise, and you 
 may understand reality as a fact or as a mere type, or in 
 short however you think is best. The point is that by being 
 something else, whether by addition or substitution or de- 
 fault, or through all these in one,^ the error is not the truth. 
 Degrees need not be denied, but all the same it is insisted 
 that we have here a matter of Yes or No. And what is here 
 assumed is that the reality, or the type, itself is self-con- 
 tained and fixed. This is an assumption made often by 
 that which would wrongly usurp the name of Common 
 Sense. But the ultimate root of this assumption is, as we 
 saw, a certain doctrine as to the final nature of reality. 
 
 ^ Substitution in the end seems otiose, and addition and default seem 
 in the end to imply one the other. 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 259 
 
 Reality must be such as to comprise self-existent pieces of 
 fact and truth. The principle and the conclusion involved 
 here is of course Pluralism, which, if it aims to be consistent, 
 holds to relations which are barely external and tries to 
 take the Universe as a mere ' And '.^ The point which 
 should be emphasized is that everything ordinarily covered 
 by the word ' implication ' is here utterly denied. Nothing 
 can make in the end any kind of difference to anything else, 
 for every kind of difference and relation is external and 
 unable to qualify that outside of which it falls. And the 
 whole as ' And ', since it is to make no difference to an5rthing, 
 seems in fact to be nothing ; or else, if something, it will 
 itself require to be comprised in a fresh ' And ', and so on 
 indefinitely. This is the underlying principle which seems 
 involved in what we have called the absolute view of error. 
 I have stated this principle in my own way, a way which 
 I certainly attribute to no one else, and I do not propose 
 further to criticize it here. 
 
 Among various forms of reply I will notice an answer which 
 I have mentioned already. ' The separate facts and truths ', 
 it may be said, ' need not really be separate. They are 
 however determined definitely, because fixed by a Universe 
 which is conditioned really throughout.' Now, even if the 
 conditions of our finite truth are known and could be given, 
 surely apart from these conditions our truth is so far im- 
 perfect, and exists only by a kind of convenient sufferance. 
 But on the other hand suppose that the conditions are not 
 statable because they are not known ; in this case the whole 
 conclusion which I advocate appears to follow irremediably. 
 You may possibly reply that you do not know the conditions 
 in detail, but, none the less on this account, you believe them 
 to exist, and you therefore are justified in taking the finite 
 fact and the finite truth as being real and perfect. To me, 
 however, this position appears to be untenable. 
 
 ' See Chap. VIII, pp. 230-1. 
 S 2 
 
26o ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 Thefe are conditions, known or unknown, from which a 
 finite fact or truth follows. Certainly I agree to this, and I 
 would even add that so much as this is obvious, since other- 
 wise the fact or truth would not be there for us to discuss. 
 But on the other hand I would urge that such a contention 
 here is irrelevant. If there are also other conditions from 
 which the opposite of the given truth follows, then the truth 
 is at once true and false, and, as it stands, clearly is defective. 
 And, in order to avoid this, and in order to show that your 
 fact or truth, as it is, can be justified, what is incumbent on 
 you is to exclude the possibility of these opposite conditions. 
 The question may be put thus : when all the conditions are 
 considered, does your finite fact or finite truth still persist in 
 the character in which you take it ? To reply in the affirma- 
 tive on the ground that there are at least some unknown 
 conditions from which the truth follows, seems hardly de- 
 fensible. For the position which you have to maintain is 
 (as we have seen) not merely positive, but has a negative side 
 also. And I do not understand how you are to base this 
 negation, and this exclusion of other conditions, upon simple 
 ignorance. What is wanted is a positive and an actual in- 
 clusion within the judgement itself of all the conditions 
 required. And the question is whether and how such an 
 inclusion is possible. ^ 
 
 Passing on from this reply we may consider truth and 
 error under the heads {a) of abstract ideas and (&) of matters 
 of fact. The former head {a) I shall touch on but briefly. 
 The contention that an abstract truth is wholly and utterly 
 true, must mean, I take it, that this truth, as it stands, is 
 self-contained and self-subsistent. Either there are nowhere 
 any conditions or implications, and nothing anywhere makes 
 a difference to anything, or else in this truth you have within 
 itself any conditions that are required. The first of these 
 
 ' I shall discuss lower down the attempt to gain this inclusion by 
 postulating uniqueness. 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 261 
 
 alternatives involves a view of things which to my mind is 
 in the last resort unintelligible. And the second alternative 
 again I am unable to accept. In no case, it seems to me, 
 is it possible to take any abstract truth as being real by 
 itself. Every such truth appears to me to be generated, and 
 to subsist, subject to implications and conditions not falling 
 within itself and in the end nowhere completely known. 
 And, if this is the case, the opposite of any abstract truth 
 can obviously never be utter and total error. But to justify 
 this contention in detail, and to attempt to show how the 
 abstraction made everywhere in the special sciences entails 
 inconsistency, is, I regret to add, even if space here per- 
 mitted it, beyond my power. 
 
 I will go on to deal at greater length (&) with ' matters of 
 fact '. What is contended here is that a fact, in time or space 
 or in both, is, as it stands, real, and that hence such a fact 
 can serve as a test of absolute truth and sheer error. The 
 ground of this contention, at least in most cases, seems to 
 consist in an appeal to ' designation ', a subject on which 
 I have already remarked in the preceding chapter.^ The 
 ■ this ', ' now ', and ' here ' of my feeling may, as they are 
 merely in my feeling, be said to be unique and self-contained. 
 And, though this statement requires some qualification, that 
 qualification may here be ignored. But it is a serious mis- 
 take, starting from this point, to go on to suppose that the 
 characters of my feeling are transferred unabridged to what 
 I call a truth about a particular fact in space and time. 
 The particular fact is to have a unique place within a single 
 unique order, and otherwise its nature becomes general and 
 ceases forthwith to be what we mean by particular. But 
 on the other hand our truth fails to reach beyond generality, 
 and hence the opposite of our truth becomes also tenable. 
 ' Caesar crossed the Rubicon,' we say, ' or not ' ; but this 
 ' either-or ' is only true if you are confined to a single world 
 ' Chap. VIII, pp. 233-6. 
 
262 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 of events. If there are various worlds, it may be also true 
 that Caesar never saw the Rubicon nor indeed existed at all. 
 And, with this, obviously our truth has ceased to be absolute. 
 Nor is it possible for us to remedy a disease which belongs 
 to the very essence of our procedure. You cannot at once 
 translate feeling into judgement and leave feeling untrans- 
 formed ; and what is lost in the translation is the positive 
 uniqueness which you demand. The ' this ', as you use it, 
 becomes general, and, though it does not become negative 
 wholly, it becomes essentially negative. You insist that 
 ' this ' is not ' that ', though to each you give only a sense 
 which is general. But the ' this ' which you feel and which 
 you mean, does not trouble itself about a ' that ', since it is 
 positively itself. And since your truth fails and must fail 
 to contain this positive meaning, your truth is defective, 
 and is self-condemned.^ 
 
 The matters of fact in which we are to find absolute reaUty 
 and truth, must, in the first place, be self-consistent ; and 
 they must, in the second place, go beyond a mere generality 
 in which both what we mean and its opposite hold good. 
 But our matters of fact belong essentially to an order in 
 time, if not also in space. And with regard to the self- 
 containedness of any member in these orders there are well- 
 known difficulties. In the case of time these difficulties are 
 aggravated, and, far from being the technical puzzles of the 
 school, they are visible to all who reflect. Are past events, 
 we all ask, dead, and is the future really nothing, and, if so, 
 what is left, and what do we mean by the present ? And 
 again, if future and past are not wholly unreal, can we on 
 the other side say that they really exist ? And, if lapse and 
 change are not to be inherent in matters of fact, in what 
 
 '■ I may perhaps mention that criticisms on Hegel, with regard to his 
 teaching as to the meaning of ' this ', usually show to my mind an entire 
 failure to perceive what he is driving at. But the reader must not take 
 the statement in the text, however much it owes to Hegel, as being an 
 exposition of his doctrine. 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 263 
 
 other region shall we place them ? But I propose to say 
 nothing here on difficulties which to my mind are fatal, and 
 which destroy the claim of matters of fact to possess in- 
 dependence and consistency. I will, passing from this, deal 
 briefly with the question of uniqueness. 
 
 If truth as to matter of fact falls short of uniqueness, that 
 truth, we have seen, is defective. Without contradicting 
 yourself you can at once affirm and deny that Caesar crossed 
 the Rubicon. But such uniqueness (as we have already seen 
 in part) is unattainable by truth. For it is not sufficient to 
 give to your event an exclusive place in its series. The event 
 still remains a mere generality, unless the series itself is 
 unique. What you seek is something which is positively 
 itself, and not a sort of a heading which can be identified at 
 once with discrepant qualities. But no truth can reach the 
 unique order which is to be the condition of such an absolute 
 fact. 
 
 Uniqueness is a well-known topic, which might with profit 
 be discussed at very great length. I must confine myself 
 here to stating briefly what to myself appears to be the one 
 tenable conclusion. Wherever you have a different quality, 
 you have so far something unique, and this is the one root of 
 uniqueness. Uniqueness in a word means difference, and 
 difference in a word means a quality. For a distinction 
 without a difference, and again a difference without a diver- 
 sity in quality, are things which in the end to me are devoid 
 of meaning. I do not, I hope, ignore wholly the difficulties 
 which have led to the acceptance of such ideas, but, whatever 
 are the difficulties, these ideas I am unable to accept. 
 Briefly then every quality, so far as it is distinct from other 
 qualities, is unique. You cannot conceivably divide it and 
 make two specimens within it and of it, unless you in- 
 troduce further difference and go on to make so far new 
 quality. A quality which positively is itself, and therefore 
 and so far cannot be something else, this is in the end the 
 
264 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 one foundation on which to my mind uniqueness is tenable. 
 Uniqueness has a negative aspect, but that negative aspect 
 must rest on a positive quaUty. 
 
 The ' this ' of feeUng (I ignore here the difficulties which 
 arise) ^ everywhere, I agree, is positive and unique. But 
 when, passing beyond mere feeling, you have before you 
 what you call ' matter of fact ' the case forthwith is altered. 
 The uniqueness has now to be made ' objective '. It has to 
 be contained within the judgement and has to qualify the 
 content of your truth. The possibility of another fact in 
 another series must be excluded, so that in j^our fact and 
 truth (with all its imperfection) you have nevertheless no 
 general sort but a determinate thing. But, since you have 
 destroyed the positive quality of the felt, you have now no 
 means by which to reach your end. Where is the quahty 
 
 ' Of these I will mention two. In the first place every different ' this ' 
 will require a new quaUty. In the second place we have the problem of 
 the connexion of identity with difference, and of the ' infinite process ' 
 which arises at either end. Chap. VIII, p. 240. Uniqueness is a subject 
 to which I desire to return. 
 
 I fully assent to the remarks on Individuality and Uniqueness made by 
 Prof. Bosanquet in his Logic (Ed. II), vol. ii, pp. 260-1. I agree that the 
 further an individual is removed from designation, the more unique (the 
 less of a mere ' sort ') it becomes, though it never becomes unique utterly. 
 A thing, that is, has uniqueness through being above as well as through 
 being below a kind or class. And the former of these senses is perhaps 
 the more important of the two. But I do not understand that this con- 
 sideration conflicts with the statement of the text. 
 
 I will add here that what Mr. Russell (On the relations of Universals 
 and Particulars, p. 24) calls ' the self-evident fact that certain spatial 
 relations imply diversity of their terms, together with the self-evident 
 fact that it is logically possible for entities having such spatial relations 
 to be wholly indistinguishable as to predicates ' to me remains inad- 
 missible. On the contrary, that every place must differ from others in 
 quality, and again, that in spatial ' occupation ' there is not a mere rela- 
 tion, is to my mind clear fact. Occupation implies, I should say, a union 
 of qualities. Hence it is only in one respect, and by virtue of an abstrac- 
 tion from their difference, that two things in two different places are the 
 same. I fully admit that the above is in a sense unintelligible. But I 
 do not find that, like Mr. Russell's view of ' occupation ', it violates plain 
 fact ; and, again, to me it is not in the same sense unthinkable. For mere 
 numerical diversity remains to me unthinkable, unless, while thinking it, 
 I allow differences in quality to introduce themselves surreptitiously. 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 265 
 
 in your truth about your matter of fact which makes it 
 particular, which excludes other series and the possibility 
 that in another series the same thing happens differently ? 
 Show me this quality, or else confess that your truth is not 
 absolute, and that ' Caesar never crossed the Rubicon ' is 
 not utter error. You can of course assume that any order 
 of events is unique. You can of course credit it with an 
 unknown quality which makes it itself and which repels all 
 other series. And I need not ask here in what sense such 
 an assumption might be true. What I am urging is that 
 even on such an assumption there is an unknown quality 
 which is not, and cannot be, contained within your judge- 
 ment. There is that which falls outside, and, falling outside, 
 makes the truth conditional. For that Caesar on a certain 
 unspecified assumption in fact crossed the Rubicon is surely 
 compatible with the assertion that the actual fact is also 
 otherwise. Your judgement is but conditional, because (if 
 I may repeat this once more) you have failed to get within 
 the judgement the condition of the judgement. ^ And the 
 accomplishment of this (if it were possible) would involve 
 the essential transformation of your judgement. 
 
 The absolute view of perfect truth and of sheer error rests, 
 we saw, on the idea that separate facts and truths are self- 
 contained and possess independent reality. And such an 
 idea (we have argued) must be rejected in the end ; but this 
 
 ' In order to include uniqueness within the judgement ' Caesar crossed 
 the Rubicon ' you would require (I should say) not less than two false 
 assun[iptions, and with anything less must fail, (i) You want («) an 
 assumption that there is only one possible order in space and time — an as- 
 sumption which in my opinion is not true {Appearance, chap, xviii) ; or 
 (6), failing this, you must include a definition of the particular order 
 which you mean, (ii) Having got so far, (a) you must make a further 
 assumption that within your unique order there is no possible recurrence 
 of ' Caesar ' — and this assumption again to my mind is quite untenable. 
 Or you must (as you cannot) define the ' this ' of that Caesar which you 
 mean. The reader will of course understand that the above unique order, 
 with its, exclusion of possible recurrence of ' Caesar ', has got to be made 
 true unconditionally of the Universe. 
 
266 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 does not mean that the absolute view is to be rejected alto- 
 gether. We are told (to repeat this) that to those who 
 accept a real Absolute, and with it a relative view of truth, 
 everything in particular becomes so much the same that the 
 distinctions which give value to Ufe disappear. But such a 
 charge, I pointed out, is due mainly to misunderstanding. 
 Within Hmits and in their proper place our relative view in- 
 sists everywhere on the value and on the necessity of absolute 
 judgements, both as to right and wrong and as to error and 
 truth. Life in general and knowledge in particular rest on 
 distinction and on the division of separate regions. And, 
 though these divided regions are not independent and each 
 [ self-contained, yet within each to a very large extent you 
 must proceed as if this were so. If you ask me, for instance, 
 whether there is truth in the statement that 2 + 2 = 5, I 
 answer that (though I am ignorant of mathematics) I believe 
 this to be sheer error. The world of mathematics, that is, 
 I understand to rest upon certain conditions, and under these 
 conditions there is within mathematics pure truth and utter 
 error. It is only when you pass (to speak in general) beyond 
 a special science, and it is only when you ask whether the 
 very conditions of that science are absolutely true and real, 
 that you are forced to reject this absolute view. The same 
 thing holds once more with regard to ' matters of fact '. 
 Obviously the construction in space and time which I call 
 ' my real world ' must be used ; and obviously, within 
 limits, this construction must be taken as the only world 
 which exists.^ And, so far as we assume this, we of course 
 
 ' Cf. Chapters III and XVI. Apart from a certain reservation as to 
 dreams and dreamlike states, this 'real world' is the world of practice. 
 The difference in practice, between my reaching here and now my end 
 and failing to reach it, may be said to be absolute. And this absolute 
 difference is thus fully preserved in our relative view. We must remember 
 here, on the other side, that the ends to be realized in my practice cannot 
 all be said to belong to my ' real world ', and are certainly not aU ' prac- 
 tical ' . No doctrine of practice for the sake of practice will stand before 
 an inquiry into the meaning of ' practice '. 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 267 
 
 can have at once simple error and mere truth. Thus the 
 doctrine which I advocate contains and subordinates what 
 we have called the absolute view, and in short justifies it 
 relatively. 
 
 On the other side, even within the special sciences and 
 within the world of practical life, the absolute view of truth 
 has its limits. The ideas which we use within the special 
 sciences are hardly self-consistent, and in our practical life 
 we experience the collision of discordant principles. And it 
 is now an old story that, even if the worlds of our diverse 
 interests were each at one with itself, at all events these 
 worlds can conflict with one another. Assuredly it is not 
 merely within philosophy that the absolute view of error and 
 truth is driven to suggest itself as false. But for philosophy, 
 as I at least understand it, the reason is plain. All ideas in 
 the end, if we except those of metaphysics, lack ultimate 
 truth. They may be called working conceptions, good and 
 true so far as they work. And, because they work, and 
 because nothing else could work so well, there is therefore 
 nothing better and nothing truer than such ideas, each in its 
 own proper place ; since nothing else could possibly be more 
 relative to our needs. But these ideas are not consistent 
 either with one another or even with themselves, and they 
 come short of that which we demand as truth. How far and 
 in what sense even within metaphysics that demand can be 
 satisfied, I have discussed elsewhere. ^ 
 
 ' Appearance, pp. 544 foil. How far (we may ask here in passing) are 
 the ideas used by metaphysics to be called ' working conceptions ' ? (i) 
 In the first place these ideas are not merely ' instrumental'. They are 
 not mere means to some end outside of, or other than, understanding. 
 And (ii) they are not means to, or elements in, the understanding merely 
 of one limited region. On the contrary, metaphysics aims at under- 
 standing the world in principle, in general and as one whole. The ideas 
 used for this purpose, since they work, may, if we please, be called working 
 conceptions. They are again all imperfect, and all difier in the degree 
 in which they approach and fall short of perfection. But the main point 
 is this, that, in order to work metaphysically, these ideas must themselves 
 have the character of the metaphysical end. They do not merely conduce 
 
268 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 The doctrine that there is no perfect truth or sheer error may 
 be said to conflict with Common Sense, if you understand 
 by that term the fixed prejudices of one-sided reflection.^ 
 This is the Common Sense which we too often find with the 
 speciaUst and in the market-place. But if Common Sense is 
 taken more widely, the above conflict disappears. Is it after 
 all a paradox that our conceptions tend all more or less to be 
 one-sided, and that life as a whole is something higher and 
 something truer than those fragmentary ideas by which we 
 seek to express and formulate it ? Is it after all the man 
 who is most consistent who on the whole attains to greatest 
 truth ? To most, if not to all of us, I should have thought 
 that there came moments when it seemed clear that the 
 Universe is too much everywhere for our understanding. 
 Any truth of ours, no matter what, fails to contain the 
 entirety of that which it tries to embrace, and hence is falsi- 
 fied by the reality. There is always another side, which we 
 may be right or may be wrong to ignore, but, we being 
 limited as we are, there must for us be of necessity another 
 side. And indeed the whole conclusion which I advocate 
 here on the ground of metaphysics, far from being para- 
 doxical, comes near, I should say, to platitude. If I were not 
 convinced of its truth on the ground of metaphysics, I should 
 still believe it upon instinct. And, though I am willing 
 to concede that my metaphysics may be wrong, there is, 
 I think, nothing which could persuade me that my instinct 
 is not right. 
 
 II. I will pass on from this to remark briefly on one of 
 the points which remain. Error, appearance and truth, we 
 have seen, do not in their proper sense belong to feeling. 
 
 to a foreign purpose, but are themselves the very existence in which their 
 end and principle is realized. The phrase ' working conceptions ' tends, 
 I think, to suggest that this is otherwise, and hence it seems to me safer 
 not to apply it to the ideas of metaphysics. 
 
 ' On Common Sense and Consistency cf. Chap. V, pp. 123-4, 132-3; 
 and, again, Chap. XV, p. 430. 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 269 
 
 And again in their proper sense they on our view are tran- 
 scended in the Absolute. Taken as such and in their special 
 character they belong to what we may call the intellectual 
 middle-space, the world of reflection and of sundered ideas 
 and of explicit relations. But (and this is the point on which 
 I wish to insist) the middle-space is not detached and it does 
 not float. Not only do all ideas without exception qualify 
 the Real, but ideas everywhere are only so far as they are 
 felt. Ideas exist nowhere except so far as they belong 
 integrally to the world of some finite centre. 
 
 It may repay us to consider the matter further with 
 regard specially to Contradiction. The self-contradictory, I 
 suppose most of us would agree, is unreal. And yet, since 
 we discuss it, it is clear that the self-contradictory in some 
 sense exists. Whether this is a problem which presses more 
 on those who agree with me than on those who differ, I will 
 not here discuss. The problem was noticed by myself some 
 years ago {Mind, No. 20, p. 482), and I have returned to it 
 later {Mind, No. 43, p. 308, and No. 60, p. 455) ; ^ and I will 
 once more here offer the solution which seems satisfactory. 
 
 The reader will recall that on our view there is in feeling 
 no contradiction as such. We feel uneasiness and change, 
 and we have in feeling contents which do not agree.^ An 
 experience of this kind may be intense, but it gives no 
 awareness of contradiction, and that it should give this 
 seems impossible. For, however great our uneasiness, how- 
 ever discordant and unstable our condition, whatever comes 
 in feeling must come together and must come somehow in 
 one. So far as feeling goes, we may say that an unknown 
 condition of union is implied and is operative. And this 
 state of things is again present in those perceived contents 
 
 ' See Chap. Ill, p. 41, note, and Chap. X, p. 302. 
 
 ' Cf. Chap. VI, pp. 168 foil., 174. I may perhaps be permitted to 
 mention here, in passing, that I do not venture to derive change from 
 inconsistency. I think it better to take change as belonging to the incon- 
 sistent finite, but exactly how we do not know. 
 
270 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 which no analysis breaks up, and in various forms it under- 
 hes the mere conjunctions of our confused thinking. Con- 
 tradiction in the proper sense is made only by reflection.^ 
 It is when diversities are referred to and located in the same 
 point that they clash. When we analyse (and to think we 
 must analyse), the immediate bond of union, with its un- 
 known condition, is perforce more or less discarded. The 
 diversities can hence no longer come to us as somehow 
 conjoined. And, attempting to connect them simply, 
 thought forces them into an open conflict, where our felt 
 uneasiness is developed before us into explicit contradic- 
 tion. Within was a felt conjunction which failed to satisfy 
 and caused disquiet and unrest. And it is the break- 
 ing up of this congeries, and it is the attempt to identify 
 differences apart from any condition of union, which 
 turns our inward unrest into the coUision of a perceived 
 discrepancy. 
 
 But (and this is once more the point which we should 
 emphasize) there is no such thing as a mere contradiction, 
 just as there cannot be any such thing in the world as a bare 
 negation. Every negation (I have dealt with this elsewhere) 
 must have a positive ground. And every contradiction 
 implies in some sense the actual conjunction of that which 
 clashes. Within feeling, as we saw, and in many cases even 
 within sensuous perception, the discrepant elements were, 
 by virtue of an unknown condition, together in one whole. 
 And when these elements pass into judgement and are seen 
 
 ' See Appearance, Appendix, Note A. The reader will remember that 
 we have diversities which can sensuously be in one and ' coinhere ', and 
 other diversities where we find that this is not possible. An inconsistency 
 like change, for instance, can be felt and perceived (so far as appears) 
 immediately and simply. An inconsistency, again, such as a round 
 square, cannot be perceived or felt apart from some further comphcation. 
 This distinction possesses on certain views, which I think erroneous, a 
 fundamental importance. But a thing to me is not self-consistent or real 
 because it is present in feeling or to perception. Beside the pages of 
 Appearance just referred to, the reader will find some further discussion 
 in Mind, No. 20, pp. 475-81. 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 271 
 
 to collide, they nevertheless, in order to colUde, must in some 
 way be perceived to coexist. 
 
 When I think of contraries I first take them as being 
 somehow separated and yet conjoined. The special nature 
 of this ' somehow ', this known or unknown condition, will 
 vary in different cases, but it here is irrelevant.^ Then in 
 thought I remove this imaginary condition of both apartness 
 and union, with the result that the diverse elements tend to 
 be forced together in one point. On this ensues a clash and 
 a divergence, with a recognized failure. And, generahzing 
 this experience, we now set down the elements as contraries. 
 We say that they are such as not to be predicable of one and 
 the same subject, the truth being that we have abstracted 
 from them and from the subject every condition of union. 
 But the above experience is possible only because the con- 
 trary elements are not simple contraries. In order to per- 
 ceive them or to think of them, even as repellent, they must 
 be still before us in a medium in which so far somehow they 
 do not collide. And obviously they and our whole know- 
 ledge of their collision must be felt. It must depend on 
 a positive and an immediate awareness within my finite 
 centre. 
 
 Contradiction in the proper sense thus belongs to the 
 middle space of our reflective world, and it may be said to 
 inhabit that region, or rather part of that region, which lies 
 between feeling and perfect experience. But contradiction 
 is perceived nowhere except on the ground of a neutral con- 
 junction, present to sense or imagination, and it is possible 
 
 ' When I, for instance, think of a round square, I may for the moment 
 drop out of view the special meaning of these words, and couple them as 
 if they were some other adjectives, like ' cold ' and ' green ', which can 
 together qualify a perceived thing. Or, if I realize the meaning of ' round ' 
 and ' square ', I may drop out of view the identity of the space which 
 these adjectives are to qualify. I take the round space and the square 
 space as being somehow diverse ; or again I may deliberately represent 
 them as two surfaces, one lying over the other, and so compatible. The 
 moment, however, that I suppress the diversities and make these spaces 
 really one, a collision takes place and the round square is destroyed. 
 
272 ON APPEARANCE, ERROR chap. 
 
 only because in the end it rests and is based on felt positive 
 experience. And contradiction, we may add, is erroneous 
 only because it is deficient, because the condition on which 
 the contraries were conjoined is in part suppressed, and 
 because the condition of their higher unity has not been 
 supplied. We should, however, remind ourselves that this 
 problem, like other problems, is but soluble in part. The 
 immediate immanence of the one Reality in finite centres 
 has always to be presupposed ; and this fact, we have seen 
 from the first, remains inexplicable. 
 
 III. I will end by touching on a difficulty which was 
 noticed some years ago by Prof. Stout. ^ The Absolute must 
 really have appearances or it could not appear, and hence the 
 appearances (it is objected) cannot really be mere appear- 
 ance. Before discussing this, I would first mention that on 
 my view there is not and cannot be any such thing as a mere 
 appearance.^ The reader next should recall the twofold 
 meaning of the word ' appearance '. That sense of the 
 term in which something appears to some one, we have 
 seen, is secondary. What is fundamental is (as we have 
 seen) the presence in everything finite of that which takes 
 it beyond itself. 
 
 Having removed from our minds these possible miscon- 
 ceptions, we may address ourselves to the above dilemma. 
 Are we to maintain that the Absolute does really appear ? 
 If we answer No, then it seems to follow that nothing 
 appears. But if on the other hand we say Yes, then finite 
 centres seem at once to have become absolutely real. Our 
 true reply, as I understand the matter, is to say ' Yes, but 
 also and in the end No '. The Absolute really appears, but 
 the conditions of its appearance are not known.' Our 
 
 * Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, ' Mr. Bradley's Theory of 
 Judgement,' pp. 27-8. ^ Appearance, pp. 557-8. 
 
 ' This again is in principle the answer to the objection urged by Prof. 
 Royce (The World and the Individual, Series i, pp. 550 foil.). The ob- 
 jection, as I understand it, rests on the assumption that the transcendence 
 
IX AND CONTRADICTION 273 
 
 former statement therefore is defective, and comes short of 
 truth in the highest sense of that word. It needs correction 
 somehow, but how to correct it we are unable to discover. 
 Nor can we even take our statement to be in the end cor- 
 rigible by any mere intelligence. Hence on the one side, 
 because nothing intelligible can be set against it, its truth 
 is ultimate and final ; while on the other side that truth 
 remains defective and must in a sense be called untrue. 
 The real appearance of the Absolute in finite centres is a 
 thing which therefore in the above sense can rationally be 
 at once affirmed and denied. The same reply holds once 
 more with regard to the ultimate reality of degrees. There 
 is a point where the ' how ' of things passes beyond the 
 nature of our vision, and where our knowledge, because 
 defective, is condemned in a sense to remain erroneous. 
 On the other hand, since there is nothing which can be 
 opposed to our main conclusion, that conclusion is certain, 
 and we may rest on it as finally true. All understanding 
 and truth, upon my view, to reach its end passes beyond 
 itself. It is perfect only when beyond itself in a fuller 
 reaUty, But short of such a completion, and while truth 
 remains mere truth, there are assertions which are so far 
 ultimate and utterly true. This general explanation of the 
 proposed difficulty was offered in my volume {Appearance, 
 pp. 544-5). I should hardly exaggerate if I added that the 
 view of truth and reality which, I think, solves the above 
 dilemma, is really the beginning and the end of that volume. 
 It is at any rate a conclusion offered as something which can 
 stand between us and a logical issue in theoretical scepticism. 
 It is a doctrine which to my mind is less one-sided than 
 others, and, so far as I can judge, the criticisms directed 
 against it have left it unshaken. This is, however, a point 
 on which the decision must rest with the reader. 
 
 of the relational form, which is experienced in the Absolute, must itself 
 be in the relational form, or else be nothing. But it is precisely the oppo- 
 site of any such alternative which, at least I have contended, is true. 
 1574 T 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE I 
 
 Since the publication of the foregoing paper there have 
 appeared (in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1910-11) 
 two essays dealing with the subject of Error. The first of these, 
 by Dr. Schiller, makes, so far as I see, no contribution to the 
 discussion of the subject, but the second, by Prof. Stout, has, as 
 was natural, a different character. Without any claim that he 
 some years back ' inaugurated the modern theory of Error ' ^ 
 (whatever that may be). Prof. Stout addresses himself directly 
 to deal with the well-known difficulties of the problem. 
 
 His essay, interesting as it is, I have found extremely hard 
 to understand. If Prof. Stout's main doctrine is that Error 
 consists in treating what is only possible as if it were actual, his 
 main conclusion would seem to differ hardly, if at all, from that 
 which I have advocated. It would apparently be another way 
 of saying that Error takes the conditional as being categorical 
 and absolute. And, again. Prof. Stout's solution of the question 
 as to how we can think of the contradictory, seems to me (perhaps 
 wrongly) to be the same in principle as that which I have offered 
 myself.^ But, apart from Prof. Stout's criticism of myself, to 
 which I will return, there are other things which point to a diver- 
 gence of our views. 
 
 Prof. Stout's account of error implies to my mind (perhaps 
 mistakenly) the metaphysical doctrine that all possibilities are, 
 as such, ultimately real. If this is his position, he seems to me 
 not to appreciate the difficulties by which it is beset. But, if 
 this is not his position, I have failed to understand how exactly 
 it differs here from my own. Certainly Prof. Stout's apparent 
 acceptance of the doctrine ^ that the difference between an actual 
 
 ^ This claim (I do not suggest that Prof. Stout approves) is made on his 
 behalf by Dr. Schiller, p. 156. 
 
 " See Chap. Ill, p. 41, and Chap. IX, pp. 269-71. 
 
 ' I have discussed this matter in Chap. III. The conclusion there 
 advocated has (so far as I know not been met otherwise than by being 
 simply ignored. 
 
IX SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE I 275 
 
 and possible object does not lie in the object's content, tends to 
 make a chasm in principle between our ways of approaching the 
 matter. But until Prof. Stout deals with the whole subject of 
 Error and of Reality more fully, I can hardly hope myself to 
 estimate the amount and the nature of our disagreement. 
 
 How great, in one sense at least, that disagreement is, may be 
 seen from the criticism offered by Prof. Stout on myself. He 
 says, on p. 199, ' My position [is ?], that whatever is thought, 
 in so far as it is thought, is therefore real. His [Mr. Bradley's] 
 position is, that whatever is thought, in so far as it is thought, 
 is therefore unreal.' I should have said that no one, except 
 Prof. Bosanquet, has emphasized more strongly than myself the 
 impossibility of thinking anything which is unreal. And the 
 exact sense in which for instance the possible, as such, is real 
 for Prof. Stout and is not real for me, is precisely the point which, 
 so far as I see, he does not explain. Again it is said that 
 according to me ' the whole development of thinking conscious- 
 ness resolves itself into an endeavour to reconstitute the unity 
 which it has destroyed '. But this, I have tried to point out, is 
 not my view. The unity at which thought aims lies beyond 
 that from which it starts. Otherwise the consequence would 
 follow that, the more you think, the more you remove yourself 
 from reality, nor could such a consequence well escape the 
 notice of any one who has learned from Hegel. In short, for 
 a satisfactory discussion between Prof. Stout and myself, each 
 of us should take account of the sense or senses in which the 
 other of us understands reality. And since I do not know of any 
 sufficient explanation as to the sense in which the possible 
 according to Prof. Stout is real, I cannot in the end judge as to 
 the meaning of his account of Error. It would be a satisfaction 
 to me to find that really in the main we are agreed. But in any 
 case I should hope to profit, if Prof. Stout would return to 
 a problem at once so interesting and so difficult. 
 
 Since writing the above I have read the remarks in Prof. 
 Bosanquet's Logic (Ed. II), vol. i, pp. 383-4. I am glad to find 
 that he considers that Prof. Stout and himself come to much the 
 same conclusion, for certainly I accept the view of Error taken 
 by Prof. Bosanquet. 
 
 With regard to the latter's two cases of error I should under- 
 stand them as follows. 
 
 T 2 
 
276 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE I chap. 
 
 (i) Wherever S-P is asserted, it is asserted as real, and therefore 
 as fully mediated. Hence, so far as the condition of the judge- 
 ment falls outside the judgement, we have error. We have that 
 which can be at pleasure affirmed or denied. And, even where 
 S-P is asserted of a sphere limited by designation, we still have 
 error in the above sense, since we fail to get into the judgement 
 the full conditions under which, in this sphere, S and P hold to- 
 gether. Error is so far, we may say, the assertion of the un- 
 mediated as mediated. 
 
 (ii) Where S-P is affirmed of a certain designated world, S-P 
 also may contain and depend on a condition x^, which condition 
 is incompatible with a condition x^ taken to be present in the 
 designated world. S-P therefore is valid elsewhere but not in 
 this world. Whether the condition x^ is viewed as positive or 
 as privative makes no difference. Error here consists in dis- 
 crepancy with something limited which is taken as absolutely 
 real. This, I understand, is the kind of error of which I have 
 spoken in Chap. IX, p. 266. 
 
 Error is always difference between an idea and reality. And 
 hence in the end all truth is in varying degrees error, and, on the 
 other side, no error is absolute. For every idea, to be an idea, 
 must be real. But, where the reality has been for any purpose 
 limited, and is viewed in this character as absolute — so far we 
 can have unconditional truth and utter error. This is the 
 doctrine which I understand to be advocated by Prof. Bosanquet 
 and myself. If I could think that Prof. Stout also had now 
 been led to a conclusion much the same, that result would be 
 welcome. In any case I am sure that the subject would gain 
 if he would discuss it further. 
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE II 1 
 
 In this Supplementary Note I propose to deal briefly with 
 two subjects. (I.) I wish to examine the doctrine as to Number 
 advocated by Prof. Royce in The World and the Individual, 
 First Series. And (II.) I must attempt to show that some of 
 the main ideas on which Mr. Russell's views seem to rest, are 
 inconsistent and ultimately untenable. It is with great reluctance 
 ' This Note is from the article in Mind for April 1910. 
 
IX SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE II 277 
 
 that I enter upon either undertaking. I am ignorant of mathe- 
 matics, not willingly but through radical incapacity ; and again 
 (it is perhaps the same defect) I cannot follow any train of 
 reasoning which is highly abstract. If under these circumstances 
 what I am about to write proves worthless, no apology, it is clear, 
 can help me. The reader in that case must judge of me as seems 
 to him best. 
 
 I. I understand Prof. Royce to contend that number and 
 truths about number can be constructed a priori, and that 
 these truths are completely unconditional and self-consistent. 
 The origin in time of our perception of number and quantity 
 he, I understand, does not discuss, and we are concerned simply 
 with what may be called an act of logical creation. I will ask 
 first as to the nature of the process, and next as to the character 
 of the result. 
 
 The process of creation appears to consist in reflection, a 
 process more or less familiar to students of philosophy. We 
 are to think of some object (no matter what), and then we are 
 to think of our thought of this object, and so on indefinitely. 
 In this way we gain (it is contended) an ordinal series where the 
 process contains no unknown condition, and where the result is 
 consistent. Now I agree that in the above way we produce some- 
 how a series which is ordinal, in the sense that each fresh product 
 somehow contains and preserves what has gone before. I do 
 not mean that, after reflecting in such a manner for a certain 
 time, I know in fact where I am, and could say how many steps 
 are included in my present result. To gain that knowledge I 
 should say that a further operation is required. Still I admit 
 (what is, I presume, the main point) that through the process of 
 reflection an ordinal series is somehow generated. What I have 
 to deny is first («) that the generation consists in pure thought, and 
 next (J) I have to deny that the product is consistent with itself. 
 
 (fl) You have an object (O) before your self (S). You then 
 
 go on to reflect that this is so ; and in consequence you now 
 
 have a new object (S — O) before you. A further reflection of 
 
 s 
 the same kind gives an object (S — 1 ), and thus you make an 
 
 o 
 
 ordinal series which has in principle no end. Now what is the 
 
278 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE II chap. 
 
 nature of this process ? Prof. Royce contends that all that you 
 start with is not a one in many, nor even a mere many, but 
 simply an object. This is all that there is, and then pure thought 
 (I understand) supervenes and produces the result. Here I join 
 issue. I can no more accept Prof. Royce's doctrine than I can 
 accept what is often understood as the process of Hegel's dialectic. 
 I do not believe in any operation which falls out of the blue upon 
 a mere object. On the contrary I maintain that with an object 
 you have, and you must have, a felt self. And I urge that this 
 felt self is a one in many and many in one, which for the intellect 
 remains incomprehensible, and which therefore for the intellect 
 depends on an unknown condition. Hence you really start 
 with a felt subject (S) which is complex, and which contains in 
 itself the object (O), which is both felt in it and opposed to it. 
 Whether we ever in fact have an O which is single, I need not 
 stop to discuss. In any case your experience at the start is 
 complex, and you have a demand on the part of this experience 
 to make the object adequate to the whole subject, and to carry 
 out the subject into the object. This is the basis and this is the 
 impulse which (I contend) sets up the process of reflection. And 
 the process cannot end, because to make 0=S would destroy 
 in principle the whole experience. To come to an end the process 
 must simply cease, or else lapse back, or else be taken up into 
 something higher. 
 
 Thus the series of reflection is generated by and through the 
 unity of immediate experience. And this unity is a one in 
 many and a many in one which for thought is not intelligible or 
 unconditional. It is this totality which for ever demands an 
 expression which is unattainable within our relational experience, 
 or within any experience for which the object is against the 
 subject in some way which we are unable to understand. The 
 principle of the process therefore does not reside in pure thought, 
 but on the contrary must be said to imply a mere conjunction. 
 And any process other than the above to my mind is even impos- 
 sible. There is for me no such thing as a mere object or mere 
 objects, nor any process of reflection which falls down from 
 nowhere. 
 
 (b) Prof. Royce insists that both process and product are 
 self-consistent and free from all contradiction. If what I have 
 already urged is correct, no such claim can be admitted. An 
 
IX SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE II 279 
 
 immediate totality, unless you allow and include an unknown 
 condition, cannot without inconsistency be formulated in 
 thought. If the one is not one of the many, it seems to be 
 nothing, and if it is one of the many, there is no one left in which 
 the many can be. There is therefore either an unknown con- 
 dition or else a self-contradiction. So again with the whole and 
 its parts. So again with the class and its members, a matter to 
 which later in this Note I shall return. We have a difference which 
 cannot be, and yet must be, and we have to choose between 
 a self-contradiction and the admission of an unintelligible con- 
 dition. So again with subject and object. These have got to 
 be different, or what are they ? On the other side the difference 
 of the object excludes perfect satisfaction. The end is not 
 reached except for a passing moment. The object therefore both 
 must remain, and yet cannot remain, over against the subject. 
 There is a ' beyond ', to be for ever asserted and denied. The 
 formula is ' Realize the subject as object beyond any object ', and 
 surely such a formula is not self-consistent. For myself I urge 
 that there is here an unknown condition and that so the contra- 
 diction is avoided. But how Prof. Royce can avoid it I am 
 unable to say. 
 
 Hence the principle which generates the series carries within 
 itself a difference and a negation, which it at once asserts and 
 denies. To Prof. Royce, on the other hand, the principle is 
 wholly positive (p. 510) ; but how that can be I fail to perceive. 
 The illustration, again, advanced by Prof. Royce (pp. 503 foil.) 
 appears to myself to contain an obvious and glaring fallacy 
 (cf. Prof. Taylor's Elements of Metaphysics, p. 150). The idea of 
 a copy which has not an existence different from, and so far 
 negative of, its original, remains to me meaningless. If you 
 take away the idea of another existence, another and a different 
 medium and fact, you for my mind abolish the essential element 
 of copying and representation. And yet, according to Prof. 
 Royce, the coming into existence of the copy is not to alter the 
 fact. And, while I hesitate to attribute to Prof. Royce such an 
 open inconsistency, I have been unable in any other way to inter- 
 pret his teaching. I must end therefore by submitting that 
 both principle and product are self-contradictory in essence. 
 And I have already urged that the process is not unconditional 
 and ' pure '. 
 
28o SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE II chap. 
 
 Finally there is a question on which I would invite the reader 
 to reflect. The empirical origin of our sense of more and less, 
 of quantity and of number I am willing to treat here as being 
 irrelevant. But another question remains which can hardly 
 be dismissed. How far does our arithmetic depend upon spatial 
 schemata ? ^ How far can we rid ourselves of the datum of space 
 as perceived, and how far is this datum ultimately consistent 
 and intelligible ? I raise no separate doubt as to time, since our 
 developed perception of time itself appears largely to be spatial. 
 How far, even to think of (I do not say to experience) the relation 
 of object to subject, are we forced to make this a spatial relation 
 to something which certainly is not in space ? And the endless 
 process of reflection on reflection, how far without a spatial 
 scheme can any such process exist ? And what in the end holds 
 our ordinal series both apart and together ? These questions 
 to my mind are very relevant, but I can do no more than suggest 
 them to the reader. Apart from any answer to them, I have 
 however endeavoured to show that Prof. Royce's generation of 
 number is, in the form in which he advocates it, not proof against 
 criticism. I cannot however end without thanking him for the 
 service which he has done in calling attention to issues, the 
 importance of which, I am sure, he in no way exaggerates. 
 
 II. I have now to remark on some of the fundamental ideas 
 used by Mr. Russell, and must endeavour to show that these 
 ideas contain inconsistency. It is a task to which in one sense 
 I am quite unequal. I am incompetent utterly to sit in judge- 
 ment on Mr. Russell's great work (Principles of Mathematics). 
 But, if the mathematical part is as good as the part which is 
 philosophical, I am sure that he has produced a book of singular 
 merit. To confine myself here to a one-sided criticism of ideas 
 which I can only partially comprehend, is ungrateful to me, and 
 I could not do it if I did not feel myself in a sense compelled to 
 say something. 
 
 I understand Mr. Russell to hold that mathematical truth is 
 true perfectly and in the end, since the principles as well as the 
 inferences are wholly valid. The fundamental ideas, I under- 
 
 ' I of course do not mean visual schemata. Obviously that could not be 
 true of every mind. But of how many minds it would be true is, again, 
 another question. 
 
IX SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE II 281 
 
 stand, are throughout self -consistent. If there were an exception 
 the extent of its influence would raise a question at once of the 
 most formidable kind, and the main doctrine obviously would be 
 imperilled. But this is a point on which, through my own 
 incapacity, I have been unable to appreciate Mr. Russell's 
 decision. I must therefore, passing this by, go on to inquire as 
 to the consistency of some leading ideas. 
 
 I encounter at the outset a great difficulty. Mr. Russell's 
 main position has remained to myself incomprehensible. On 
 the one side I am led to think that he defends a strict pluralism, 
 for which nothing is admissible beyond simple terms and external 
 relations. On the other side Mr. Russell seems to assert empha- 
 tically, and to use throughout, ideas which such a pluralism 
 surely must repudiate. He throughput stands upon unities 
 which are complex and which cannot be analysed into terms and 
 relations. These two positions to my mind are irreconcilable, 
 since the second, as I understand it, contradicts the first flatly. 
 If there are such unities, and, still more, if such unities are funda- 
 mental, then pluralism surely is in principle abandoned as false. 
 Mr. Russell, I cannot doubt, is prepared here with an answer, 
 but I have been unable to discover in what this answer consists. 
 To urge that these unities are indefinable would to myself be 
 merely irrelevant. If they had no meaning they could serve no 
 purpose, and the question is with regard to their meaning. If 
 that is not consistent with itself or with Mr. Russell's main doc- 
 trine, then that meaning is not admissible as true, unless it is 
 taken subject to an unknown condition. But, if so taken, that 
 meaning, I would urge, is not ultimate truth. For a certain 
 purpose, obviously, one can swallow whole what one is unable to 
 analyse ; but I cannot see how, with this, we have rid ourselves 
 of the question as to ultimate truth. 
 
 On my own position here I need not dwell. For me immediate 
 experience gives us a unity and unities of one and many, which 
 unities are not completely analysable or intelligible, and which 
 unities are self -contradictory unless you take them as subject to 
 an unknown condition. Such a form of unity seems to me to be 
 in principle the refutation of pluralism, and on the other side it 
 more or less vitiates the absolute claim of all truths (I cannot 
 stop here to make the required qualification) including those of 
 mathematics. Now what is Mr. Russell's attitude towards 
 
282 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE II chap. 
 
 a position of this kind ? On the one hand I understand him to 
 reject it most decidedly. On the other hand, wherever anything 
 like ' imphcation ' or ' unity ' is involved (and how much have 
 we left where these are excluded ?), Mr. Russell seems to myself 
 to embrace a conclusion which in principle I find it hard to 
 distinguish from my own. And, it being clear to me that there 
 is something here which I have failed to comprehend, I must 
 leave this fundamental issue and go on to consider some difficulties 
 more in detail. 
 
 The notion of ' imphcation '} I understand Mr. Russell to say, 
 is necessary for mathematics ; and let us consider very briefly 
 what this notion involves. It seems to mean (if it means any- 
 thing) that something is both itself and more than itself. There 
 is a difference here which is both af&rmed and denied ; for of 
 course that anything should imply merely itself is meaningless. 
 But how can anything be at once itself and in any sense not-itself ? 
 Mr. Russell leaves us here, so far as I have seen, without any 
 assistance. But with this we are face to face with the famihar 
 problem of the one and many, the universal and particular. We 
 are driven back to the immediate experience where the whole is in 
 the parts and where, through the whole, the parts are in one 
 another. But such an immediate experience seems in the first 
 place (I would repeat) to contradict pluraUsm, and in the second 
 place it offers by itself no theoretical solution. The same 
 difficulty appears in ' such that '. If this phrase does not mean 
 that a particular is also a universal, and with a certain conse- 
 quence, it surely has no meaning at all. But how to justify this 
 necessary inconsistency Mr. Russell does not tell us. Among 
 other fundamental troubles of the same kind I would mention 
 the ideas of ' occupation ' and of ' magnitude of '. Certainly 
 Mr. Russell asserts here the existence of a relation, but this 
 assertion to my mind seems obviously opposed to fact, and once 
 more I find an unjustified recourse to the inconsistency of imme- 
 diate experience. 
 
 I will enter now on some instances of a somewhat different 
 kind, where however the difficulty remains at bottom the same. 
 I will not repeat what in a former chapter I have urged with regard 
 
 ' In connexion with ' implication ' the axioms given by Mr. Russell 
 (p. 1 6) demand the attention of logicians. But want of space makes it 
 impossible for me to offer here any criticism. 
 
IX SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE II 283 
 
 to the word ' And ' (Chap. VIII, p. 231). Its relevancy and its 
 importance in this connexion however are obvious. But, leaving 
 this, I will touch briefly on the subject of relation and identity. 
 Mr. Russell, I understand, defends and builds on such an idea 
 as the relation of a term to itself. This idea to my mind is 
 unmeaning or else self-contradictory. To my mind a relation 
 must imply terms, and terms which are distinct and therefore 
 different from one another ; and our only ground for thinking 
 otherwise in any case is our failure to apprehend the diversity 
 which has really been introduced. Mr. Russell in particular 
 uses and justifies the abstract identity of a term with itself. 
 He does not, I think, say the same thing here with regard to 
 difference. But, if difference is a relation (and, if it is not a 
 relation, its nature seems puzzling), and, if again all relations 
 are external, — then the difference of a term from itself seems as 
 justifiable as its identity with itself. For, ex hyp., it is all one 
 to the term what its relations are. But, however that may be, 
 Mr. Russell defends identity between a term and itself. And 
 this idea surely contradicts itself, since (to repeat this) diversity 
 is required for relation, and Mr. Russell would not admit that 
 the idea can be at once the same with itself and different from 
 itself. He attempts to justify his doctrine here by producing 
 a number of examples (p. 96). But I can see no meaning in any 
 of these unless diversity is introduced, and I will lower down 
 say something more with regard to one instance. 
 
 I will proceed now to remark more in detail on the incon- 
 sistency of such an idea as ' class '. We have here no fresh 
 difficulty in principle, any more than if we examined, for example, 
 such a word as ' instance '. It is still the old problem of the 
 universal, and of the one in the many, and the dilemmas which 
 everywhere arise change their particular shape but not their 
 radical essence. Mr. Russell however has attached great impor- 
 tance to the problem raised specially by the word ' class '. 
 I regret that my incapacity for following abstract arguments has 
 prevented me in great part from understanding the position 
 which he has here taken up. But I will venture briefly to 
 exhibit some of the puzzles and inconsistencies from which 
 I cannot find that he delivers us. 
 
 I will first remark that no class can be related merely to itself. 
 We have seen above that everywhere relation without diversity 
 
284 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE II chap. 
 
 is meaningless. In the next place no class can consist only of 
 one member. Such an idea is a fiction which contradicts itself. 
 It ceases to do this only when you introduce plurality in the 
 form of possible members. Where these are excluded, as in the 
 idea of the Universe, you can no longer speak of a class. The 
 Universe obviously is no class nor any member of a class of 
 Universes. And in any case, with the introduction of possibility 
 into the idea of class, difficulties would arise, which, as I under- 
 stand it, on Mr. Russell's view would be fatal. The idea of 
 possibility, I may perhaps add, seems to call for an attention on 
 his part which it appears hardly to have received. The account on 
 page 476 seems scarcely adequate, and the idea, I submit, must be 
 dealt with in any satisfactory account of Continuity and Infinity. 
 
 After this necessary preface I will set out briefly the inherent 
 inconsistency of ' class '. («) The class is many. It is its 
 members. There is no entity external to and other than the 
 members. The class is a collection. And it is not a mere possible 
 collection, nor is it a collection of mere possibles. Either of these 
 alternatives would ruin the idea of class, as could be shown, if 
 required. The class is an actual collection of actuals. But it is 
 a collection which is not collected by itself (that idea would seem 
 meaningless), nor is it again collected by anything from the 
 outside — for, if so, it would have to contain this other agency. 
 It is a collection, since it is taken together ; but it is a collection 
 collected by nothing — an idea which seems either senseless or 
 self -contradictory. 
 
 (&) The class is One, but the One is not something else outside 
 the members. The members even seem to be members because 
 of what each is internally. And this apparent quality in each 
 cannot be a relation to something outside the class. The One 
 clearly is something within the members. If there are two 
 qualities they must be taken in one, or else we have forthwith 
 two classes. And (to return to the idea of a collection) two 
 collections, differing only as collections and not differing at all 
 in their contents, seem certainly not the idea which we seek in a 
 class. On the other hand a quality merely internal to each 
 member seems to leave the class without any unity at all. The 
 unity therefore, not being external, must be taken itself as a 
 member of the class. And, since this once more seems senseless, 
 the class appears to be dissolved. 
 
IX SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE II 285 
 
 To save ourselves from ruin we may construct a new class 
 which is wider, and which includes within itself, as members, 
 both the members of the old class and their unity. But since 
 the principle of inconsistency is left, any such expedient is useless. 
 We are forced once more to dissolve our class and to seek refuge 
 in a still wider class. And, when we have reached our widest 
 class of all, our bankruptcy is visibly exposed. We are then 
 compelled openly to make the class as one a single member of 
 itself as many. And with this we end in what is meaningless or 
 else plainly is in contradiction with itself. 
 
 The discussion of these inconsistencies (the reader is perhaps 
 aware) might be pursued almost ad libitum. Since the class 
 cannot fall outside the several members, each member by itself 
 wiU be the class, and wiU even be the whole class. And from 
 this will follow results which are obviously ruinous. For instance, 
 the member itself will become many, and will be internally 
 dissipated. But the reader, if so inclined, can develop these 
 consequences for himself, as well as the puzzles which arise in 
 connexion with the ideas of ' a collection ' and of what is ' actual ' 
 and ' possible '. I have, I hope, said enough "to show that the 
 idea of class is inconsistent ultimately, and that every region 
 where it is employed must be more or less infected with self- 
 contradiction. 
 
 How Mr. Russell would avoid this conclusion I regret to say 
 I have been unable to understand. He apparently defends the 
 idea of a class being a member of itself — an idea which to myself 
 contains a glaring self-contradiction. And, as we have seen, he 
 advocates the doctrine that a term can be related to itself — 
 a view which for the same reason I am forced to reject. In every 
 instance adduced, such, for example, as ' Predicability is pre- 
 dicable ', I find (I would repeat) a distinction and difference, or 
 else I find nothing. The reader will permit me perhaps to illus- 
 trate and explain this statement by the instance of ' being '. 
 I do not reject as meaningless such a judgement as ' being is ' 
 or ■ is is '. I only insist that, in order to have a meaning, I must 
 introduce distinction and diversity. I might, for instance, mean 
 by such an assertion that only or merely being is and that any- 
 thing else must be denied. I might wish to convey that after all, 
 or whatever else it is, being still is. I might in the end mean 
 that in ' being ' itself there is the distinction and diversity of 
 
286 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE II chap. 
 
 ' what ' and ' that ', and might imply that either of these thus 
 ' is ', and yet that each of them is so different from ' being ' 
 that our assertion ' is is ' may be significant. And then I might 
 go on to urge, of " what ' and " that ', that each is included in 
 the class of the other, and that each is a part of the other and 
 so perhaps even of itself. And in short I might develop all 
 those monstrous results which follow when an inconsistent idea 
 like ' class ' is taken as true, not for a limited purpose, but 
 absolutely. 
 
 I will end by some remarks on the subject of negation.*- It 
 seems to me that negation is a topic which, on a general view like 
 Mr. Russell's, causes difficulty, and calls for more notice than (so 
 far as I can find) it has received. Mr. Russell's doctrine of zero 
 to myself appears to be philosophically untenable ; and in various 
 other ideas negation is present in a way which seems to me to 
 require explanation. I will take the last point first in connexion 
 with such ideas as ' a ' and ' any '. (i) ' A man ' appears to 
 assert one instance of man and to deny more than one man. (ii) 
 ' Any man ' seems to affirm that there is a man, and to assert 
 also the existence of other men actual or possible.^ It denies, 
 with regard to these others, any difference — in a certain respect. 
 ' Any ' therefore contains negation in its essence in the form 
 of ' it does not matter who or what '. (iii) ' Every man ' and 
 ' all men ' (I will not here discuss the difference between these) 
 contain the denial of ' man ' outside of certain limits ; while (iv) 
 ' some man or men ' means a man or several men, together with 
 a negation as to my further knowledge. It conveys that ' I know, 
 or need know, no more about it than that '. Now I do not suggest 
 that the negation in these terms is a matter with which Mr. Russell 
 is not perfectly familiar. I am urging merely that I do not 
 understand the place which in his general system of ideas negation 
 is to occupy. 
 
 To come now to the account of zero, this idea, unless I have 
 failed to understand it, seems to contain an open self-contradic- 
 tion. ' It would seem that " no pleasure " has the same relation 
 to pleasure as the various magnitudes of pleasure have, though it 
 has also, of course, the special relation of negation ' (p. i86). The 
 
 ' Cf. Chap. X, pp. 29s foil. 
 
 ^ ' Any ' tends to drift away from this assertion, but so tends to drift 
 away from itself. 
 
IX SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE II 287 
 
 ' also ' here to my mind involves a self-contradiction. To my 
 mind ' no pleasure ' excludes pleasure, and by consequence the 
 required relation ; and how this consequence is avoided by 
 Mr. Russell I have been unable to see. On the alleged positive 
 relation I have already remarked, and the difficulties attaching 
 themselves to Mr. Russell's idea of a kind of magnitude to myself 
 seem insuperable. Every magnitude has ' a certain specific 
 relation to the something of which it is the magnitude. This 
 relation is very peculiar, and appears to be incapable of further 
 definition '. I must repeat with regard to this relation that to 
 my mind it is a sheer fiction, as is also the relation alleged to 
 exist in ' occupation '. The fact is a complex not consisting of 
 or reducible to terms in relation. But, however that may be, 
 the proposal to unite this relation by an ' also ' to the relation of 
 negation I can only understand as a demand to bring together 
 simply two elements which exclude each other. And with regard 
 to ' indefinable ', what troubles me is not that I insist on defining 
 everything. What troubles me is that, if an indefinable is 
 meaningless, to me it is nothing, and that here the meaning which 
 I must give to zero (if I am not to leave it meaningless) seems 
 inconsistent with itself. 
 
 It is intolerable to my mind to speak of ' no pleasure ' as being 
 a decreased lot of pleasure, or, when pleasure is once more 
 added, to speak of pleasure as being increased. On the other 
 hand, since to me there is no such thing as bare nothing, and 
 since all negation rests on a positive basis, you can rightly speak 
 of diminution when you descend from pleasure to no pleasure, 
 and, when you pass the other way, you can rightly speak of 
 increase. But what is this positive something which has here 
 become less or more, and has become less or more by pleasure ? 
 To call this something ' pleasure ', even where pleasure is speci- 
 fically excluded, surely involves self-contradiction. And the 
 same remark applies to any attempt to begin with less than 
 something, and to increase this until it becomes something, or 
 to descend by degrees of diminution from something to nothing. 
 If such ideas are useful, then of course they must be used, but 
 in the end they do not hold together. But I hasten to add that 
 I think it probable that on the subject of zero I have wholly 
 failed to understand Mr. Russell. 
 
 These pages have been written, I would repeat, with great 
 
288 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE II chap. 
 
 reluctance and with a sense of compulsion. I have felt myself 
 coming forward, or rather driven, to speak on matters where 
 on one side I am quite ignorant, and where this ignorance is 
 only too likely to have led me into fatal error. And I have 
 criticized a writer whose work as a whole I am unable to appre- 
 ciate, and in connexion with whom I can say nothing on some of 
 those merits which I am sure are very great, but which are really 
 beyond me. And, even where mere metaphysics or mere logic is 
 concerned, I have had to confine myself here to dissent. I regret 
 this, for I do not think, amongst those present writers on philo- 
 sophy whom I know, there is any one who, as compared with 
 Mr. Russell, calls for more or even for as much attention. For 
 any student of first principles that attention seems to me to be 
 not merely advisable but imperative. The problem of the 
 general nature of order and series has been too much neglected, 
 and yet surely it is a problem which seems infinitely promising. 
 Not only has this inquiry been brought to the front by Mr. 
 Russell, but he has, at the lowest estimate, supplied matter for 
 its solution which no one can neglect. And to have done this by 
 itself, even if he had done nothing beyond, is to have helped our 
 philosophy in a way which, I hope and believe, wiU become more 
 and more manifest. 
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE III i 
 
 The explanations offered by Mr. Russell in the July number of 
 Mind (1910) have been read, I am sure, with interest by many 
 readers. I unfortunately did not see the number at the proper 
 time, but still I hope it is not too late to ask Mr. Russell to explain 
 somewhat further ; for in the main I am left still unable to under- 
 stand. If, however, Mr. RusseU should feel that within con- 
 venient hmits there is no more to be done, such a position, so 
 far as I am concerned, would call for no justification. 
 
 I. In the first place, my difficulty as to ' unities ' remains.^ 
 Is there anything, I ask, in a unity beside its ' constituents', i.e. 
 
 ^ From Mind for January 1911. 
 
 ' On this and some other points cf. Chap. X. 
 
IX SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE III 289 
 
 the terms and the relation, and, if there is anything more, in what 
 does this ' more ' consist ? Mr. Russell tells us that we have not 
 got merely an enumeration or merely an aggregate. Even with 
 merely so much I should still have to ask how even so much is 
 possible. But, since we seem to have something beyond either, 
 the puzzle grows worse. If I remember right. Prof. Stout some 
 years ago stated the problem as attaching essentially to the fact 
 of ' relatedness '. What is the difference between a relation 
 which relates in fact and one which does not so relate ? And if 
 we accept a strict pluralism, where, I urge, have we any room for 
 this difference ? 
 
 2. In the next place, as to ' imphcation ' my troubles continue. 
 If we have nothing but facts, I see no room for implication, and 
 if we have anything more or less than facts, I cannot understand 
 what this is. By all means banish possibility as real, but where 
 among facts does implication fall ? Is a disjunction with its 
 ' Either-or ' an actual fact ? Are ' conditions ' facts ? Is " de- 
 ducibiUty ' a fact ? With regard to facts I thought our attitude 
 was one of ' It is ' or (perhaps also) ' It is not '. I do not in the 
 least understand the position of ' either-or ' or of ' can be ' or 
 ' may be '. 
 
 3. I urged against the possibility of a term being related to 
 itself the fact that relation implies diversity, and I should like to 
 explain my reason for holding to this fact. I do not proceed here 
 by arguing downwards from some assumption or axiom. ^ I pro- 
 ceed on the contrary by way of actual experiment. With any 
 relation remove diversity (this is my experience), and the relation 
 is destroyed. You have (I find) no relation left unless you also 
 leave that diversity which you may have failed to notice. What 
 I of course am forced to assume here is that I have correctly 
 performed my experiment. If Mr. Russell on the other side says 
 that he can perceive a relation where there is absolutely no 
 diversity about the terms, I do not see how we are to argue 
 about our difference. 
 
 4. With regard to diversity, externality and mere fact, the 
 assumptions (I do not call them such) which I make are as 
 follows. I assume first that, where I get the unmeaning or the 
 self -destructive, I have not got even the possible. And I assume 
 that what is is, in the sense that, so far as I have truth and 
 
 ' Cf. here Chap. XI, pp. 311 foil. 
 1574 U 
 
290 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE III chap. 
 
 reality, I have not got something which is true and real merely 
 because of something else. This second assumption, if it is to 
 be called one, bears on the question of externality and mere fact 
 in a way which I will explain. 
 
 (a) But, first, with regard to diversity Mr. Russell maintains, 
 as I understand, that our only reason for denjdng the relation of 
 diversity between a term and its own self is that this relation is 
 not a fact. Whether Mr. Russell means more than that the 
 relation has not yet been found, I am unable to judge. To 
 myself on the other hand the above relation is not possible. 
 To myself it either is meaningless or self -destructive. In making 
 an ideal experiment I either have no diversity, or else the terms 
 are different ; and, when I suppress the difference, the relation 
 is destroyed. I therefore deny this possibility, and I go on further 
 to argue that any premisses from which such a possibiUty follows 
 are false. 
 
 (6) With regard to externality and mere fact I should first 
 explain that, in my opinion, these are things which are not and 
 which cannot be observed. To have bare A in bare external 
 relation to B is not possible in any observation or experiment. 
 The supposed fact is really an inference reached by vicious 
 abstraction. We saw above how ' unities ' and ' imphcations ', 
 without which Mr. Russell apparently cannot move a step, involve 
 always a something more which on his view seems inexplicable. 
 And the same thing holds good with regard to any alleged 
 perception of mere conjunction. 
 
 To myself the mere fact in which something seems to qualify 
 A from the outside, is never really the whole fact. There is 
 always here a condition left outside of what you take as the fact. 
 Your statement is therefore true not of A itself but of A qualified 
 by X. And hence the opposite of your statement is also true. 
 On the other hand to say something about A which in no sense 
 qualifies A, remains to my mind meaningless. In other words, 
 no ' and ' which is purely external is thinkable. This is once 
 more the point to which Mr. Russell is invited to address himself. 
 The above is the ground of objection to externality and to mere 
 fact. You want, that is, to say something about something, 
 and not about something else, particularly when the something 
 else is unknown. The demand for ' intrinsic ' relations I take 
 to be an expression of this want, but I agree that here once more 
 
IX SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE III 291 
 
 complete satisfaction is impossible. There is of course with me 
 no question of any ' axiom '. 
 
 Naturally I realize that in this way doubt may be thrown upon 
 every possible conclusion, however certainly it seems to follow 
 in ideal experiment. How are we anywhere to save ourselves 
 from doubt arising from the presence of the possibility of an 
 unknown condition ? Have we not with every result a counter- 
 possibility ? This question in its turn leads to the inquiry whether 
 the alleged counter-possibility is everywhere really possible. 
 But I must not here digress into a defence of what I have argued 
 elsewhere. 
 
 5. I have stated the main principle on which objection is taken 
 to absolute externality and bare conjunction. I would go on to 
 add that I am still in doubt as to the sense in which according 
 to Mr. Russell relations are external. The terms are to contribute 
 nothing, and so much I understand. But I still do not know 
 whether Mr. Russell takes the relations apart from any terms to 
 be thinkable. To be consistent he should, in my opinion, hold 
 this view, but I cannot say that he does so. If all that is meant 
 is that this or that term contributes no more than any other term, 
 clearly, from so much, absolute externality and pluralism do not 
 follow. On the other hand, a relation apart from terms is to me 
 unmeaning or self -destructive, and is an idea produced by an 
 indefensible abstraction (cf. pp. 295 foil.). 
 
 6. I will end by noticing briefly Mr. Russell's contention that 
 on his view we are less in conflict with science and with common 
 sense. This is an argumient which I am very far from under- 
 valuing. In fact the doctrine which I hold I hold largely because 
 it seems to me to remain, more than others, in harmony with life 
 as a whole. I am speaking of course only of views which aim at 
 theoretical consistency, and not of those where inconsistency and 
 self-contradiction are of minor importance. But I could not on 
 this ground compare the conclusions advocated by myself with 
 those taught by Mr. Russell, because on the most important point 
 I do not know what his conclusion is. To myself the things which 
 matter most in life are not to be resolved into terms with relations 
 between them. And I am ignorant as to what on this point 
 Mr. Russell may really hold. The question is in a word as to 
 experiences which, to a greater or less extent, are non-relational. 
 Obviously, when I do not know whether and how far Mr. Russell 
 
 u 2 
 
292 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE III chap, ix 
 
 denies the existence of such facts, or in what sense he admits them, 
 it is not in my power to judge as to how far his views are in 
 harmony with science and common sense, if I use these terms, 
 that is, in anything Hke a wide meaning. This is a point on which 
 some explanation by Mr. Russell would be welcome, I am sure, 
 to others as well as to myself. We return here to the doubt as 
 to ' unity ' with which we began. We have again on our hands 
 the whole question as to sensible fact and as to all that is covered 
 by the word ' feeHng '. I should perhaps add that, so far as I can 
 judge, Mr. Russell's view as to the inviolability of ' facts ' would 
 make indefensible the constructions in and by which the entire 
 body of history and of natural science consists. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 A DISCUSSION OF SOME PROBLEMS IN CONNEXION 
 WITH MR. RUSSELL'S DOCTRINE 
 
 Since the preceding chapter appeared in Mind, Mr. 
 Russell has brought out several important articles in the 
 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1910-12), and, 
 beside his Essays, has published an interesting little volume 
 on the Problems of Philosophy. While grateful for all these 
 I do not find that my main difficulties have been removed. 
 And I cannot perhaps do better than touch and even 
 enlarge on certain points which seem vital. 
 
 I. The first of these will be Mr. Russell's theory of judge- 
 ment and truth. I will not attempt to state this, since 
 I doubt my having succeeded in grasping it. But I cannot 
 accept the view that a unity can here, or anywhere, consist 
 in a multiple relation, and to this difference in principle 
 I will return lower down. And, even apart from this, 
 Mr. Russell's doctrine to my mind has remained untenable, 
 and I have found my difficulties confirmed, it seems to me 
 convincingly, by Prof. Stout. ^ The view that for me, as 
 I judge, there is no unity anywhere in what I take as true 
 except the unity made by my judgement, seems indefensible. 
 It involves apparently in principle the complete previous 
 dissolution for me of the whole content, followed by its 
 re-integration in detail by means of one new multiple rela- 
 tion. Only (so it seems) because of this supervening relation 
 is for me the horse before the cart, and everything through- 
 
 ' In the Aristotelian Proceedings for 1910-11. Prof. Stout, however, seems 
 willing, as I am not, to accept in principle the ' multiple relation '. 
 
294 SOME PROBLEMS IN CONNEXION chap. 
 
 out not turned just the other way. I amreminded here of 
 the position taken by some over-zealous disciples of Kant, 
 where every particular relation found in the object appears 
 to have been thrown out by an impartial, not to say casual, 
 eruption from the synthetic Ego. But I can scarcely sup- 
 pose that such an interpretation of Mr. Russell's view can be 
 really much more than a misapprehension. 
 
 Suppose that, as sometimes happens, a husband A is 
 jealous of a man C who does not exist in fact but is imaginary. 
 On the above doctrine this complex unity C would, appar- 
 ently, be made ad hoc by A's present judgement. But C 
 has really been the result of a gradual morbid growth. 
 And, in order for the new unity of the judgement to super- 
 vene, this result apparently must be ad hoc disintegrated. 
 Again, to pass from this, there is a difficulty, the importance 
 of which it would, I think, be hard to exaggerate. I under- 
 stand that the world made for me by a new multiple relation 
 may or may not answer to things as they are outside that 
 relation. But what I cannot understand is why one of 
 these two worlds should be more real than the other. Why 
 is not the content affirmed in my judgement in any case 
 absolutely real ? Suppose that, more or less, it does not 
 correspond with some other arrangement, why and on what 
 principle do we set one arrangement above the other ? 
 Why is a multiple relation, where a subject comes in, not 
 just as real as anything else ? And can its detail be false, 
 just because that detail is different from something other 
 than itself ? I have so far been unable on all these points 
 to understand Mr. Russell's teaching. Are we, I repeat, 
 to call unreal anything which is what it is only in and 
 through relation to a subject, and, if so, why ? And, if we 
 are not to say that this is unreal, are we ever to caU it false, 
 and if so, on what principle ? And are we, I add, still to 
 use the word ' false ' even where we have a whole psychical 
 state which does not so much as pretend to be true ? 
 
X WITH MR. RUSSELL'S DOCTRINE 295 
 
 II. Leaving this point, where I cannot pretend to have 
 understood Mr. Russell, I will touch on another difficulty. 
 Is it possible to think of a relation as being real apart from 
 all terms ? ^ I now understand that Mr. Russell affirms 
 this possibihty, and further adduces arguments in favour of 
 its existence in fact.^ Of course I agree that, since one 
 speaks of a relation without terms, in a sense one must 
 think of it, but for myself I am sure that I cannot think of 
 it as real. 
 
 Difference and identity, where nothing is the same or 
 different, after and before and the difference between after 
 and before, where nothing is before or after anything, right 
 and left and their difference, and greater and less on some 
 scale, where there are no terms and, perhaps, no different 
 places — all of this to my mind in the end is unmeaning. 
 When I remove the terms wholly, my idea is forthwith 
 destroyed, or, again, it becomes inconsistent with itself when 
 the removal is ambiguous. And there is no question here 
 of arguing downwards from some axiom which I assume. 
 I am appealing direct to an ideal experiment, and the result, 
 at least to my mind, is certain. Whether Mr. Russell goes 
 so far as to ask me to conceive of a series or scale where 
 there are absolutely no terms, where there is nothing at all 
 but bare relations, and perhaps in the end nothing but one 
 multiple relation — I am unable to say. But I cannot find 
 that any relation survives in my mind the total removal of 
 its terms. The terms may be to the last degree vague and 
 schematic, but, once attempt to abstract them, and you 
 find that they were there. 
 
 But relations without terms, Mr. Russell argues, must be 
 thinkable, and I go on to deal with what I understand to 
 be the reasons adduced. Where a relation is universal and 
 holds of ' anything ', you could not take it so, Mr. Russell 
 
 • Chap. VIII, p. 238, and IX, p. 291. 
 
 " Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1910-11, pp. iii, 112, 
 
296 SOME PROBLEMS IN CONNEXION chap. 
 
 urges, unless you took it quite apart from everything. And, 
 again, since it is admitted that you can analyse a whole 
 into terms and relations, you could not do that unless the 
 relations were really separate. Whether Mr. Russell main- 
 tains that every possible distinction has separate reaUty, 
 I do not know. But that this is the conclusion which must 
 follow, appears to me to be obvious. 
 
 {a) I will consider first the argument with regard to 
 universals. Whether, given a bare universal, Mr. Russell 
 can supply a satisfactory account of its relation to ' any- 
 thing ', I will not inquire. What I wish to show here is 
 that the facts can be dealt with quite otherwise. The 
 subject is a large one, and it raises psychological problems 
 on which I cannot touch, but I will endeavour to state 
 briefly the conclusion which to myself seems tenable. There 
 is no such thing as a bare universal, nor for my consciousness 
 of universality is such a thing wanted, nor could it serve. 
 In fact there is always an aspect of particularity, though 
 this aspect may of course be hard to observe, and though 
 the whole content may be highly schematic in character. 
 But, though in our perception of a universal the particu- 
 larity always is there, it is treated as more or less irrelevant. 
 We ignore it, or, while recognizing it, we exclude it from 
 our view entirely or partially. It is in a word negation 
 which is implied in our awareness of universals and which 
 makes that awareness possible.^ ' Representation ' at least, 
 the reader perhaps may agree, without exclusion would be 
 a word deprived of its meaning. 
 
 When I have the universal idea, say, of a triangle, that 
 idea is an event in my mind, and it is particular in a certain 
 aspect. In what this aspect of particularity in various cases 
 consists, I do not propose here to discuss. But every 
 psychical event, I assume, has particular existence.^ Now 
 
 ' Cf. pp. 286-7. 
 
 " Cf. pp. 153 foil., and Prof. Bosanquet's Logic, vol. ii, chap. x. 
 
X WITH MR. RUSSELL'S DOCTRINE 297 
 
 my awareness of a triangle as universal negates the above 
 aspect, and it does so by ignoring the aspect or by excluding 
 it as irrelevant. Whether tacitly or consciously, the thisness 
 is in various senses discarded. I can use the ' instance ' 
 while I ignore even the fact that it is an instance, or, while 
 recognizing that fact, I can treat it as irrelevant. I can 
 again be conscious that my instance is one among others, 
 while at the same time I take that diversity as immaterial 
 since it here makes no difference. Again I may recognize 
 that the many instances, actual or possible, form a class. 
 Their plurality is to me now the positive existence of the 
 universal, while at the same time I exclude their differences, 
 at least as mattering or counting. Thus, when I speak of 
 ' any case of a triangle ', I am aware, though perhaps 
 vaguely, that a number of cases actual or possible is there, 
 but, so .far as these cases differ, I imply (however incon- 
 sistently) that their difference can be ignored or excluded.^ 
 I am speaking here throughout (the reader will remember) 
 of the abstract and not of the concrete universal. This 
 latter (we may here remind ourselves) is perhaps really, 
 though not avowedly, admitted by Mr. Russell under the 
 name of ' unity '. 
 
 ' But your account of the matter ', the reader may urge, 
 ' takes no heed of an obvious objection. According to you 
 I have not before me the bare universal idea, and yet what 
 I have to use, in the negation which you describe, is appar- 
 ently nothing else. How can negation help me to arrive at 
 that from which it proceeds, and which it presupposes as 
 already there ? ' This objection, I reply, forgets that nega- 
 tion is of more than one kind. Denial always rests on a 
 
 ' It is important to keep in mind that we use universals from the very 
 beginning of our mental development. With regard to these we of course 
 do not know that they are universals, or are representative, or form a 
 class. Whether and in what sense there is negation here, is of course 
 a further question. The action from the very first of universals is a 
 matter discussed by me elsewhere. Seemy Principles of Logic. 
 
298 SOME PROBLEMS IN CONNEXION chap. 
 
 basis, but that basis is not always, like that which it denies, 
 an object before the mind. When you exclude you exclude 
 on the strength of something positive, but this positive 
 something, which serves, may not be explicit. In the above 
 distinction is found, I think, the solution of our problem. 
 The universal idea cannot come before us as bare, but this 
 universal on the other hand is used as the positive ground 
 of a negation, and, as that, it can on reflection be afiirmed. 
 
 Our idea of a triangle has, we saw, a particular side which 
 we ignore or take as irrelevant. Our attitude here is so far 
 negative, and, as negative, it involves a positive basis. 
 This basis is that central area in our triangle which is 
 identified in feeUng with a familiar name and with a use 
 beyond itself.^ The central area is by itself no object. 
 It is something in the object, not separated from the 
 object, which repels whatever else in the object interferes 
 with a certain reference elsewhere. It is the quahfication 
 which, we feel, answers to a recognized employment and 
 name. And later, though our meaning never becomes bare, 
 we can be aware of it in its proper character, and can go 
 on to relate it positively to that diversity which in a sense 
 it excludes. 
 
 Suppose that on an object of a certain kind you are 
 accustomed to act, practically or theoretically, in a special 
 manner. So far you may know nothing about any universal, 
 though obviously there is here a universal, which you use, 
 or which uses you, in a certain fashion. Then let us suppose 
 that there comes a striking difference in the instance. Upon 
 this you hesitate perhaps, and then proceed to act in your 
 usual way. Still this noticed difference may have its effect, 
 and may lead to a consciousness of ' and yet ' and of ' after 
 all '. You are now aware of a sameness, and, with it, 
 a difference which is there and does not count. But this 
 
 ' Even in the case of a sensation, such as our awareness of red, the 
 universal aspect depends, I should say, in the end on a certain use, but, 
 in some cases, on a mere theoretical use. 
 
X WITH MR. RUSSELL'S DOCTRINE 299 
 
 sameness is a basis which, as such, is not before you. It is 
 felt, and felt as that which is in one with the habitual use 
 which later is named. And, however much you reflect, 
 and, however clearly the identical and universal are expU- 
 cated, they can never become naked. Your awareness of 
 triangularity still must leave the particular standing as a 
 fact, while you disregard it, or while, recognizing it in various 
 senses, you deny its ralevance. Your exclusion in the end 
 rests on that which by itself is not an object. Its positive 
 basis is an area of content emphasized in feeling, and identi- 
 fied later in feeling with a recognized function and name. 
 This emphasized nucleus, with its exclusion of any accom- 
 paniment which threatens to invade it, is the root of our 
 knowledge of the universal as object (cf. p. 309, note). 
 
 If this brief account is not mistaken, it would follow that 
 for our consciousness of a universal the idea of a class or 
 collection is not required. The diversity, ignored in use or 
 recognized as excluded, may (to repeat this) be the particular 
 nature of our idea as a mental fact. There is here no refer- 
 ence to other cases whether actual or possible. When these 
 cases and their diversity are recognized, we are aware of an 
 ' instance '. And, when again further the other instances 
 are taken collectively, we have the idea of a class. But 
 knowledge of an instance or a class is not essential to our 
 use of a universal, nor, even when we have before us an 
 abstract idea, need this aspect be present to our minds. 
 On the difficulties involved in the idea of a class I have 
 remarked already (pp. 283 foil.). 
 
 (6) I will pass from this to touch briefly on the nature of 
 analysis. Mr. Russell urges, as I understand, that the fact 
 of analysis proves the existence of bare relations. For, if 
 you were not acquainted with these relations by themselves, 
 the result of the analysis would to you be meaningless. The 
 principle here involved leads to results which, so far as I see, 
 
300 SOME PROBLEMS IN CONNEXION chap. 
 
 are wholly ruinous. It will follow that without any excep- 
 tion every distinction which I can make anywhere, exists 
 bare and real by itself. This plain consequence does not, 
 however, appear to be drawn and accepted by Mr. Russell. 
 And I therefore conclude that I have failed to apprehend 
 the argument which he seeks to found on the nature of 
 analysis.^ 
 
 Without any further reference then to Mr. Russell I will 
 venture to add a word on this difficult problem. Analysis 
 and synthesis I take in the end to be two aspects of one 
 principle, just as are again (to give a general illustration) 
 rights and duties. Every analysis proceeds from and on 
 the basis of a unity. The ' And ', we have already seen, is 
 nothing but a form of oneness. Analysis and abstraction, 
 far from suppressing union and totality, are the substitution, 
 the superposition for a certain end and purpose, of another 
 kind of synthesis.^ But on this general aspect of the pro- 
 blem I do not wish to remark here. The point before us is 
 the question as to how, without separation in existence, we 
 can discriminate ideally in analysis ; and this question has, 
 I think, in principle been answered already. The individual 
 unity, as we saw, can be left standing in fact, while one of 
 its aspects is emphasized, and while from that basis other 
 aspects are negated. The result of the process is, in the 
 present case, the ideal discrimination of one or more features 
 left none the less united. The moving principle is the 
 identification of some character of a complex whole with 
 that which goes beyond this whole and is incompatible with 
 its residual content. Hence you have incompatibility in 
 idea, conjoined with coexistence in fact. If, for instance, 
 you take a confused plurality, ab c, and if you emphasize b, 
 as used in a function b-d, and then attend to what happens, 
 the result is as follows. You have the feature b given at 
 
 ' Loc. cit., p. 112. 
 
 ^ Principles of Logic, pp. 430-54. And, for the nature of ' And ', see 
 above, p. 231, note. 
 
X WITH MR. RUSSELL'S DOCTRINE 301 
 
 once in perceived unity with a and c, and yet as passing 
 away from them and distinct from them. The function b-d, 
 I need hardly add, may be at bottom theoretical or practical. ^ 
 In any case the felt oneness of b with a use excluding its 
 implicit unity with a and c, is that which brings out at once 
 the two sides involved in discrimination and analysis. 
 
 The whole of this question, both as to universals and as 
 to analysis, turns on the meaning given to ideality, for all 
 discrimination is ideal. Here the two paths diverge. If an 
 idea is something separate, there will be in the end no 
 difference between facts and ideas, and in the end, I should 
 say, you will be left without either.^ But on the other path 
 there is nowhere an absolute division in reality. Ideality is 
 the loosening of some feature of content from its own exist- 
 ence, a loosening which comes from the attachment also of 
 that feature to something beyond.* Ideality rests on the 
 identity at once with a standing ' here ' and a transcendent 
 ' elsewhere '. And we have an idea where we attribute 
 some feature of given content to a reality which falls outside 
 of that content's private existence. This existence, we have 
 seen, is in various senses negated, but, if it were removed, 
 the idea would be lost. Ideality, we may say, is what moves 
 the world, and it is the inseparable union at once positive 
 and negative of fact and transcendence. 
 
 Leaving the subject of analysis I will notice a dilemma, 
 
 ' There is a further point of importance to be noticed here. After we 
 have learnt to discriminate, we have gained a new form of awareness of 
 many in one. And hence, when later we go about to discriminate, we 
 can make use of this form. We can apply it as an ideal schema to some 
 unanalysed complex, and then the features of this complex may become 
 distinct through fusion and identification with the differences in our 
 schema. This is of course one form of what is called ' apperception ', 
 but it is obviously not so ultimate as the process explained in the text. 
 It should be clearly understood that in that process ' fusion ' is not in- 
 volved, and that, to bring it in, would be in my opinion a serious error. 
 
 " So far as I can judge that is really the case with Mr. Russell. Unless, 
 that is, he is prepared to place ' unities ' first, and to subordinate to that 
 principle all the rest of his doctrine, I fail to see what place is left in his 
 world for either a fact or an idea. ' Cf. Chap. Ill, pp. 28-9. 
 
302 SOME PROBLEMS IN CONNEXION chap. 
 
 not, I believe, offered by Mr. Russell. It is admitted (this 
 may be urged) that one can think of bare triangularity, and 
 can think of a relation naked and devoid of all terms. But, 
 if these things were not real, how, it may be asked, could 
 they really be objects ? This same argument, it will be 
 noticed, applies without exception to every idea, no matter 
 how self-contradictory ; and its consequence, if it held good, 
 would be theoretical ruin. With this dilemma I have dealt 
 already,^ but it may be well perhaps once more here to 
 state its solution. 
 
 Any idea, of course not meaningless, let it be ever so 
 monstrous, is thinkable, so long, that is, as you do not think 
 it out. For you may couple it with some tacit condition, 
 taken with which its elements are somehow kept apart and 
 so combined. In this manner you can hold it before you 
 as an object. But go on to realize your ' somehow ' and to 
 make that explicit, and the object either becomes another, 
 or, by the withdrawal of the condition, is disintegrated. 
 Thus a relation without terms is a thinkable idea. ' Rela- 
 tion ' and ' exclusion of terms ' and ' coupUng ' are all 
 thinkable, and their union without doubt is an object 
 somehow ; but then the question is how. The relation by 
 itself is thought of really perhaps as a relation taken with 
 other terms, and on the strength of these other terms, which 
 are ignored, I exclude the terms which are explicit. Or I 
 couple ' relation ' and ' absence of terms ', because coupUng 
 is intelUgible, and it is easy to forget the special nature of 
 the coupled. Or (it is all the same thing) exclusion clearly 
 is a relation, and there can be a relation, we know, between 
 a relation and its terms. But realize what you are doing, 
 cease to ignore and to forget, and once begin to make 
 expHcit every ' somehow ', and your relation without terms 
 is either transformed or goes to pieces before your eyes. 
 
 ' Chap. Ill, p. 41, note, and Chap. IX, pp. 269-72. Cf. Prof. Stout, 
 Arist. Proc. for 1911-12, p. 194. 
 
X WITH MR. RUSSELL'S DOCTRINE 303 
 
 Everywhere what may be called the individual is the real, 
 and yet the individual is in various ways never self-con- 
 tained. And in use we may disregard this or that residual 
 aspect of its content. We may emphasize and may attend 
 merely to the opposite of what we disregard. And we may 
 go on to set down what we thus transcend as excluded for 
 a purpose or even utterly. But this idea of exclusion, when 
 you make it absolute, becomes self-discrepant and inco- 
 herent ; and the more you seek to grasp it, as it is, the more 
 certainly does it fly apart in your hands. This is, however, 
 not so much a matter for argument and discussion as for 
 actual experiment.^ 
 
 III. I will pass now to the subject of what Mr. Russell 
 calls ' multiple relations '. If there were such things, I 
 cannot think that they would serve their alleged purpose, 
 and in the second place I fail to see that such things exist 
 at all. 
 
 (a) We are brought back once more here to the funda- 
 mental question of ' unities '. Is there, in the end and 
 really, for Mr. Russell such a thing as a whole which is non- 
 relational or again super-relational ? Unless we know the 
 answer to this question, the entire position seems doubtful 
 throughout. Now on the one hand Mr. Russell appears to 
 be fully committed to such unities, but, if so, how this 
 doctrine stands to his other views, I am unable to conceive. 
 On the other hand, in his interesting little book on the 
 Problems of Philosophy, the idea seems to have disappeared. 
 There is even a tendency to imply that a complex unity 
 consists in a relation (p. 202). But this problem surely 
 (if in philosophy there are problems) is second to none in 
 importance. 
 
 Let us consider (it is one of Mr. Russell's instances) the 
 case of jealousy. We have here an emotional state, and in 
 
 ' Cf. p. 289, and Chap. XI, at the beginning. 
 
304 SOME PROBLEMS IN CONNEXION chap. 
 
 this state let us agree that we have relations, and for the 
 sake of argument (if you will) one principal relation. And 
 on the other side let us agree that our state is a unity. 
 Now the question is whether this unity consists in a relation 
 or relations. Given the terms and the relations (whatever 
 these are), as terms and relations, and given nothing else, 
 have you got, or can you reconstitute, the emotional fact ? 
 The fact, I presume, is the jealousy that I feel. And is this 
 a relation, or is it, on the contrary, a unity of another sort ? 
 To myself, as I understand the question, the answer is 
 obvious. It seems to me monstrous to describe a felt whole 
 as a relation. A relation (to repeat this) is one thing, while 
 a relational whole is another thing. And, not only with an 
 emotion but everywhere, to myself the fact of a relational 
 complex is a unity which cannot possibly consist in a set of 
 relations or again in a relation. Nor could any ' multiple 
 relation ', if such existed, make the unity of a fact. But 
 how in the end Mr. Russell understands this matter, I am 
 quite unable to say. 
 
 I can imagine a view which I certainly do not attribute 
 to Mr. Russell, a view which for a moment (if the reader is 
 so inclined) it may be well to take seriously. Reality here, 
 or at least the main reality, will consist in relations, bare 
 relations without terms. And these relations are able to 
 generate a kind of world. They are of many kinds, and 
 at least some of them are such as to have what Mr. Russell 
 calls ' sense ', and to be capable thus of forming series, 
 unities which express and consist in one constitutive relation. 
 There are (to use another terminology) various functions of 
 analysis and synthesis in one. And these, being applied 
 one to the other and so dealing only with themselves, produce 
 thus an indefinite number of more complex wholes in endless 
 generation. Thus a spatial relation may seem to be single, 
 but a relation of time, applied to it, forms a principle of 
 
X WITH MR. RUSSELL'S DOCTRINE 305 
 
 fission and a sphere of diversity in which the space-relation 
 becomes plural — and so reciprocally. And consider what 
 happens when on both of these a relation of degree becomes 
 active, and again itself by both is multiplied and pluralized. 
 Further, if these functions have ' sense ', each, even by 
 itself and acting on itself, can perhaps serve as its own 
 principle of endless fission and unbroken unity.^ And the 
 world, perhaps in the end, is one world through such a mere 
 bare self-dividing synthesis. 
 
 There remains, however, a doubt and a question as to the 
 terms. It is hazardous perhaps after all to generate terms 
 by one naked relation which turns another relation, or even 
 itself, into its object and the field of its own activity. On 
 the other hand, if we cannot venture as far as this, we at 
 least do not require a plurality of actual reals to serve as 
 'matter'. Nor need we fall back on the mythology of 
 a Chaos at once nothing and ready for everything. All that 
 we require in the end is one single term. And this one term, 
 together with our world of ideal functions, will make the 
 concrete universe. For one and the same term can be 
 related to itself, and so becomes double and different. And 
 entering into the multiplicity of the various series, it becomes 
 through them an infinity of diverse matters. Its singleness 
 is thus sundered into endless plurality, and is at the same 
 time connected in the end perhaps into one great world of 
 organic unity. 
 
 I need not, I presume, state once more that I do not for 
 one moment attribute anything like the above to Mr. Russell. 
 
 '■ Take a relation, such as ' up and down ', and to this, as a term, apply 
 the same relation. The result apparently would be ' up and down ' in 
 another dimension. And this same procedure could be continued so as to 
 reach an indefinite number of dimensions. And, if you believe that the 
 self-same term can stand on both sides of a relation, I do not see how you 
 can object that this process of a priori construction is from the first ille- 
 gitimate. Then, not content with this result, repeat the same procedure 
 even where the first relation has no terms at all. The same result (it 
 seems to me) will still follow, if once you can accept, as real or possible, 
 a relation without terms and yet not meaningless. 
 
 1674 X 
 
3o6 SOME PROBLEMS IN CONNEXION chap. 
 
 And yet, when I ask myself what in the above is on -Mr. 
 Russell's principles untenable, and exactly why, and how 
 far, it is so, I find myself at a loss. And the 'source of my 
 darkness is, I think, first the question as to -the ' terms ' of 
 relations, and secondly this vital problem as to the existence 
 and nature of ' unities '. 
 
 {b) Even if there were multiple relations, such relations 
 could not constitute unities, since no whole, however rela- 
 tional, is made by and consists in a relation. This is the 
 first point. And now further I wish to question the exist- 
 ence anjrwhere of a ' multiple relation '. This, so far as 
 I can judge, is merely something which has to be postulated 
 because the theory requires it. And in this it seems to me 
 to be like, for instance, the relation alleged by Mr. Russell 
 to exist in ' occupation '.^ Not only then does the multiple 
 relation in any case fail to be all that we want, but I cannot 
 believe that it is even really there. 
 
 Let us take Mr. Russell's instance of ' between '.^ ' Be- 
 tween ' requires a multipMcity of terms, ^ and 'between', 
 it is said, is a relation, and so much may seem obvious. 
 But, I reply, to my mind it is not true that ' between ' is 
 a relation, and the opposite of this I even venture to regard 
 as evident. ' Between ' is certainly a feature which appears 
 in a relational arrangement. But the arrangement is not 
 itself a relation, and still less could it be the relation of 
 ' between '. What is ' between ' is one piece of the related 
 whole, and it never could be that whole itself. So far as 
 the unity of the complex is relational, it is a relation between 
 relations and not between terms. And, secondly, the 
 
 ' See Chap. IX, pp. 264, 287. 
 
 ' Problems, p. 195. The meaning of ' between ' is discussed elaborately 
 by Mr. Russell in his Principles of Mathematics, chap. xxv. 
 
 " If, however, a term could be related to itself, all that we should want 
 would be, I presume, one term, and the multiplicity would come from the 
 ' multiple relation '. 
 
X WITH MR. RUSSELL'S DOCTRINE 307 
 
 complex never consists in a relation, and it never so much 
 as implies a relation which is multiple.^ 
 
 Certainly in a series you can find between the terms one 
 relation, one, that is to say, in tharacter. So far as a series 
 is one series, its several connexions, I understand, must 
 have one character throughout, and one or more of its terras 
 must be between others. And, given this formula, I agree 
 that you can construct a series. But, even if the formula 
 were the series, which surely it is not, yet the formula itself 
 is not between, and what really is between is not the formula. 
 
 And, where I probably have not succeeded in under- 
 staliding; it would hardly serve to elaborate further. I agree 
 of course that there is a looser usage of speech which may 
 b'g ' adduced in support of multiple relations. We can 
 doubtless speak, for instance, of jealousy as being a relation 
 between persons, but we do not here, I am convinced, mean 
 to assert a single relation which is multiple. We are saying 
 perhaps that jealousy is an arrangement involving such and 
 Jjuch relations. But more probably we mean that, where 
 persons are related in a certain manner, with that you have 
 jealousy. And so we go on, expressing ourselves carelessly, 
 to call this manner a relation. But, when we try to speak 
 accurately, our position, I think, is otherwise. The doctrine 
 that an emotion is a relation, we should reject, nor should 
 we agree that it even implies one relation of many terms. 
 We should be again perhaps quite as clear, if we were asked 
 to take the instance of some product of fine art. And with 
 this, regretting once more my failure to comprehend, I am 
 forced to leave the subject of multiple relations. 
 
 * On the other hand I am still unable to accept what has been called 
 the Law of Duality (Mind, O.S., No. 47, p. 382). In the apprehension, 
 say, of a hexagon or a triangle, I am compelled to follow no such principle. 
 I can have a relational arrangement, perceived as a unity, where there is 
 no such dual subordination of the relations involved. This is possible 
 because their unity is more than relational. Such, again, is the case, 
 I would add, with every possible spatial figure. No points and lines in 
 the end can make that what it is. 
 
 X 2 
 
3o8 SOME PROBLEMS IN CONNEXION chap. 
 
 I will, however, end by laying stress on a point which 
 seems fundamental. Given a plurality of terms, and given 
 one relation of a certain sort, to be taken in as many instances 
 as you please — and I agree that with this you can make 
 a series. But I deny emphatically that the series is really 
 made out of nothing more. Obviously, if no further con- 
 dition is added, the result is not one series, and so far I 
 understand that Mr. Russell would agree.^ From the terms 
 and the relations, as materials, the series cannot be made 
 anyhow, and the question as to the how to myself seems 
 vital. And, in order to make your series, what in my 
 opinion you really do, is to superimpose, openly or covertly, 
 upon the data a form of serial arrangement. The series in 
 short is presupposed and is implied in those conditions from 
 which it is supposed to be made. 
 
 Hence, finally, we are led to ask as to what is involved in 
 that which Mr. Russell calls ' sense ', and which in English 
 is perhaps better expressed as ' direction '. Can any mere 
 relation by itself have a ' sense ' ? Has a series, and have 
 the links of a series, if taken apart from a serial whole, any 
 meaning left ? Does not the ' sense ' of each relation take 
 its very character from the serial whole, and, viewed by 
 itself, is not a relation with ' sense ' a vicious abstraction ? 
 I need not state how in my opinion such a question should 
 be answered. 
 
 I should thus agree that a series is in the end teleological, 
 but such a conclusion, we must remember, may help us but 
 little. If the end or object is taken as outside the passage 
 and its steps, we are as far as ever from having reached the 
 essential nature of a series. We do not have a series unless 
 the end is immanent in the passage itself, and is reached not 
 merely by that passage, but in it, at once gradually and as 
 a whole. In a series there must throughout be something 
 identical, of which each link gives you more, and apart from 
 
 ' Principles of Mathematics, cliap. xxiv. 
 
X WITH MR. RUSSELL'S DOCTRINE 309 
 
 which there is no meaning in sense or direction. But I fully 
 admit that we have here a difficult problem which calls for 
 investigation in detail.^ 
 
 Throughout the foregoing remarks I have doubtless failed 
 to comprehend, and I fear that I must have perverted Mr. 
 Russell's doctrines. But I pubHsh what I have written, 
 partly to express my own views, but mainly perhaps as 
 a help towards a better understanding. There is no living 
 writer, with whom I am acquainted, whose work in philo- 
 sophy seems to me more original and valuable than that of 
 Mr. Russell. It will, I hope, not be long before he is able on 
 some fundamental points to explain himself more fully. 
 
 Note to p. 299. — The reader will, I hope, not misunderstand 
 what I have written with regard to universals on p. 299. The 
 universal, and even our awareness of it, come in my view 
 (p. 297, note) long before language is developed. As soon .as 
 one has with anything the sense of sameness or familiarity, 
 with and over against the sense of difference or novelty, one is, 
 I should say, aware of a universal. On the other hand, I agree 
 that it is only through language that the universal becomes 
 known as such. 
 
 * In connexion with the above would have to be discussed the question 
 as to whether, and how far, passage, and I mean by that in the end tem- 
 poral passage, is implied in a relation of any kind whatever. Obviously 
 at first sight from some relations anything like passage is excluded. But 
 still, if you remove passage wholly, the relation, as such, seems to dis- 
 appear, since in its essence it seems to be discursive. The solution lies, 
 I presume, in our taking the passage as at once implied and ignored, 
 since its direction in the supposed cases is immaterial. There are of 
 course those who with regard to spatial and other relations would dispute 
 this, but hardly, I think, rightly. And, if in the result the whole idea 
 of a relation becomes inconsistent, that is a conclusion which may perhaps 
 already have been forced upon our minds. Everywhere in the end a 
 relation appears as a necessary but a self-contradictory translation of 
 a non-relational or super-relational unity. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTHS 
 
 I MUST begin this chapter by once more asking for the 
 indulgence of the reader. Once again I am writing on 
 a theme where I doubt if I have anything really new to offer. 
 My excuse is that there are some questions on which, even 
 at the cost of repetition, I desire to be explicit. And these 
 questions are so difficult and so important, that the reader, 
 if led to dwell on them, may, I hope, be too much occupied 
 to ask for novelty. ' When I think truly, can I think that 
 which has never been so thought before ? ' and ' Can I in 
 any sense make truth ? ' — these were the two problems 
 which I wished specially to notice. And I have thought it 
 better to take these problems more or less in connexion with 
 some other inquiries. 
 
 In any discussion about truth I am met by what to myself 
 is a great difficulty. It is impossible, in my opinion, to deal 
 with truth apart from an examination of the nature of reality. 
 Not merely has every one (though perhaps only at the back 
 of his mind) a view as to reality which is sure to affect his 
 result. The very questions as to truth with which a man 
 begins, involve in the end an answer to certain questions 
 about the nature of things. And to deal with these final 
 inquiries here is obviously not possible. Hence I am forced 
 to refer the reader to that which I have published elsewhere. 
 In what follows I am in the main confined to showing how 
 various problems are dealt with, supposing that you adopt 
 a certain view as to the Universe. If the reader insists on 
 
 ' This chapter appeared first in Mind, July 191 1. 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 311 
 
 asking throughout for more, I can only reply that here I am 
 writing for others. 
 
 I will however begin by noticing some misunderstandings 
 as to the method employed in ultimate inquiry by writers 
 like myself. There is an idea that we start, consciously or 
 unconsciously, with certain axioms, and from these reason 
 downwards. This idea to my mind is baseless. The method 
 actually followed may be called in the main the procedure 
 used by Hegel, that of a direct ideal experiment made on 
 reality. What is assumed is that I have to satisfy my 
 theoretical want, or, in other words, that I resolve to think. 
 And it is assumed that, if my thought is satisfied with itself, 
 I have, with this, truth and reality. But as to what will 
 satisfy I have of course no knowledge in advance. My 
 object is to get before me what will content a certain felt 
 need, but the way and the means are to be discovered only by 
 trial and rejection. The method clearly is experimental. 
 
 Speaking from this point forwards simply for myself, I 
 find an object which is plural. I do not of course mean that 
 it is only plural, but I mean that it has maniness. Now how 
 am I to take this object ideally so as to satisfy my mind ? 
 If I try to take the object as merely many, it is forthwith 
 dissipated and is lost. Therefore the object is not a mere 
 many. Let me now, starting from this result, try to take 
 the object as a mere conjunction of terms and external rela- 
 tions. The aspect here, other than the mere many, will be 
 a bare ' together ' or ' and '. But I want to see what this 
 aspect is. I take it first as adding to the many only another 
 one, a something more of them. And, as soon as I do this, 
 the object once more is dissipated, and the whole conjunction 
 disappears. Therefore the ' together ' or ' and ' does not 
 consist in terms and external relations. It is something 
 else. It may perhaps be called a form of unity and totality.^ 
 
 • On the nature of ' and ' see Chap. VIII, p. 231, and for ' external 
 relations ' cf. the Index. 
 
312 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 I take the plural object as many in one, and with that so far 
 I ain satisfied. But on this naturally succeeds further in- 
 quiry and further trial, not going backwards but endeavour- 
 ing to advance and to specify the How. And where the 
 alleged downward deduction from axioms comes in here, 
 I am myself unable to discover. 
 
 As to what has been called the axiom of internal relations, 
 I can only repeat that ' internal ' relations, though truer 
 by far than ' external ', are, in my opinion, not true in the 
 end. You have no alternatives here, by denying one of 
 which you can go on to assert the other ; for truth in the 
 end is not merely relational. And the alleged axiom is 
 a comparative truth which is not a premiss but a result. 
 The same remark applies to any ' axiom of ground '. Where 
 A is not real by itself but implies and belongs to an ideal 
 whole, you want a reason for A, for you want to know the 
 How of this unity. Mediation is called for, and, if external 
 merely, is none. But the ' axiom ', once more here, is a 
 result and not a premiss. 
 
 I will venture to enlarge on this second supposed axiom. 
 Is it true that everything must have a reason, a ' how ' and 
 a ' why ' ? In the end this assertion is not true, we see at 
 once, of the Universe. The ' axiom ' holds only so far as a 
 thing is not complete in itself, and is therefore, on our view, 
 ideally beyond itself. The demand for the making good of 
 such imperfection, not as real but as ideal, the completion of 
 the thing in idea so as to satisfy us theoretically, is what we 
 mean by the search for a ' why ' and ' how '. Wherever, 
 in other words, you have an ' impHcation ', you want a 
 reason, because you desire to see the whole nature of your 
 implication. 
 
 Where you have a felt whole, as felt, or where you have 
 a non-relational unity, as in a work of art, there, so far, you 
 need not ask ' why '. The tendency of the content to pass 
 beyond the Umits of the thing is not always forced on your 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 313 
 
 notice. The case is different where, by analysis or otherwise, 
 the self-contained unity has been lost. Wherever the oneness 
 of ' what ' and ' that ' has perished before us, or has been 
 destroyed by reflection and analysis, and wherever we seek 
 to reunite these aspects not really but ideally, we have 
 a demand for a ' reason '. 
 
 Every felt whole changes in time, and the felt ' present ' 
 has narrow limits. We are left, when we notice this, with 
 two things, a felt present and a recalled past ; and these two 
 things come to us somehow together. Byt are the two felt 
 or perceived as one in the sense that their contents are 
 throughout in immediate unity ? Clearly not so, and hence 
 the ' somehow ', as it is, does not satisfy us. It is the name 
 of something which, for us, is not all there, and is not 
 actually contained in our fact. And we want the whole of 
 the ' somehow ' actually and in detail. Such a complete 
 totality we cannot directly experience, so as to have once 
 more something which is or seems to be self-sufficient. We 
 therefore attempt to supply this defect by ideas. We seek 
 to understand, to make good ideally our lost unity. 
 
 Passing by the question raised by space, let us go on also to 
 ignore change in time. Let us take some sensible whole, or 
 other non-relational unity ; let us suppose that this does not 
 change in time, and let us, for the sake of argument, assume 
 also that within this, as it comes to you, there is no tendency 
 of the content to pass beyond the limits of the thing. Here 
 so far, it will be said, there is no ' why ' or ' how '. I agree, 
 but I ask whether you intend to remain here. And that, as 
 I observe, is precisely what you do not intend to do. You ^ 
 go on to think, you analyse, you introduce terms and re- 
 lations, whereas in your immediate whole there were no 
 relations or terms ; or, at least and in any case, the whole 
 itself was non-relational. And, so far as you have terms 
 and relations, the unity is destroyed. It now, as the fact of 
 ' relatedness ', falls outside of the relational scheme, and this 
 
314 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 fact you have not specified. The attempt to specify this 
 fact, to re-include it not really but ideally, and so to make 
 good the broken unity, is the demand and the search for 
 the ' how ' and the ' why '. We wish in other words to 
 perceive the full nature of the ' and ' or the ' implication '. 
 We desire in short to understand. 
 
 To ask us here why we cannot remain content with ' the 
 brute fact ', seems even ridiculous. What is the, brute fact ? 
 Is it the fact as merely felt ? Is it an immediate unity 
 taken non-relationally and so not understood ? On the con- 
 trary your ' brute fact ' is that ideal scheme of terms and 
 relations which comes into being only through the destruc- 
 tion of the felt whole. Such a fact is not brute, but is ideal. 
 It is a thing which, as itself, is only for thought. And it 
 itself is not a fact. It has no unity except that which is 
 added from outside itself and is supplied irrationally from 
 elsewhere. Your ultimate brute fact is in brief your own 
 half-thought-out theory. 
 
 We have now seen the nature of the demand for a reason, 
 a ' how ' and a ' why '. We have here no axiom, standing on 
 which we proceed to argue downwards. So far as this truth is 
 true, it is a result and a character of our procedure itself. 
 
 Passing now from this misunderstanding about axioms, 
 I will venture (if the reader will pardon the repetition) to try 
 to throw some further light on the general method which 
 I have used. In theorizing we put questions directly to 
 Reality. In other words we experiment ideally on the nature 
 of things. We find that, given a, we have 6, and that this is 
 how the world behaves.^ The objection that in this way we 
 learn nothing about Reality itself, is ill founded. It depends 
 on a false separation between Reality and ourselves, and it 
 may therefore be dismissed. Reality is such that a is 6. All 
 our truths are true of Reality, but all are subject to a con- 
 
 ' Cf. Principles of Logic, p. 87. 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 315 
 
 dition. We can say indifferently ' a{x)b is real ', or ' Reality 
 is a{x)b\ Such is the doctrine of judgement which I have 
 found to be the one doctrine which holds. 
 
 But obviously with an unknown condition we are but 
 partly satisfied. To pass from one term to another term, we 
 do not know how, is not enough. We have to seek know- 
 ledge where the mode of transition, the mediation itself, also 
 is known. And, even if we had various pieces of knowledge 
 which held good, each in itself, that would still fail to satisfy 
 us, as long as we remained in ignorance as to the connexion 
 of these pieces. For some connexion there is. If we had 
 no ' and ' or ' together ', we should not even have pieces, 
 and ' together ' or ' and ', as we have seen, is an expression 
 of unity and totality. It asserts a whole, but it couples 
 this assertion with blank ignorance as to ' how '. And such 
 ignorance does not content us. We are led, therefore, to 
 search for the reason why we pass from one term to another 
 term. We seek in other words a mediated intelligible whole. 
 That whole, if we could reach it, would fulfil our theoretical 
 want. That would be true and real ; and reality and truth, 
 we have to assume, is that. But whether we can say 
 ' merely that ', is of course a further question. 
 
 The reader may object that, even if the above, so far as it 
 goes, is admitted, if still is useless. It tells us nothing as to 
 the world, since all it tells us is formal. The word ' formal ' 
 I put on one side as a probable source of misapprehension. 
 But I fully agree that all the knowledge we have reached so 
 far about reality is too general and empty. To the question 
 ' What do I know ? ' the above is an answer which by 
 itself does not satisfy. And not only do I hold this, but 
 I have urged also that by itself no such knowledge could 
 even exist. For the whole of our knowledge may be said to 
 depend upon immediate experience. At bottom the Real is 
 what we feel, and there is no reahty outside of feeling. And in 
 the end the Reality (whatever else we say of it) is experience. 
 
3i6 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 Our fundamental fact is immediate experience or feelihg.^ 
 We have here a many in one where, so far, there is no dis- 
 tinction between truth and fact. And feeling again is mine, 
 though of course it is not merely my feeling. It is reality 
 and myself in unbroken unity. We in a sense transcend 
 this unity ; that is clear, for we could not otherwise speak of 
 it. But that we should ever in any way reach a reality out- 
 side of it, seems impossible. And if this is so, as I have con- 
 tended more fully elsewhere, then experience is reality. For 
 in attempting to deny this thesis, or to assert something 
 else, we find on experiment that we have asserted this thesis 
 or nothing.^ 
 
 If then Reality is an intelligible whole and ReaHty also is 
 experience, can we assume that, above relations and inclusive 
 of them, there is an Experience which reasserts our original 
 unity ? If this is possible, our theoretical want would be 
 satisfied. Such a whole would be Reality, and nothing else 
 could in the end be called even possible. There is of course 
 no question here of explaining everything. Such an idea, at 
 least to my mind, is ridiculous, not to say insane. The real 
 question everywhere as to the inexplicable is whether it falls 
 within the general view, or whether, falling outside that, it 
 becomes a negative instance. In the latter case, and in 
 the latter case only, the general view is refuted. But into 
 the discussion of such alleged instances there is no space to 
 enter here.* 
 
 • See especially Chap. VI, and c£. the Index. 
 
 " We have here a matter for observation and experiment and not for 
 long trains of reasoning. In Mind, No. 75, p. 335, I notice, for instance, 
 that Prof. Perry, while uprooting Idealism, demolishes in passing myself. 
 He takes me to argue to a conclusion which I do not hold, from a basis 
 which I have rejected as an error, and then wonders at the unnameable 
 vice of the process. But, if Prof. Perry wishes to get an idea as to the 
 view which he is anxious to refute, why should he not suppose (for a 
 moment) that on my side there is no argument at all, and that on his side 
 there is an inference by way of vicious abstraction ? 
 
 ' Any critic who desires to be fair, should, I think, make up his mind 
 on these two questions : (a) Has or has not a philosophy got to explain 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 317 
 
 My object in the above has not been to indulge in idle 
 repetition, nor again to argue that the conclusions which 
 I hold are not refutable. What I have been aiming at is to 
 help the reader to understand how it is that such conclusions 
 as mine are reached ; in what way, that is, and by what 
 method, starting from what is given, we arrive at our goal. 
 I wish, finally to point to a merit possessed, I think, by no 
 view which is not akin to my own. In philosophy it is not 
 enough merely to state the connexion between truth and 
 reaUty. One is bound to show in addition how, this con- 
 nexion being so, we can know that it is so, how in short our 
 knowledge is such that it can comprehend itself and reality. 
 I will not repeat here how, on the view which I hold, this 
 vital question is answered. What I wish to urge is this, 
 that on no opposite view (so far as I see) can the question 
 be answered at all. The problem of the ultimate Criterion 
 must be faced, and on any other basis it cannot, I think, be 
 fairly encountered and solved. I will now point out this 
 failure in the case of two widely held doctrines. 
 
 The theoretical criterion, for myself, is in theory supreme. 
 The truth for any man is that which at the time satisfies his 
 theoretical want, and ' more or less true ' means more or 
 less of such satisfaction. The want is a special one. We 
 do not of course know beforehand what it is and what can 
 satisfy it. We only at first feel that there is something 
 special that we miss or gain, and we go on to discover the 
 nature' of the want and its object by trial, failure and 
 success. Let me now proceed to ask what will happen if 
 we take the Criterion to lie in satisfaction not specific but 
 general. The necessary result to my mind is failure and 
 bankruptcy.^ 
 
 everything ? (6) What is it (if anything) that a philosophy may leave 
 unexplained ? Without some consideration of these points I do not 
 myself see how rational discussion is possible. 
 
 ■ What follows may be taken as a commentary on Appearance, 
 PP- 373-4- 
 
318 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 We must not confuse the position in question with that 
 taken in ordinary Hedonism. The Hedonist, as such, has 
 no doctrine of his own about truth. The means to the 
 one Desirable are sought by the intellect, but, as to the 
 nature of the intellect and of truth and fact, almost any 
 view can be joined with Hedonism. But in the' position 
 to be now examined the ground is changed. Satisfaction 
 has itself become the criterion of truth. And this satis- 
 faction we are not to understand in any narrowed sense. It 
 is not to be merely hedonic, nor is it to be merely practical 
 as belonging to what we do, as against what we feel and 
 are. Satisfaction in general is to be our criterion of truth 
 and error. 
 
 There is a mental attitude from which the above must 
 again be distinguished. We may, despairing, for ourselves 
 or in general, of ultimate truth, or finding the quest of it too 
 costly, resolve to abandon it. The satisfaction of our human 
 interests, truth included, is our end; and we decide for 
 ourselves to limit truth to those ideas which subserve our 
 interests so far as they subserve them. Truths are to be 
 working ideas. And if we really understand our present 
 position (as we seldom do), any ideas, no matter how in- 
 consistent, are to be counted true, if and so far as they are 
 required in our spiritual interest. What we feel to be the 
 general health and harmony of our being is the end, and 
 truth is to be subject absolutely to dictation from that. But 
 within these limits we, like the common Hedonist, ilse the 
 everyday notion of truth, and confine it to the search for 
 that which, in the above sense, works. I myself have much 
 sympathy with this attitude which of course, in theory, is 
 not mine.^ But we must remember that such an attitude 
 is not a doctrine about truth and the criterion, and, if it 
 understands itself, makes no pretence to the name of philo- 
 sophy. And, keeping this in mind, we may pass onwards. 
 
 ' Cf. Chap. V, pp. 132-3. 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 319 
 
 The position which we are to examine claims to be a 
 philosophy and to offer an account of truth which is valid. 
 Its criterion, we have seen, is satisfaction not one-sided but 
 general. As to how on this view we are to know what is 
 one-sided or general, a doubt might be raised. But, leaving 
 this, we are face to face with a serious difficulty. Is the 
 general satisfaction to be that of my own self or of others, or 
 again of both at once ? And who are others ? Let us decide 
 to mean by others the present and future inhabitants of this 
 our planet, so far as they are known, and, if you please, let 
 us consider only those inhabitants which are human. But 
 in any case my satisfaction and that of others seem able to 
 collide. Are we to assume that really this is not so, or are 
 we on the other hand to subordinate my satisfaction to that 
 of others, or that of others to my own ? Whatever attitude 
 we adopt, our procedure seems irrational and arbitrary, and 
 we shall hardly save ourselves by trying to take all three 
 positions at once, or as each serves the turn. But our theory, 
 if so, has been shaken by the first simple question. 
 
 It is better hoTvever to examine it further. The general 
 satisfaction includes the future and is not merely present. 
 Let us call it satisfaction in the long run for myself or for 
 humanity. And ' in the long run ' does not mean what 
 ' will be ' in an ordinary realistic sense. For that sense is 
 excluded by our doctrine of truth. What ' will be ' is that 
 which satisfies now as tending to satisfy in the long run. 
 Whatever idea of means to our end satisfies most now, is 
 the truth. 
 
 And ' satisfies ' does not point solely or specially to theo- 
 retical satisfaction. That would be a return to the view of 
 truth which has been abandoned definitely. Then satisfies 
 (we must at once proceed to ask) whom and how ? It cannot 
 be my future self, or humanity in the future, which has to be 
 satisfied, for these surely are inaccessible. The satisfaction 
 clearly must be present. And the present satisfaction of 
 
320 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 humanity once more cannot be reached. For this is known, 
 I presume, only by an inference, and an inference on our 
 present view of truth must rest on actual satisfaction. Thus 
 actual satisfaction in the end must be now and be mine. 
 
 Truth is the idea which satisfies me now. Then in what 
 way ? Not theoretically, for to say that would be to relapse 
 into a discarded attitude. You may say, ' It satisfies me 
 most now to adopt and act on a certain view as to the 
 probable future. This view rests on my present satis- 
 faction, and hence all is consistent.' But no such defence 
 is really valid. For it is an obvious fact that (not to speak 
 of other persons) to adopt and to act on other views some- 
 times satisfies me as much or more. If we admit this fact, 
 then all these opposite views will be equally true. And we 
 can only deny the fact by a collision with everything like 
 common experience and common sense. To identify my 
 satisfaction now with a certain view and a certain object 
 which I take as real, with an ideal construction capable of 
 appearance at other moments and in other persons, would 
 be to make the criterion theoretical. And on our present 
 theory there is no essential connexion between the satis- 
 faction and any special quality in the object. The idea 
 therefore, whatever it is, which satisfies me most now, is 
 true. The truth is whatever idea at this moment is felt 
 to satisfy me most, and, beside this, there is no other 
 truth. 
 
 Theoretical satisfaction may be rejected (and this is the 
 better course) as not existing or as subordinate. Or it may 
 be admitted as one element in the satisfaction which is 
 general. This admission leads inevitably to a coUision 
 between the truth which is theoretical and the truth which 
 is true. And there would be no principle on which to decide 
 between these conflicting claims. The only criterion left in 
 any case is the feehng which at the moment prevails. Truth 
 is nothing but whatever idea I feel at a given moment to 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 321 
 
 give most satisfaction. And with this I submit that we 
 have ended in bankruptcy. 
 
 I will pass on now to say something on the doctrine called 
 Darwinism, so far as it bears on the question of the criterion. 
 We have here at first sight the antipodes of our former view. 
 That stood on satisfaction, while for Darwinism there is 
 nothing in the world like value or good or evil. Anything 
 implying evolution, in the ordinary sense of development 
 or progress, is wholly rejected. But the two views meet 
 positively so far as there is coincidence between that which 
 prevails and that which satisfies. And negatively they meet 
 in their exclusion from the criterion of anything like a special 
 quaUty, type or character, as essential to the object.^ What- 
 ever idea satisfies or prevails (no matter what else it is) 
 is true. 
 
 Darwinism often recommends itself because confused with 
 a doctrine of evolution which is different radically. Human- 
 ity is taken in that doctrine as a real being, or even as the 
 one real being, and Humanity advances continuously. Its 
 history is development and progress to a goal, because the 
 type and character in which its reality consists is gradually 
 brought more and more into fact. That which is strongest 
 on the whole must therefore be good, and the ideas which 
 come to prevail must therefore be true. This doctrine, which 
 possesses my sympathy, though I certainly cannot accept it, 
 has, I suppose, now for a century taken its place in the 
 thought of Europe. For good or for evil it more or less 
 dominates or sways our minds to an extent of which most 
 of us, perhaps, are dangerously unaware. 
 
 Any such view of course confhcts radically with Darwin- 
 ism, and let us now ask how the latter can deal with our 
 inquiry as to truth. The ideas (it may explain) by which 
 our world, and our human world, have got on so far, are 
 
 ' Cf. Chap. IV, pp. 85, 103. 
 
 1574 Y 
 
322 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 called true. There is some probability, though we cannot 
 estimate the balance, that by using the same ideas we shall 
 continue to get on in the same direction. Therefore (a) truth 
 is merely the ideas by which we get on, or (&) at any rate 
 these are the ideas to which we should confine our attention. 
 
 {a) The first conclusion is suicidal, since it contradicts its 
 basis. 1 Its basis obviously is positive doctrine, right or wrong, 
 which assumes and rests on the validity of theoretical truth 
 in the sense which Darwinism denies, (b) The second con- 
 clusion, if, that is, it admits truth in the ordinary sense with 
 regard to human history, is so far consistent. But, so far as 
 Darwinism has anything to say, this conclusion seems ar- 
 bitrary or worse. For the word ' should ' falls outside of 
 Darwinism, just as to ' get on ' means nothing if it means 
 more than to ' go back '. And the historical assertion that 
 only ideas of ' getting on ' have so far worked, is clearly 
 untenable. 
 
 For Darwinism the true idea is the idea which prevails, 
 and we may perhaps identify satisfaction with inward 
 prevalence. Then the question which at once arises is, 
 ' prevails where and when ? ' As to the ' how ' we need not 
 ask, because we know that ' how ' means ' anyhow '. If the 
 where and when are taken as in our world in general, then 
 (as we saw before) such knowledge on our part must rest on 
 the very theoretical truth which we deny. But, if the 
 prevalence is in myself, and in myself here and now, then 
 any idea, no matter what, if it prevails, is true, and all such 
 ideas are true alike. There is no criterion, and from this 
 result we cannot escape by refinements. The argument that 
 Darwinism's idea of prevalence prevails in me here and now, 
 and so proves itself by a circular reinforcement, will not 
 stand scrutiny. For all that we have here is the moment's 
 coincidence, unessential and external, and any of the other 
 ideas which elsewhere or at another time prevail, are as 
 
 ' Cf. Appearance, p. 137. 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 323 
 
 unquestionably true. A contention like the above is good 
 only if the other, the incompatible, doctrine of development 
 is accepted. And it rests probably, wherever it is used, on 
 some reminiscence or result of this other doctrine. The one 
 criterion for Darwinism is the abstract success or prevalence 
 of whatever happens to prevail, without any regard for its 
 character. And this must surely leave us in the end with 
 no criterion at all. 
 
 It may however repay us, before we go further, rapidly 
 to view this matter from the other side. To maintain that 
 Reality or Truth is what prevails, or is that which satisfies 
 us, is not wrong. And similarly it is not wrong to affirm 
 that Reality is ' this ', ' now ' or ' mine '. The mistake here, 
 so far as there is a mistake, lies in our simple identification 
 of both terms, and in our addition of the word ' only '. 
 Any positive attribution, in other words, to Reality must 
 be right, so long as it abstains from the denial, implicit or 
 explicit, of ' something more '. To say ' only ' is to lay 
 emphasis on the negative side of the positive identity. 
 ' Only ' or ' merely ' excludes any ' other ', or again it may 
 warn us against making an abortive attempt to find an 
 ' other ' where any other is meaningless. Hence such an 
 assertion as that Reality is merely prevalence, is, on our 
 view, inconsistent with itself. Since an other than mere 
 prevalence has, on that view, a meaning, we have set up 
 within Reality the distinction of R {a) and R {b). This 
 distinction however must imply a higher and more inclusive 
 R within which it falls, and the exclusive identification 
 asserted by our ' merely ' is thus in contradiction with itself. 
 
 Even the judgements that Reahty is one in many and is 
 experience, would be untenable, if we meant by these judge- 
 ments to deny that Reality is in any sense more. But no 
 such denial should be the intention of our judgement. 
 What we really exclude here as senseless is the idea of an}? 
 
 Y 2 
 
324 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 ' other ' falling outside of our predicate, and able to be set 
 over against it in idea as being itself also an attribute of the 
 Real. And we deny no quahiication of our predicate which, 
 remaining still under it, fiUs out its character merely from 
 the inside. But how a truth, claiming to reach reality, 
 should at once be absolute and yet for ever consciously in- 
 complete, I have elsewhere discussed.^ 
 
 I will now proceed to deal with a number of special ques- 
 tions as to truth. Any knowledge which on my view can in 
 a proper sense be called truth, is the qualification of Reality 
 by ideal content. The Real must here have the form of an 
 object, and the idea must in some sense have an existence 
 other than that of the object. With these points I have 
 dealt fully elsewhere, and I propose to go on here to ask first 
 as to the meaning of qualification. That meaning is derived 
 from immediate experience and sensible perception. If you 
 take, for instance, an object such as an apple, this is qualified 
 by its adjectives. It is each and all of them, and yet it is 
 something more, though you are unable to say what. It is 
 different from its quahties, and it is also the same and one 
 with them. This is the idea of qualification which we apply 
 to judgement. It is an imperfect idea obviously, and it is 
 not ' thinkable ' or ' inteUigible ' if that means that you can 
 analyse it without destruction into terms and relations. But 
 it has a positive sense which, however inconsistently, you 
 use. And, because this sense is not ' intelhgible ', there is a 
 ' constant tendency to deny or to destroy it. You may seek 
 for the essence of qualification in an arrangement of relations 
 and terms, or in a simple identity ; and in either case what 
 you will find is anatomized death or vacuity. Or again, 
 shrinking from these, you may still deny that anything other 
 than these is there. But the positive meaning exists, and, 
 with all its imperfection, it is applied in truth. On the 
 
 ' See Appearance, chap, xxvii. 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 325 
 
 nature and the result of this imperfection I have written 
 elsewhere.'- 
 
 From this I go on to approach another question at once 
 important and full of difficulty. Does truth always refer to 
 something other than itself ? And, if this is always the case, 
 in what sense are we able to affirm it ? As to what is the 
 obvious view, there is no doubt. Truth, to be true, must be 
 true of something, and this something itself is not truth. 
 This obvious view I endorse, but to ascertain its proper 
 meaning is not easy. And it commonly is misinterpreted so 
 as not to be tenable. I will begin the discussion by the 
 statement of what is called an antinomy. 
 
 (i) No judgement is self-contained. For (a) on my side 
 there is always something which does not qualify the object, 
 and which therefore falls outside. There is always my psy- 
 chical state of the moment, a context in which the assertion 
 happens and which it has to transcend. So far, for example, 
 as my judgement pleases and satisfies, that feeling, where we 
 are confined to truth, does not qualify the object. And, 
 again, I may be aware of an act which proceeds in and from 
 me with more or less of difficulty or ease, and either faster or 
 more slowly. But this difference is irrelevant to the judge- 
 ment. And (&), on the side of the object. Reality is never 
 confined in and limited to my special object, but is always 
 also beyond it.^ 
 
 (ii) No judgement is self-transcendent. For (a) it refers 1 
 to and qualifies something real. But how it could quahfy 
 something which is not there for me and present, or how 
 this something could be present and yet not within the 
 judgement, seems not intelligible. Or rather we see that, 
 when we attempt such assertions, we have really implied 
 the opposite. And (b) that activity which seemed to lie 
 
 ' See Appearance, Index, s.v. Truth, and, again, the Index to this volume. 
 ^ Even where ReaUty or the Universe is the subject, this still will hold 
 good. See Chap. Ill, p. 41. 
 
326 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 merely in myself, is not external to the object. To take the 
 felt activity as faUing wholly in or on something outside the 
 judgement, is not a tenable view. We cannot regard the act 
 as expended merely by myself on myself, nor does it move 
 or hang somewhere between myself and the object. And, 
 asking in general for the sense of this ' between ', we find 
 that we have nothing beyond a self-inconsistent metaphor. 
 Judgement cannot consist in the external relation of two 
 independent things, nor is it the presence (one-sided or 
 otherwise) of one merely to the other.^ If you imagine two 
 foreign bodies, one impressing or sohciting the other, and 
 the second body attempting to grasp the first which has 
 impressed or excited it — you have passed away from an 
 actual judgement. For somehow undeniably there is an 
 awareness of that whole judgement as one, and we belie that 
 ■fact when we take its felt activity and its entire psychical 
 existence as faUing somewhere apart from it. The act of 
 judgement itself must belong also to the object, and itself 
 make an element in the judgement. 
 
 A dilemma such as the above is insoluble so long as we 
 remain on the ground which supports it. The notion of 
 myself as a thing standing over against the world, exter- 
 nally related to it in knowledge, and dividing with it some- 
 how unintelligibly the joint situation or result, must once 
 for all be abandoned. This point of view rests on the ideal 
 construction which we call the soul or the mind, and it 
 assumes this construction to be an absolute fact. But, as 
 I have argued elsewhere,^ such a position is untenable. To 
 take my self or soul as a separate thing, and to regard every- 
 thing that happens to it as its psychical states, is, in its own 
 place, proper and necessary. For certain purposes we are 
 right, and we are even compelled, to adopt such an attitude. 
 And not to reaUze this necessity is to fall into dangerous 
 
 ' What some one should explain is how the merely external relation of 
 two terms is able to be aware of itself. 
 
 ^ Appearance, chap, xxiii ; Mind, No. 33. Cf. Chap. XIV of this volume. 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 327 
 
 error. On the other side to rest in this position as ultimate, 
 . is fatal. It is to turn a relative truth into ruinous falsehood. 
 And, if we are to understand knowledge and judgement, we 
 must discard the doctrine of a self which by itself is or 
 could be real.^ 
 
 Here, as everywhere, so far as I can discover, there is no 
 way except one which holds good in the end. We musti 
 view the Reality in its unbroken connexion with finite cen- 
 tres. We must take it as, within and with these centres, 
 making itself an object to itself and carrying out them and 
 itself at once ideally and practically. The activity of the 
 process is throughout the undivided activity of the Reality 
 and of the centre in one. There is in the end no ' between ', 
 nor any external relation. The striving of one side or the 
 other merely for itself is impossible, and to seek to verify 
 such a striving, for instance, in selfishness or its opposite, is 
 futile. And in knowledge the impression by the object, and 
 the will to experiment in fact with the object or to grasp it 
 ideally, all belongs to the single activity ^ at once of myself 
 
 ' In his interesting book, Pragmatism and its Critics (p. 31), which 
 I read while revising the above in 191 1, Prof. Moore states that the 
 doctrine that the individual consciousness is a function of the ' com- 
 munity life ', has appeared only within our own generation. Such a 
 statement surprises me. Is Prof. Moore really prepared to deny that 
 the doctrine was taught by Hegel, and that I, for instance (if I may men- 
 tion myself), following Hegel, fought for it in 1876 ? What Prof. Moore, 
 I think, has failed to realize is the necessity for defining the ' community 
 life ', and for deciding whether this is merely social, and, if so, precisely 
 in what sense. We seem to have here once more the well-known old 
 ambiguity which obscures, and which assists, that which calls itself 
 Humanism. But is Prof. Moore ready to identify reality with the ' com- 
 munity life ', and, if so, in what sense of this term ? The question left 
 unanswered surely threatens to destroy his doctrine as to the perception 
 of material objects. But I am glad to find that on the whole the differ- 
 ences between Prof. Moore and myself are small in comparison with the 
 amount of our agreement. 
 
 '^ The same thing of course holds with regard to passivity. My present 
 actual contents are, for instance, disturbed by the felt inroad of an un- 
 expected perception or of a sudden and surprising thought. And on the 
 other side the object is passive where in reflection I attack and analyse it. 
 But such passivity is on neither side the change made in a thing acted 
 
328 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 and the whole Universe. For certain purposes (if I may 
 repeat this) the division of subject from object, and the 
 relation taken as existing between them, are ideas which 
 are requisite. But beyond these purposes such ideas are 
 fatally false. They are directly opposed to our immediate 
 consciousness of the whole relation in one,^ and, if you start 
 from them as premisses, you are inevitably entangled in a 
 network of dilemmas. 
 
 You cannot however, it will be urged, deny that with 
 every judgement there goes an element which is only per- 
 sonal and merely ' subjective '. There is surely something, 
 when I judge, which you cannot take as belonging to the 
 object. Certainly to this I agree, and to myself it seems 
 even incontestable. But what, I ask, do we mean by the 
 ' subjective ' ? For myself it is merely^ the irrelevant. It 
 is that which does not count, it is that which falls outside of 
 the matter here in hand, and does not now serve our pur- 
 pose. Our purpose, when we seek truth, is the ideal quah- 
 fication of the object. In our search for goodness or for 
 beauty again we pursue in each case a different end, and the 
 subjective is whatever in each case is irrelevant to our end. 
 The irrelevant may be called the ' mere this ', because it is 
 left behind in the general immediacy of the moment. And 
 it may be called the " mere mine ', because my self is a con- 
 struction based upon the feehng of one finite centre. But 
 there is no mere ' this ' or ' mine ' which is such absolutely. 
 These things are everywhere illusions, unless we take them 
 as relative.^ 
 
 The merely personal is the irrelevant ; but this brings us 
 to a serious difficulty. How can anything in the end be 
 irrelevant ? If all in the end hangs together, then, whether 
 in the world inside us or outside, there seems no place for 
 
 on merely from without. Truth does not break into my premises Uke 
 a burglar, nor again like a corpse does it suffer my anatomy. 
 
 ' Cf. Chap. VI. 
 
 ' See Appearance, chap, xix, and Chap. V, p. 119, of this volume. 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 329 
 
 irrelevancy. Nothing can really be quite loose from any- 
 thing else in the Universe. On this conclusion I have to 
 insist, and I accept the consequence that all irrelevancy, 
 when you go further back, becomes a matter of degree. The 
 alleged bare conjunction of mere facts is itself a lower kind 
 of connectedness. It lies at the bottom of the scale of truth 
 and reality, but not somewhere outside it. And even degree 
 itself, I have to add, in the end is transcended. Our distinc- 
 tions all hold good, but not precisely in those forms which 
 for us are necessary.^ 
 
 All judgement and truth depend on distinction, upon 
 abstraction and selection. That which falls outside a par- 
 ticular judgement is hence taken as not counting for the 
 purpose, and this not merely in degree but utterly. And, 
 if truth is to exist, such an attitude is necessary. You 
 cannot (to put the same thing otherwise) condition your 
 judgement from the outside. After it is made, you can of 
 course go on to reflect on it and to correct it, but for you, 
 while you make it, its truth must be absolute.^ Apart from 
 a selection to which you commit yourself unreservedly and 
 unconditionally, no truth is possible. 
 
 The selection is not arbitrary, for its object is truth. Our 
 goal is in the end to gain Reality in an ideal form, to possess 
 ourselves of a self-contained individual whole. The criterion 
 here, as everywhere, which we use is the Absolute. And the 
 
 ' Cf. here Chap. IX, p. 273. 
 
 ' Cf. Chap. XIII. It is impossible in the end by any judgement to 
 qualify Reality as conditioned. R, taken with the condition, implies a 
 higher R within which it falls and of which it is asserted. This general 
 principle has of course many applications. Thus (as we have seen) you 
 may attempt to make the qualification of the object in a judgement 
 include also the personal satisfaction of the judger. But this inclusion 
 forthwith makes a new object, and so on indefinitely. Hence the satis- 
 faction of the judger, as and while he judges, is necessarily excluded from 
 the judgement. From the other side, the satisfaction, or the psychical 
 prevalence, which is asserted, cannot be the satisfaction or prevalence 
 belonging to the act of such assertion. It may or may not be consistent 
 with this, but to judge concerning such a point belongs to and involves 
 a further reflection. 
 
330 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 justification of our procedure is through its result. We seek, 
 that is, to include the conditions of the assertion within the 
 assertion itself. And those conditions which we take any- 
 where as falling outside of our assertion and as irrelevant, 
 are so actually for our purpose.^ They are disconnected from 
 that purpose to such a degree that we can treat them as 
 ' matter of fact ', which is only coincident and which there- 
 fore is negligible. And our object can be gained, so far as 
 we gain it, by no other method.^ 
 
 Every judgement therefore transcends immediacy. It in- 
 volves a distinction and selection, and it may be said to pass 
 beyond whatever for its purpose it leaves outside of its object. 
 But the notion of a psychical subject, standing opposed to 
 the object and then transcended somehow in knowledge, 
 must be rejected as illusory. It holds good elsewhere, but 
 only so far as it is an idea which works usefully. 
 
 And even the account of truth which we have just given 
 cannot satisfy in the end. It implies that dualism which, 
 involved in truth's essence, for ever stands between it and 
 its goal. Truth is not perfect so long as it fails anywhere 
 to include its reahty, and its reality is not whole so long as 
 any of its conditions are left out. Truth, compelled to 
 select, is therefore forced to remain for ever defective. Its 
 purpose, though realized increasingly, is not utterly fulfilled, 
 and to fulfil that purpose would be to pass beyond the 
 proper sphere and limits of truth. The problem cannot be 
 solved by any alleged creation, in and by one act, of truth 
 and reality in one. And it cannot be solved by that reunion 
 at a higher level of fact and idea, which we can produce 
 (I will not ask how far) in our intuitive knowledge or again 
 in aesthetic perception. For everywhere there is an object 
 which remains incomplete in itself, and which in any case 
 
 1 Cf. Chap. IX, p. 266. 
 
 " The same thing holds again of course mutatis mutandis in Ethics and 
 in Aesthetics, in short wherever you have an object. 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 331 
 
 could not be an object if nothing else remained outside. 
 Truth in short is about the real, while that which is only 
 ' about ' has stopped short of the truth. The complete 
 attainment of truth's end is reached only in that Reality 
 which includes and transcends inteUigence. 
 
 The question, how far a judgement refers to something 
 beyond itself, can now be answered as follows. If you take 
 a judgement as my psychical state, then certainly it refers to 
 that which is beyond itself. But to take a judgement thus 
 is to destroy its essence and to be lost in dilemmas. From 
 a better point of view our answer to the question is twofold, 
 (i) No judgement can refer to anything beyond itself, since 
 in every judgement the ultimate Reality is actually present. 
 In any judgement on the other hand this Reality is incom- 
 plete, and there will therefore be a difference between the 
 ReaUty present and the truth actually reached in the judges 
 ment. But this difference remains within the object, and 
 for truth to pass or to refer beyond that is impossible, 
 (ii) In the second place every judgement is conjoined with 
 irrelevant existence and must transcend this. For a judge- 
 ment to exist, you must have that which, as you judge, you 
 do not in any sense include within the object. This attitude, 
 untenable in the end, is essential to truth. But if, going 
 further, you desire to know how in the end irrelevancy is 
 explained, the answer is that it cannot be explained. Irrele- 
 vancy belongs to the fact of finite centres and the process 
 in time, and this aspect of the Whole I at least have set 
 down as inexplicable.^ 
 
 I will dwell further on one of the points which has just 
 been noticed. Judgement refers always an ideal content to 
 reality. Now in every judgement this reality is at once the 
 whole Universe and something less than the Universe, (a) 
 Although judgement is mine, and again involves a selection, 
 
 ' Those who have done me the honour to read my book will know this. 
 Other critics may be referred to the Index (in any edition of my work, 
 under the heading Inexplicable. 
 
332 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 still what it qualifies is the one all-containing ReaUty, present 
 alike to you and to me and to every one else. Let us sup- 
 pose this to be otherwise, and knowledge is destroyed. For 
 knowledge apart from the real is nothing, and the real again, 
 on our view, is nothing if apart from the Universe. And we 
 may once more remind ourselves that to leave truth for 
 something outside which it does not include, is illusory and 
 senseless. On the other hand, suppose, for instance, that 
 the lapse of time were ultimately real in our experience, then 
 what on such a view would have become of our past ? To 
 us it could be nothing, unless indeed we possessed a mira- 
 culous ' Faculty of Memory '. If there is not, present in 
 this passing ' now ', a Reality which contains all ' nows ' 
 future and past, the whole of our truth and knowledge 
 must be limited to the ' now ' that we perceive. For to 
 reach a larger Universe by transcendence would really be 
 nonsense. 
 
 On the other side (6) what I have in judgement is not 
 the whole Universe at once. This seems obvious, and, for 
 example, it is clear that I must leave the present to gain, so 
 far as I am able to gain, the past and future. For I do not 
 possess these as present. I have everywhere indeed present 
 to me the whole Universe, but I have not all of its detail 
 or even its actual complete form. In knowledge what is felt 
 and perceived at any moment is but little, and what again 
 is true is but ideal. That which we call our real world, the 
 past and future of ourselves and of others, and the whole 
 body of things common to us — all this in the main is ideal 
 construction made by selection and synthesis. It is the 
 Universe realizing itself as truth within finite centres. And 
 the immediate experience on which this common world, so 
 far indeed as it is common, is based, is at any time and 
 in any centre obviously incomplete. The entire undivided 
 Universe in short is everywhere present, but it is present as 
 appearance and but partially. And, though it again in and 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 333' 
 
 for us transcends this partial character, it never does so 
 completely.^ 
 
 We have to guard ourselves here against a double mistake. 
 Truth, we have seen, qualifies the Reality by an ideal con- 
 tent. And we may be led to take on one side this ideal 
 content as detached wholly from the Real, to which then we 
 apply it. And the Reality on its side may perhaps be re- 
 garded as an undetermined object, such as mere Being or 
 again the Universe at large. But, in the first place, there 
 is no such thing as an ideal content which absolutely fails to 
 qualify the Real. Except in a relative sense, there are no 
 ideas which float or are suspended, or are assumed or pre- 
 sumed or in any way entertained, except as adjectives of the 
 Real. This is a common mistake which leads everywhere 
 to dangerous confusion and error.^ And in the next place 
 the Reality (as we have seen), while it is the Universe, is 
 never the mere Universe. It is always also a selected reahty. 
 The selection may be made only by a designation that does 
 not seek to specify, but the selection always is there. My 
 idea is not attached to a blank object, but is launched into 
 a context which more or less is distinguished and ordered. 
 And thus judgement in principle, we can say, involves 
 mediation and is in a sense inferential. It asserts some- 
 thing of and in a whole, and the place of this something in 
 the whole and the relation which it bears to other elements, 
 are problems implied in the assertion. ' Reality is such 
 that S is P,' may be taken, we saw, as a formula which 
 expresses the nature of truth. S is P (to put it otherwise) 
 because Reality is such. The ' such ' is that order which we 
 
 ' The reader must not take me to have forgotten the worlds of art and 
 of social reality. I am confining myself here to the problem of knowledge 
 and of truth in the narrower sense. 
 
 ' See Chap. III. Into this error, with really no decent excuse, I fell 
 myself for a time {Principles of Logic, chap. i). The second mistake 
 I certainly never made, though I failed to be clear on the matter. But 
 see pp. tog, 438 (ibid.). 
 
334 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 realize progressively in an ideal system. The ' because ' 
 is the conditions more or less specified, the intermediaries 
 which ideally connect S and P.^ This mediation must 
 remain, while truth is truth, a work for ever unfinished, but 
 the search for its completion is implied in the very essence 
 of judgement. 
 
 I will pass on now to consider two questions which the 
 reader perhaps may find more interesting, (a) Has every 
 truth which I think been thought before ? Did it, as truth, 
 always exist before ? And, together with this, I will ask, 
 Can truth or knowledge alter reality ? (b) Further again, in 
 what sense, if in any sense, can I be said to make truth ? 
 
 (a) Neither this problem nor any other problem can be 
 solved by bringing in the potential or virtual.^ This is a 
 device specially favoured by ' empiricists ', and is perhaps 
 the screen that serves most to veil their bankruptcy. Prof. 
 James, we have seen (p. 147), can furnish us with a signal 
 illustration of this misuse. But I cannot pause here to dwell 
 on a matter which I must venture to regard as settled. The 
 recourse to the potential is everywhere a worthless self- 
 deception, and, so far as I am aware, no serious attempt has 
 been made to justify it against criticism. 
 
 To pass from this point, there is a sense in which we may 
 maintain that every truth, however old, is new at any time 
 when it is affirmed.* And, for myself, I agree that in this 
 sense no judgement ever is repeated. The occasions are 
 different and so are diverse, and, for myself, I am bound to 
 hold that the diversity of each appearance in some way in 
 the end qualifies the identical content. But this qualification, 
 we have seen, must here be disregarded as irrelevant. 
 
 ' To take the intermediaries as mere events in time is a ruinous error 
 (see pp. 146-7). 
 
 " Other terms of the same kind are ' nascent ', or some word ending 
 in ' ible ', or, possibly again. Cat;. 
 
 ^ C£. Prof. Bosanquet's Logic, vol. ii, p. 310. 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 335 
 
 What then am I to answer to the inquiry whether a truth, 
 which I think, is possibly now thought for the first time ? 
 To go beyond possibility seems to me here out of the ques- 
 tion. For the full extent of finite mind, and of the events 
 which happen there, is to me clearly unknown. To this 
 you may reply that, for anything we can tell, the world of 
 finite minds, with the exception of a small province, is out 
 of temporal relation with ourselves, and that therefore any 
 general assertion of priority in time could have no meaning. 
 With this naturally I agree, but our doubt cannot in this 
 way be removed. Let us confine ourselves to those finite 
 minds among which our before and after hold good, and yet 
 how much even of this region do we certainly know ? Even 
 here to assert positively that my truth has. never been for 
 another mind before me, seems not in my power. On the 
 other hand the possibility of such a first appearance must in 
 many cases be admitted. The description of truth as that 
 which is essentially common to more minds than one must 
 (we may remark in passing) be rejected as false. Within 
 our series the individual conditions may, for anything we 
 know, neither be shared nor recur, and the truth may appear 
 never but to one person, and only once. 
 
 I shall be told perhaps that there is a higher Mind and 
 Intelligence by which all truths are thought. Even if we 
 admit this, there, however, remains, in connexion with this, 
 a question as to the validity of before and after. I will not, 
 however, discuss that question, since I do not accept the 
 Intelligence referred to. I am not asking here how God 
 is to be conceived by the religious consciousness.^ For me 
 (readers of my book will know) the Absolute is not God, and 
 we here are dealing theoretically with first principles. Cer- 
 tainly I admit that the Absolute Experience may perhaps 
 contain some matter which is not included within the experi- 
 ence of finite minds. I incline to the opposite view, but I 
 • See Chap. XV. 
 
336 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 still think that the doubt must be admitted.^ Here, however, 
 the question is confined to judgement and truth, and I see 
 no reason to suppose that, outside of some finite mind, truth 
 and judgement are possible. And hence on the main issue 
 without hesitation I can reply thus. It is possible for 
 a finite mind to have a truth which, as truth and judgement, 
 is for no other mind whatever, and has never in time existed 
 before. 
 
 But I must hasten to add that any such answer is one- 
 sided. It pays its regard solely to that which is but one 
 aspect of the whole matter. Wherever you have truth you 
 must have one or more series of appearances in time, of 
 events which occur one before or after another. On the 
 other hand, with no more than this, truth would have no 
 existence. Events happen because of that which is beyond 
 all happening and at once contains and subordinates its 
 temporal form. The Reality, above mere time and mere 
 relations, possesses now and always all truths, whether actual 
 or possible. And hence the whole view for which a truth 
 first was not and then is, must be set down as in the end 
 inadmissible and false. You may therefore insist that my 
 present truth was waiting there and has been found. Such 
 a statement once more must in the end be called untenable, 
 because it again is but partially true. But it is truer far 
 than the assertion that a truth can originate as this or that 
 person first conceives it. 
 
 Starting from such a basis we can now dispose rapidly of 
 a further question. Is it possible that any knowledge should 
 alter its object ? It is easy here to answer in the negative, 
 and even to insist that the opposite is really self-evident. 
 But the assertion, however self-evident, that reahty or fact 
 is not altered by knowledge, is still but a partial truth, which, 
 taken as more, becomes false. For if truth and knowledge, 
 when they come to exist, make no alteration in reality, to 
 '^ Appearance, -pp. 2y:i-4., $2y-8. And see pp. 350-1 of the present chapter. 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 337 
 
 what other region, we have to ask, does their appearance 
 belong ? To deny that knowledge happens, or to assert that, 
 happening, it makes no difference to reality, seems a mon- 
 strous paradox. And you cannot dispose of such an objection 
 by insisting blindly on your opposite thesis. Both thesis and 
 antithesis are but aspects of a truth which at once overrules 
 and embraces them. The Reality was known always, and 
 now its knowledge occurs. My contribution leaves it unin- 
 creased, and yet is indispensably requisite. The fact of my 
 knowledge makes an evident change in reality, and yet the 
 idea that the Universe is changed by me must be rejected 
 as folly. We are moving here in a region of partial truths ^ 
 broken away from that which includes all aspects in a higher , 
 experience.^ 
 
 We cannot always be labouring to express at once the I 
 complementary aspects of the whole. We are forced, to suit 
 our varying purpose, from time to time to make statements 1 
 which, as they are made, contradict one the other. Unless i 
 the Reality itself enters into the process of events, unless it 
 itself is what it becomes there, unless it itself discovers itself 
 to itself and us, and takes on a change from that discovery — 
 the Reality remains outside of knowledge, and itself is un- 
 real. On the other hand if that which is discovered is not 
 found, if that which appears is not revealed, if in short the 
 thing, which we get to see, was really not there — then reality 
 and knowledge once more are illusory. But we are unable 
 to combine these partial truths so as to understand in detail 
 how both of them go to make the Universe. 
 
 ' The attempt to escape by urging that a difference is made but made 
 only to me, cannot succeed. The difi&culties which arise here should be 
 well known, and can never, I think, be met. To fall back on an external 
 relation, which, though external, is lopsided and so makes a difference to 
 one term, seems even ridiculous. The conclusion which will follow really 
 is that neither knowledge, nor anything else, can make any difference to 
 anything, and that anything like alteration is an illusion which itself could 
 not exist. 
 
338 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 (b) The position, just reached, anticipates our answer to the 
 question which follows. Prof. James and Prof. Dewey have 
 each advocated the view that truth is made. I cannot, how- 
 ever, find that either of them has made an attempt to consider 
 seriously the whole subject.^ If I can make truth, I can 
 make also, I presume, error and falsehood, and goodness and 
 beauty, and whatever is opposite to these. Everything, in 
 brief, that is covered by the terms 'value' and 'worth', is in 
 the end merely made. It will repay us at some length to 
 examine this statement. The conclusion which I have to 
 advocate is briefly as follows. The doctrine that this or that 
 man, or set of men, can make truth, is in the end false and 
 even monstrous. From one point of view I can be truly said 
 to bring truth into being, either for the first time or once 
 more. But there is no tenable point of view from which 
 I can be properly said to make truth. 
 
 Any such expression is condemned, we may notice first, 
 by the usage of language. I may make a true assertion or a 
 mistake, or again an experiment, but, unless I violate lan- 
 guage, I cannot make either a truth or an error or a lie.^ Now 
 I am not suggesting that such usage is everywhere infallible, 
 but I am sure that it deserves everywhere our careful atten- 
 tion. And in this case it is based, I submit, upon a distinction 
 and a principle which is valid. 
 
 What is ' to make ' ? It is to produce in time, and 
 usually also in space, a certain existence. What so exists 
 may, or may not, be what we call a thing which goes on to 
 endure for a period. Neither endurance, nor again the 
 character of being a thing, is here really essential. I can, 
 for instance, make a noise or an experiment. What is 
 essential here and essential absolutely is the aspect of event 
 
 ' Cf. Chap. V, p. 141. Prof. Dewey has republished the article there 
 noticed, but has not tried, I think, to go any further into the matter. 
 (The above was written before Prof. James's lamented death.) 
 
 " I can make a lie only when the lie is regarded as a thing which exists, 
 and the phrase, even then, is clearly irregular. 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 339 
 
 and of temporal existence. It is this aspect of happening in 
 time on which the word ' make ' lays its stress. And hence 
 to make anything, so far as anything goes beyond existence 
 in time, is not possible. I can make a box but not the nature 
 of the materials, nor again the properties of the box itself 
 when once made. I can make, as we saw, a noise, but to 
 make an explosion begins at once to strain language. The 
 explosion refers to that which is beyond the mere course of 
 events. In this respect it is like an act, and I cannot be said 
 to make an act. And on the same principle truth and error, 
 or beauty or goodness or badness, are none of them things 
 which are made. The life of none of them is confined 
 within that element to which making points, and to which 
 it gives emphasis. They appear in time certainly, and as 
 certainly they can be made to happen, but they cannot 
 be identified wholly, or even mainly, with their aspect of 
 existence and fact.^ 
 
 Truth, beauty and goodness must appear as temporal 
 facts, but their essence does not consist in that appearance. 
 It transcends the lapse of time and the flux of change, and it 
 everywhere in this sense is eternal. Wherever you have an 
 object taken as good or beautiful or true, or as the opposite 
 of one of these, ^ you have at once something which reaches 
 and holds beyond time and event. And, if it were otherwise, 
 a truth, true at one moment, might at another moment have 
 become a falsehood ; and, if so, obviously the whole notion of 
 
 ' Illustrations, I know, are dangerous, but perhaps to some persons the 
 above may be clearer if I state it as follows. Suppose that there is a 
 necessary way of doing something, say of making a box, can you be said 
 to make this way ? No, it may perhaps be answered, but all the same 
 I make the box, and, if so, why not truth ? The reason why you cannot 
 may be put thus. The box can be regarded, and is regarded, as separable 
 from the way in which it has to be made. But, with truth, an abstraction 
 of this kind is not possible. There is ho truth left if you abstract from 
 the way in which truth is made, a way which itself is not made. What is 
 made is therefore something which, taken by itself, is not truth. 
 
 ' You can, we saw, ' make a mistake,' but this is because, and so far as, 
 you can regard a mistake merely as an event. 
 
 Z 2 
 
340 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 truth is destroyed. ' Oh no,' I may perhaps hear, ' a truth 
 at any moment may become false, and I can make it false 
 and can make something else true.' Such a reply to my 
 mind is based on sheer confusion and want of thought. We 
 can say of course first, ' Now it is light,' and then, ' Now it 
 is dark,' but obviously, with this, the first truth is not falsi- 
 fied. That truth was stated ambiguously and imperfectly, 
 and involved a condition not made explicit.^ But assuredly, 
 so far as it was true, its truth is eternal. And of course 
 again you can alter the fact. You can make it so that now 
 not the former truth but another truth holds good. You 
 have brought this other truth into existence, and you have 
 made it appear. But on this ground to assert that you have 
 made it, shows, to my mind, mere confusion. 
 
 And even if ' Humanity ' is brought in, the same answer 
 applies. This seems to be obvious if by Humanity you mean 
 merely the set of beings on our planet. Or if, attempting to 
 profit by a wretched ambiguity long since exposed, you seek 
 tacitly to identify Humanity with all finite mind, or perhaps 
 the entire Universe, still your conclusion is false. Even from 
 such an extreme paradox it does not follow that truth can be 
 made. The issue still turns upon the way in which Human- 
 ity or the Universe is taken, and on the position given there 
 to the aspect of temporal event. But it is difficult to discuss 
 a doctrine which its supporters seem afraid even to try to 
 state clearly .2 
 
 Every truth is eternal, even, for instance, such a truth as 
 ' I now have a toothache '. Truth qualifies that which is 
 beyond mere succession, and it takes whatever it contains 
 beyond the flux of mere event. To be, it must appear there, 
 but, to be truth, it must also transcend that appearance. 
 The same thing holds again without exception of all beauty 
 
 ' See Chap. IX, pp. 261 foil. 
 
 ^ I have repeatedly called attention to what I must now regard as mere 
 bankruptcy veiled by ambiguity. See the Index, s.v. Humanity. 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 341 
 
 and goodness, and of everything in short, however mean, 
 which is apprehended as an object."^ You may be said to 
 make me happy, but to make it beautiful or right or good or 
 true that I am happy, violates both language and reason. 
 Such characters do not happen, and still less are they made. 
 In a sense you make them to be, but for any man to make 
 their being is inconceivable. Though revealed in time and 
 in our ' mortal world ', they are not subject to its chance 
 and change, and, though in this world, they remain some- 
 thing which never is of it. 
 
 The conclusion is suggested that, if that which calls itself 
 ' empiricism ' takes reality to have its life in the mortal 
 world of events, and holds time and change to be ultimately 
 real, no empiricism can give an account of truth or beauty, 
 or, generally, of goodness or worth. It will be compelled to 
 break openly with the plainest of facts, or to obscure its bank- 
 ruptcy in a mist of phrases such as ' potential ' and ' virtual '. 
 
 I will ask finally, at the cost of repetition, how far it can 
 be said that ' Truth does not depend on me '. There are 
 misunderstandings here against which it is vital to guard 
 our minds. Obviously, first, in the case where the truth is 
 about me, the assertion that it in no way depends on me is 
 false. On the other hand, if the ' me ' stands for that which 
 is irrelevant in and to the judgement, the above assertion (we 
 have seen) will hold. Its more probable meaning, however, 
 is that truth does not depend on my actJ^ And here, as we 
 have argued, a distinction must be made. My act certainly 
 can be said to bring a truth into existence, but there is that 
 in the truth which essentially is beyond any act in time. 
 The truth can also (we have seen) be said to be prior to my 
 act and to be found. 
 
 ' Not only is all beauty an object, but it is even taken as that which is 
 self-existent. Cf. Appearance, chap. xxvi. 
 
 ' If the ■ my ' is here taken in opposition to the object, and it is assumed 
 that my act is not also the act of the Reality, that would be of course 
 once more an error, which has been dealt with sufficiently (p. 327). 
 
342 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 My act never is creative. It presupposes always what we 
 have called the dualism between fact and idea, and to create 
 both at once is beyond us. And thus the truth about a fact 
 must be for ever beyond it. It would be otherwise if truth 
 were the immediate experience which to some extent my will 
 can produce. It would be otherwise, again, if the ultimate 
 real union of both aspects could be brought into being by me. 
 But, since creation is impossible for my will, that must still 
 be limited to and by fact. Any act of mine is therefore com- 
 pelled to be one-sided. It brings into temporal existence 
 something which, except for its aspect of existence, cannot 
 be properly said to depend on the act. 
 
 You may reply that the whole thing is a matter of em- 
 phasis. You may object that in acting, and even in making, 
 if you insist on emphasizing too strongly the aspect of mere 
 event, you in the end would have no act, and nothing in the 
 end could be said even to be made. In the end both aspects 
 are inseparable. I do not seek to dispute this, for in what 
 has gone before I have been endeavouring throughout to urge 
 (if you please) that falsehood lies in a one-sided emphasis.^ 
 And to say that truth depends on me, and still more to assert 
 that it is made by my act, is therefore certainly false. For 
 by its emphasis on the aspect of event such an assertion 
 really means that in this aspect consists truth's essence. 
 And it really denies that other aspect of eternity apart 
 from which truth has utterly perished. Whatever else you 
 can assert about truth, you must still be able to add that 
 it was, and is waiting there to be found, and that it is made 
 by no man.^ 
 
 I will now proceed to touch in passing on two further 
 
 Everything (to repeat this) in the end depends on everything else, and 
 connexion is in the end a matter of degree. It is our selective emphasis 
 for a certain purpose which makes the relative absolute. And the point 
 here is this, that, in asserting the dependence of truth on my act, the 
 emphasis and the selection is not warranted by the degree of connexion. 
 " On the whole matter the reader is referred to Prof. Bosanquet's Logic, 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 343 
 
 questions, (a) What is the relation between reahty and 
 truth ? and (b) Does truth copy reality ? I have dealt 
 already with these subjects,^ but, in view of persistent 
 misunderstanding, I will venture on a brief repetition. 
 
 (a) You cannot ask how in any proper sense truth is 
 related to the real. For such a relation to be possible, you 
 would require reality on one side and truth on the other. 
 And, since without truth reality would not be real, and truth 
 apart from reality would not be true, the question asked is 
 ridiculous. There cannot in the end be a relation between 
 two inseparable aspects of one whole. On the other hand 
 you can inquire as to how truth stands to reality, in this 
 sense that you can ask in wliat way truth is different from 
 and falls short of the Whole. What is it lacking to truth, on 
 the addition of which truth itself would be reality ? This 
 is a question which to some extent can be discussed and 
 answered. 
 
 Reality for me (if I may be pardoned such repetition) is 
 one individual Experience. It is a higher unity above our 
 immediate experience, and above all ideality and relations. 
 It is above thought and will and aesthetic perception. But, 
 though transcending these modes of experience, it includes 
 them all fully. Such a whole is Reality, and, as against this 
 whole, truth is merely ideal. It is indeed never a mere idea, 
 for certainly there are no mere ideas. It is Reality appear- 
 ing and expressing itself in that one-sided way which we call 
 ideal. Hence truth is identical with Reality in the sense 
 
 vol. ii, chap. x. Practice, he points out (p. 321), iinds as well as makes, 
 and knowledge alters as well as finds. The reader perhaps will recognize 
 that, if we have a complete whole completing itself in the temporal develop- 
 ment of finite selves, these apparent inconsistencies must be. The universe 
 in knowledge makes itself in and by me into something nearer to its 
 full actual nature. The result therefore is found. Again in practice the 
 idea which I carry out into existence — so altering existence — was actually 
 there for me as an ideal, and I then find it in what I make to exist. 
 
 ' I may refer in particular to Chap. V. Cf. Prof. Bosanquet's Logic, 
 chapters ix and x. 
 
344 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 that, in order to perfect itself, it would have to become 
 ReaUty. On the other side truth, while it is truth, differs 
 from Reality, and, if it ceased to be different, would cease 
 to be true. But how in detail all this is possible, cannot be 
 understood. 
 
 Further, the ultimate Reality is not a development, and it 
 is absurd even to ask if it progresses. On the other hand 
 it essentially contains a process, or rather processes, in time. 
 And, looking at it from this partial aspect, we may say that 
 the Reality uses ideas in order to realize itself. Immediate 
 experience, itself showing ideality in lapse and change, in its 
 endeavour to complete itself develops truth. It produces 
 ideas progressively freed more and more from union with 
 particular objects of sense. It uses these ideas to procure 
 for itself a fuller experience, both practically and in higher 
 perceptions and in intuitive understandings and in apprehen- 
 sions of beauty. It is the nature of ideas, we may say, to 
 pass over into a completer whole which both subordinates 
 and includes them. Even for us in our experience this end 
 partially is attained. And in the absolute Reality it is 
 reached entirely and throughout, though obviously for us 
 not visibly. 
 
 On the one side, therefore, our experience remains in part 
 merely ideal, and thus, within certain limits, an activity 
 which is but theoretical is called for and is justified. With 
 every side of our life all the other sides are inseparably im- 
 plied, but it is impossible that everywhere in detail these 
 other sides should be verifiable. So far as the detail goes, 
 we everywhere, and not merely in theory alone, may be said 
 to rest upon faith. But on the other hand the character 
 of the absolute Reality is everywhere manifest, and we can 
 possess no other possible criterion of truth. 
 
 (b) For a discussion of the question as to how far truth 
 is a copy of ReaUty, I must once more refer the reader to 
 Chap. V, but I will repeat briefly what seems called for 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 345 
 
 here. On any view like mine to speak of truth as in the 
 end copying Reality, would be senseless. To copy is to 
 reproduce in some other existence more or less of the char- 
 acter of an object which is before your mind. Now, apart 
 from knowledge and truth, there can be no original object 
 before you to copy. And hence to make truth consist in 
 copying is obviously absurd. This question I take to have 
 been settled, once and for all time, by the post-Kantian 
 criticism of., the doctrine of the Thing-in-itself . That criti- 
 cism I take to have proved that, outside of truth itself, there 
 can be no criterion of truth. 
 
 The working to carry out a certain general character, to 
 construct an ideal world according to a certain prescription, 
 would surely not be copying in detail. And, when the 
 general character and prescription is itself again not copied, 
 the idea of copying is nowhere appUcable. 
 
 Copying, as an ultimate account of truth, is therefore out 
 of the question, and to ask what would be gained by it, if it 
 were possible, is an idle inquiry. I have spoken of course, 
 so far, of that copying which is absolute, that which has to 
 reproduce in truth an object which does not already itself 
 more or less consist in truth. On the other hand with copy- 
 ing in a relative sense we are all familiar, though the extent 
 even of this we are prone to exaggerate. Past and future 
 facts, for example, can scarcely be copied, unless we are 
 assisted by some miraculous ' Faculty '. We come nearest 
 to cop5dng intellectually when we attempt to describe a per- 
 ceived fact. But, even here, the fact itself depends more or 
 less upon idealization, and the reproduction of it involves a 
 further process of the same kind. And, where this can per- 
 haps be doubted as to the fact itself, as, e. g., in sensations of 
 pleasure and pain, the conclusion as to our truth about this 
 fact will still hold. Truth must select and abstract, and, if it 
 failed to do this, and if it repeated feeling, it would be itself 
 mere feeling and no longer truth. But I will not venture 
 
346 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 here further to abuse the reader's patience/ but will pass on 
 to deal with another well-known topic. 
 
 What is the good of truth ? To ask a question is here, 
 as everywhere, to imply an assertion. And the assertion in- 
 volved in the above inquiry is often as follows. The inquirer 
 may affirm (a) that truth itself is not good, and he may (b) 
 imply also that some other aspect of life, taken by itself, is 
 good. This is the position of the ordinary Hedonist, and 
 he at least knows, or may be supposed to know, what he 
 means. But it is the position of others also, who possibly 
 may know what they mean, but whose mental state, for any- 
 thing that appears, is certainly otherwise. Any one, however, 
 who in philosophy asks such a question as ' What is the 
 good of ',2 is obviously bound, when challenged, to state his 
 answer to the inquiry, ' What is good'. 
 
 On any view such as mine no one aspect of life is good 
 ultimately by itself. To set up any one aspect of life as the 
 absolute Good or Evil, and to reduce the rest of life to mere 
 means, is a most serious error. Relatively of course with 
 every aspect of life this point of view is tenable. Morality 
 and reUgion can be regarded as means to worldly success or 
 to bodily health. We can say the same thing of pleasure, or 
 again pleasure may be taken not as a means but as the end 
 which all else should subserve. The pursuit of beauty in art 
 may be spoken of as a more or less useful amusement, or as 
 a way perhaps of keeping out of vice. And truth again also 
 undeniably is useful, and is a means and instrument valued 
 for the sake of other purposes. All this is justifiable, but 
 justifiable only when we remember that it is but relative. 
 
 ^ It may of course be said that with truth we have the same idea in two 
 different contexts. We have it before us as an adjective of the real, and 
 at the same time it has its place in the series of psychical events. This, 
 I should agree, is indubitable, but, once more here, there is obviously 
 nothing like copying from an original. 
 
 ^ The same remark mutatis mutandis applies to the covert assertion 
 contained in such phrases as ' instrument ' and ' use ' (pp. 134-5). 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 347 
 
 To turn any one aspect of life by itself into the end is false 
 ultimately. What is ultimately good is life itself or experi- 
 ence as a whole.'- 
 
 The question, What is the good of truth ? can (as we have 
 seen above) be asked properly, if it means. How does truth 
 stand to, and how does it conduce to experience or life as 
 a whole ? And, except as so conducing, you can certainly 
 affirm that truth is not good, and that it possesses no value 
 whatever. I emphasize this assertion, and I once more re- 
 peat that truth's natural destiny is to return once more into 
 unbroken union with Reality, and to restore at a higher level 
 that totality out of which it has emerged. But that this 
 destiny is accomphshed, verifiably and in detail, within and 
 throughout our experience seems demonstrably false. And 
 (as we have" seen) within our experience truth remains and 
 must for ever remain relatively free.^ 
 
 The attempt to deny or to condemn the relative freedom 
 of truth and of art, involves to my mind, in general, mere 
 prejudice and error. And it is difficult to argue where, as 
 opposed to you, you for the most part can perceive little else 
 but confusion. But it may perhaps tend to make this whole 
 matter clearer, if we consider it from another side. Let us 
 take the instance of a high and heroical will for good at any 
 cost to oneself, an effort which, so far as we can see, has 
 
 ' It is possible to identify Reality with the Good, but I prefer not to do 
 this. It is unnecessary to enter on the question here. See pp. 89, 179. 
 
 ' While denying this freedom, Prof. Moore, speaking for the ' prag- 
 matist ' {Pragmatism, p. 168), allows, as I understand, to thought a value 
 of its own, though not in ' independence '. It is, I think, important to 
 have got even as far as this. But what surely follows is that to speak of 
 thought, e.g., as instrumental, is not permissible. The rest of the whole 
 process is surely also instrumental, as thought is, and may itself, by the 
 same right, be taken as instrumental to thought. But Prof. Moore does 
 not say this, and once more as to the position of beauty, so far as I have 
 seen, he says nothing at all. But to deal with these matters is surely 
 imperative. However, between such a ' pragmatist ' as Prof. Moore 
 and myself, the points of difference (as I said before), in comparison with 
 the amount of agreement, seem really small. And again with regard to 
 Prof. Dewey the same remark, I think, would hold good. 
 
348 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 failed to carry itself out. This effort, for anything that we 
 can discover, has failed, even when you look at its indirect 
 result in human history, and it has failed even when you 
 regard merely the inner life of the man who has made it. It 
 may have left that life more frustrated and more discordant, 
 and in a sense really lower, than if the man had never risen 
 to the struggle. Now, is an effort of this kind to be set down 
 as sheer waste and loss ? I abstract here from any belief as 
 to a difference made to a state of existence after death. For 
 such a belief may be true or false, but to call it verifiable 
 seems nonsense, if we mean by that to imply that we can 
 find that and how it holds in every detail. Apart then from 
 any belief as to a future state, what are we to say of those 
 moral efforts which, with all their intensity, appear to have 
 failed ? Are we to call them mere waste, or perhaps some- 
 thing even worse than waste ? While on some other views 
 this seems inevitable, I can give an opposite reply. For me 
 the Absolute is there to see that nothing in the world is lost. 
 That effort which for our vision is wasted, passes over be- 
 yond our vision into reality and is crowned with success. 
 Of all the foolish criticisms (and they are many) which have 
 been directed against the Absolute, the most foolish of all 
 perhaps is that it is useless. And this does not mean that, 
 whatever I do, it is all one to the Absolute. The Absolute 
 is there to secure that ever3rwh'ere the highest counts most 
 and the lowest counts least. For it is at once the active 
 criterion and the supreme power. 
 
 Truth and beauty then on the one hand within limits are 
 free. On the other hand truth and beauty, all without 
 exception, conduce to a higher Reality. But in detail this 
 consummation must remain for us invisible. The idea, how- 
 ever, that any one truth is just as good as another is sense- 
 less. A truth is true so far as it works, in the first place 
 theoretically, and truths, so far as they are empty and are 
 idle, fail to work. They fail proportionately to make a 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 349 
 
 contribution to the Absolute. But there are criticisms to 
 which I feel that it is useless to reply. It is not given to any 
 man to argue against self-satisfied ignorance.^ 
 
 In conclusion I will ask how far the view which I hold is 
 open to the charge of ' subjectivism ' and ' relativism '. 
 What I mean by relativism here is the consequence that, 
 beyond this or that man or set of men, there is no truth or 
 reality. In neither of these senses (between which of course 
 there is in principle no difference) can my view be said to 
 end in relativism. With regard to Solipsism there is, I think, 
 no occasion for me to notice any criticism which ignores or 
 is ignorant of what I have said on this subject.^ And it is 
 equally obvious, I presume, that, for me, reality and truth 
 are not confined within the limits of any one set of finite 
 beings, such, for example, as the human race. 
 
 Certainly for me beyond and outside of all finite minds 
 there is no truth. From the doctrine which I inherited all 
 such transcendence has in principle been banished. And 
 certainly for that doctrine, once more, the desire and the 
 striving of finite minds is essential to Reality. The ini- 
 manent will of the Universe, for knowledge and truth within 
 those minds, is impossible unless it is in one with their per- 
 sonal endeavour. If to hold this is to embrace subjectivism, 
 
 •■ a. Chapters IV and V. 
 
 ' Appearance, chap. xxi. It may be useful perhaps to recall that 
 Mr. E. D. Fawcett (Mind, No. 78, p. 200) understood me to start from a. 
 ' provisional Solipsism '. Mr. Fawcett attended here, I think, merely to one 
 side of my view. On that view the whole Universe is directly aware of 
 itself in each finite centre, but so as not there to be aware of the contents 
 of any other finite centre as they are experienced immediately by itself within 
 that other centre. The highest all-embracing experience is never reached 
 in any finite mind. How this is possible, I repeat, is inexplicable. I fully 
 understand that the logical result of applying here an ' Either-or ', is 
 either a denial of any self or else an assertion of Solipsism, whichever of 
 these alternatives you please. But I do not see how it can be right to 
 suppose that I accept either of these alternatives. I may add that, 
 if I accepted either of them provisionally, I should have to accept it as 
 final. But whether there is any real disagreement here between Mr. Fawcett 
 and myself, I cannot say. 
 
350 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap. 
 
 then assuredly to subjectivism I have always been wedded. 
 But, upon a view such as mine, that which is ' objective ' 
 can be distinguished from that which is merely personal, 
 and I have shown the principle upon which this vital 
 distinction is made. And any view, I would add, in 
 which such a distinction does not hold good, is ruined irre- 
 trievably.^ 
 
 ' A point on which difl&culty, I beUeve, has been felt, is the account to 
 be given of Nature and of its position in the Universe. Nature has seemed 
 on my view to possess no external reality. But this apparent failure is 
 mainly perhaps due to a defect in my exposition. I have emphasized 
 perhaps too one-sidedly our inability to arrive here at an ultimate explana- 
 tion. I never sought to deny that in our own wills we have the experience 
 of what we may call a power of real externalization. Certainly the idea 
 that any such externalization can break somehow quite out of the absolute 
 Experience, to my mind remains untenable. But to a conclusion which 
 stops short of that I am far from being in principle opposed. 
 
 I will venture, in republishing this footnote, to add some further re- 
 marks on the subject of Nature. The fact of finite centres, with change 
 in time and apparent externahty, must remain, I would once more repeat, 
 in my view inexphcable. Certainly in volition we experience the carrying 
 out of what is ideal into the world over against us. And, though no 
 ultimate explanation can in my judgement be found in Will (cf. Chap. IV), 
 it may be well to consider the fact of Nature from this side. 
 
 The absolute Reality of course is will, since it includes will in something 
 higher. On their side the wills of finite centres, though real, are never 
 the mere wills of these several centres. Experienced volition is always 
 the will of the Whole in one with my own. What therefore is carried out 
 into existence in and by my will is always more than any content which 
 merely is mine. The content carried out belongs also and, in one sense, 
 just as much to the Whole. And not only is this so, but some content 
 is realized in and by my will, though this content goes beyond that of 
 which in wilUng I was aware. To some extent this realization beyond 
 what I have consciously willed seems evident in fact, and how far it 
 conceivably might go, we seem unable to say. My will thus carries out 
 into existence, and into the external world, more than in one sense was 
 actually contained in my will. 
 
 It is thus important to ask about the source of such additional matter. 
 Is there any margin of content over and above that which is experienced 
 in all finite centres ? The totality of experiences must (this is obvious) 
 have some content beyond that which falls in the experiences as several. 
 For otherwise the totality (this seems clear) would be nothing. But is 
 there (here is the point) in the absolute Experience any margin of content 
 beyond what falls in the finite centres as unified ? In my book {Appear- 
 ance, pp. 273-4, and pp. 527-8) I raised a doubt on this point, a doubt 
 which later I have tended perhaps too much to ignore. The question is 
 difiicult, and since we do not know how the finite centres are One, the 
 
XI ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH 351 
 
 For me truth gives the absolute ReaHty, the whole Uni- 
 verse as in its general character it really is. It gives its 
 result imperfectly, as I have explained. But, so far as this 
 truth goes, it is impossible to think that for any other mind 
 it is otherwise. And, in attempting to entertain such an 
 idea, you succeed merely yourself in thinking inconsistently. 
 On the other hand, outside of this general character, in a 
 sense relativism holds good. That which in particular, for 
 one mind or one set of minds, is true or real or good, may 
 be the opposite for another individual or set of individuals. 
 And how far in detail this diversity may extend we have no 
 means of knowing. In such a sense our knowledge must 
 always be relative. But this detail remains subordinate to 
 our general principle. It is not mere ' matter ' conjoined 
 externally to an indifferent ' form '. Any such indifference 
 (some critics tend to forget) is a positive doctrine which it is 
 incumbent on them to prove, and which for me is untenable. 
 The detail, upon our view, can vary only so far as the 
 general character is preserved. Hence our faith in the world, 
 in truth and in beauty and goodness, is unshaken by doubt. 
 And, if so, to hold that belief in an Absolute can make no 
 difference to any one or to anything, seems ridiculous, while 
 
 question possibly may be unmeaning. On the other hand I cannot maintain 
 that it is so, and hence I am forced to admit as possible this margin of 
 content not included in finite centres. Such a, margin, if so, might go to 
 make up that sphere which appears to each of us as the world of external 
 existence. It would contribute to, or at least affect, that order of dis- 
 orderly perception in which other centres appear to mine. But, beyond 
 this, it would never enter into my consciousness or will. And, though 
 made one in the whole with all finite centres, it could never be properly 
 called the content of any. 
 
 I do not think that, in order to account for Nature, such a supposition 
 is necessary. But to my mind it is tenable, and any one, to whom it 
 seems to remove difficulty, is, I think, right if he adopts it. On the other 
 hand beyond this point I am unable to move. I could not admit that 
 any externality is more in the end than appearance. A real split or 
 sundering in the Universe I am forced to reject, and anything of the kind 
 leads, so far as I see, to difficulties far worse than those which it may 
 appear to banish or lessen. But this is a point on which naturally I am 
 willing to hear reason. 
 
352 ON SOME ASPECTS OF TRUTH chap, xi 
 
 to intimate that this is even my own opinion is worse than 
 ridiculous. The Absolute is that by which all reality, and 
 all truth and goodness and beauty, in their various degrees 
 are, and without which they are nothing. And, if there is 
 any one in whose eyes this makes no difference, I address 
 myself to others. 
 
 The above are those aspects of truth on which I wished to 
 remark. I cannot hope that I have succeeded in not tasking 
 the patience of the reader. My remarks have at the best 
 been disjointed, and I have repeated (it is the vice of ad- 
 vancing years) what I have said, and have said perhaps too 
 often before. But I will end by insisting once more on that 
 with which I began. Except in connexion with a view or 
 views as to the nature of Reality, any controversy as to the 
 nature of knowledge and truth in the end is futile. Such a 
 discussion may be more or less instructive, and it may be 
 stimulating more or less, but it never can deal with the real 
 question at issue, or arrive at any final result whether 
 positive or negative. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 SOME REMARKS ON MEMORY AND 
 INFERENCE i 
 
 My object in this paper is to discuss certain questions 
 about the nature of memory in connexion with inference on 
 one side and mere imagination on the other. I have been 
 led to write it partly from a desire to explain and justify the 
 position which I took elsewhere.^ But the reader need not 
 concern himself with the matter from this point of view, 
 and I shall endeavour to treat the subject independently. 
 On the other hand, even if I were able anywhere to deal 
 satisfactorily with all the problems involved, the present 
 Hmits are much too narrow. I can offer no more than a 
 discussion imperfect at the best, and in which the reader 
 must not expect to find anything really new. 
 
 We may notice first the well-known ambiguity of the word 
 ' memory '. I have used, and shall use, the term in what 
 seems its proper sense, the consciousness of past events as 
 having been in fact experienced in my past. But memory 
 is often employed otherwise. It may be taken to embrace 
 all recognition and sense of famiharity, to cover persisting 
 after-sensation and resurgent images, sporadic and undated. 
 It may be a general head which includes all retentiveness 
 and reproduction, and may be enlarged to cover every habit, 
 even where habit rightly or wrongly is appHed to a case of 
 mere physical mechanism. And hence nothing is easier 
 than to defend memory as basal, if not as quite ultimate, 
 and to refute the true view that it is a complex and late 
 
 ' This chapter appealed first in Mind for April 1899. 
 ^ In my Principles of Logic. 
 
 137-1 A a 
 
354 SOME REMARKS ON chap. 
 
 phenomenon. If, however, we keep in mind its various 
 senses, less labour may be wasted. 
 
 Memory in its proper sense seems certainly complex, and 
 involves a high degree and development of thinking, and 
 memory for any sound psychology must be derivative and 
 secondary. We may find it for the moment more convenient 
 to postulate a faculty inexplicable and ultimate, by which I 
 know my past events isolated or even in their synthesis with 
 my present, an organ which gives us really the really exist- 
 ing past, or somehow immediately reports to us that which 
 perhaps really does not exist — an oracle, which, although 
 inexplicable or even perhaps because inexplicable, is to be 
 accounted veracious. But the path which seems easy may 
 be long in the end when it involves us in confusion, and a 
 miracle, however cheap, in the end is dear when it entails 
 the subversion of principle. And if against fact we are led 
 to postulate the veracity of memory, that postulate, as 
 I shall show, leads to ruinous scepticism. 
 
 Memory is an ideal construction of the past by which the 
 present reality is qualified, or we know the past as an enlarge- 
 ment by ideal content of reality beyond the present. In 
 this respect memory does not differ, it will be urged at once, 
 from. at least some inference and even from fancy. But, 
 without at present touching on these differences, it will be 
 better to ask in general how we are able at all to think of the 
 past. There is, of course, the further question as to what in 
 the end is the real nature of the past, but that question 
 does not in this chapter concern us. We are to ask about 
 the past simply so far as it is for us. 
 
 Now there are doctrines which I must take for granted 
 without explanation or discussion, and all that I can here do 
 is to try to state them so as to avoid unnecessary objections. 
 If the reader finds that he dissents, I would ask him to 
 consider this chapter as written for others. We must first 
 of all presuppose retentiveness and the growth of associa- 
 
XII MEMORY AND INFERENCE 355 
 
 tions, the formation in other words of special dispositions to 
 restore elements previously conjoined ; and it is better to 
 abstain here from the least attempt further to explain or 
 formulate these doctrines, since that would involve us in 
 controversy and in the discussion of some obstinate diffi- 
 culties. Here I would add merely that I have presupposed 
 nothing except that which I take to be present in principle 
 at the very lowest level of mind. 
 
 Now, so much being assumed, it is no great step to advance 
 from it to serial connexions. Wherever A tends to call up B, 
 and B to bring in C, A being present will tend to produce the 
 series A-B-C. The means and the condition of this mediate 
 connexion is the identity of B. There is here a common 
 link which is one and the same, or which at least somehow 
 behaves as if it were so, and which also again on examination 
 seems so. Without this identical link there is certainly no 
 series at aU, but how far its identity must be perfect is a 
 further question to be considered later. And at that point 
 there will arise the difficult and most important problem 
 about the unity of the whole series, a problem at which 
 I shall be able to do no more than glance. 
 
 But when once we have such series joined by common 
 Unks, it seems easy from this point to proceed to the future 
 and past and to transcend the present. For given the dis- 
 position to an ideal series such as c-d-e, and given on the 
 other side a present quaUfied as A(6-c), there is, through the 
 identity of c, a transition from A to e through b-c-d. And 
 with this transition memory, it might be said, is at once 
 explained. Now in principle I think memory is so explained, 
 and the explanation is correct, but it on the other hand is 
 insufficient, and takes no account of serious differences. For 
 in the first place memory has perforce to go backwards if it 
 is to reach the past, while our series, it seems, run all the 
 other way, and we can only think forwards. And in the 
 second place memory is certainly not the mere extension of 
 
 A Q /^ 
 
356 SOME REMARKS ON chap. 
 
 the present. It gives us rather something which is not the 
 present, something which is known as different and incom- 
 patible. I will proceed briefly to discuss these two diffi- 
 culties, beginning with the second. 
 
 To know the past or future as such is a hard and late 
 achievement of the mind, for it imphes an enormous degrada- 
 tion of the present. We do not properly represent the past 
 or future until we have gained an order of things in which 
 the present has become but one thing among others. These 
 other things, not the present, are not presented, and, if by a 
 miracle they were so while the present itself still remained 
 untransformed, the result would be chaos. But past and 
 future do not and cannot exist for us until reahty appears as 
 a series in which the present has sunk and has become but 
 one member among others. Such an order is an array into 
 the ranks of which the present is cashiered ; it is an order 
 which is ideal and yet real, which is often not practical 
 except remotely and indirectly, and which can conflict sharply 
 with our presented perception and our presented need. The 
 passage to this new world is the barrier, if there is one, 
 between the animal and the human mind.^ The animal 
 mind (I am here compelled to be dogmatic) has neither past 
 nor future. It has no world but the reahty felt present and 
 given, a present qualified ideaUy and qualified incompatibly 
 with itself, but never transcended and itself degraded to be 
 but another qualification. It has ideas assuredly and from 
 the first, and, if it had not ideas, it could most assuredly 
 have no conation or desire. But the ideas of the animal 
 mind are but adjectives of the given, ideas that enlarge the 
 given and may indefinitely distract it, but never can set them- 
 selves up beside it as other and equal realities. Hence the 
 animal could never say, Yesterday I was sad but I shall be 
 happy to-morrow. Its present is clouded and is brightened 
 by the movement of its ideas, but remains always its present ;, 
 
 ' I do not mean to say that there is no animal but man which ever in 
 fact makes this transition. 
 
XII MEMORY AND INFERENCE 357 
 
 its revenges are never retribution for the past, and even its 
 plans, where it has plans, are no forecast of the future. It 
 has, in brief, no world sundered from the world of its imme- 
 diate practical interest, and to take an immediate practical 
 interest in the past as past is surely not possible. 
 
 I regret to be unable to explain and defend this brief state- 
 ment. It may serve, perhaps, to point out the interval which 
 in my judgement separates memory from the lower level of 
 mind. How in detail that interval is filled up and crossed 
 I cannot here discuss. I agree that it is the use of language 
 for social needs which is the principal agent. It is in this 
 manner, I agree, that in fact we gain a world of ideas beyond, 
 and in part incompatible with, our personal world, an ideal 
 order which seems fixed and independent and which sub- 
 ordinates the present. On the other hand, I must demur to 
 the conclusion that without society no such ideal world is 
 in principle possible or could slowly be fixed by the mind. 
 But, however it may have arisen, it is this ideal order which 
 makes memory possible, and apart from this development to 
 postulate memory is to invoke a senseless miracle. 
 
 I will pass next to the difficulty which arises from the 
 direction of our thoughts. The past hes behind us while, it 
 seems, we can only think forwards. Given the disposition 
 to an ideal series h-c-d, then, if X5 is presented, the identity 
 of b can develop X ideally as Xh-c-d. But if, on the other 
 hand, 'K.d is presented, how are we able to arrive at h-c ? 
 Our sensations, we may say, come wave on wave out of the 
 future and disappear backwards into the past, while the 
 direction of our ideas is naturally opposite, and our asso- 
 ciated series, usually if not always, run from the present to 
 the future.^ We, to maintain our being, must face and must 
 meet with our ideas the incoming waves, and it is this 
 practical attitude against the course of mere events which 
 gives the direction to all our series. I do not, indeed, admit 
 
 ' Cf. A-b-bearance. v. 214. 
 
358 SOME REMARKS ON chap. 
 
 that all our associations are practical, and that is a question 
 I pass by. But the rule that usually they are directed 
 forwards we must admit as true, whatever we may think as 
 to possible exceptions. The current of our lives and thoughts 
 in short runs opposite to the stream of mere event. 
 
 How then, given the disposition to an ideal series a-h-c-d-e, 
 and given our actual presence at d, can we arrive at the past? 
 The result is gained in this way. Our present has a char- 
 acter associated with a, the beginning of the series, and so, by 
 means of a, we identify ourselves with and pass through the 
 series a-h-c-d-e. But this so far is not enough. This series 
 so far, it will be rightly said, can at best give us a future, and 
 it will not supply us with a past which lies behind us. Our 
 explanation, however, so far was incomplete, and our fuller 
 reply is as follows : {a) In order to perceive the past we 
 must not merely identify ourselves with the beginning of a 
 series, but that beginning must, also and as well, be incom- 
 patible with our present. That beginning must, beside its 
 identity with our present state, have also a further character 
 which prevents identification. If our present is X«?, then, 
 since x is associated with a, we through x ideally reconsti- 
 tute Xa, but the two, X^ and Xa, are or may be incompatible. 
 (&) And secondly, starting from this incompatible beginning 
 Xa, the series leads up to our actual present Xc?, and can be 
 prolonged into the future. And this in principle is the expla- 
 nation required for our recovery and perception of the past. 
 
 I will illustrate this first by a simple example which in 
 part is defective. I have seen a stone thrown and now 
 perceive it at my feet. It is the ideal identity of the stone 
 which reinstates its existence at the point of departure, an 
 existence incompatible with the present. And then that 
 incompatible sameness produces itself in series ideally till 
 it is one with the actual present perception. The illustra- 
 tion is, however, imperfect because it presupposes and makes 
 use of a fixed spatial order, and, whatever may be true of our 
 
XII MEMORY AND INFERENCE 359 
 
 actual development, I cannot think that in principle such a 
 spatial series is involved. Let us then take another illustra- 
 tion. Let us suppose that in the same locality I am first wet 
 and cold and then dry and warm . Now my personal presence 
 in this place can by association restore in idea my wet and 
 cold presence in the same place, the two being both the same 
 and yet also incompatible— and then an intermediate series, 
 say of lighting the fire, or of the sun's coming out, may unite 
 by an ideal prolongation the first with the second. It is by a 
 leap through ideal identity that we make ourselves one with 
 what is incompatible with our present, and, this difference 
 being then connected by a series with our present, we have 
 our past, which is thus given both as sundered and as con- 
 nected. Such at least is the main principle involved, though 
 I cannot attempt to work it out in its complex detail. The 
 most instructive illustration is probably furnished by the 
 fact of double memory. That past from time to time is 
 remembered or forgotten which has or has not the special 
 quality which from time to time distinguishes the present. 
 In this way at least the facts can in principle be explained, 
 and in some cases the actual quahty appears to have been 
 discovered.^ 
 
 The above may be made clearer, perhaps, by a reply to a 
 possible objection. You cannot in every case, it may be said, 
 show that what we remember is thus reproduced from the 
 present, and memory therefore, it may be urged, is im- 
 mediate and inexplicable— except of course, like everything 
 else, by physiology. Now I should myself admit that the 
 reason why I remember this thing and not that often cannot 
 be found in my present psychical state. One might indeed 
 
 ' By Janet. See his Automatisme. The principle was long ago laid 
 down by Lotze, Med. Psych., 487, Mik., i, 371. I would remark in this 
 connexion that any one who fails to see that the present character of 
 my feeling is a basis of reproduction, and who argues as if that basis 
 must either be something before the mind, or else not psychical at all, 
 does not in my opinion really understand the doctrine of Association. 
 
36o SOME REMARKS ON chap. 
 
 urge that the reason is in all cases there and has been 
 simply overlooked, but I am not myself prepared to 
 endorse this contention. I would rather take no account 
 here of unconscious states of mind, and the contention 
 seems at least not warranted by those facts which we are 
 able actually to observe. Certainly to argue, on the other 
 hand, that dispositions work without any kind of support 
 from my present psychical state would be quite mistaken. 
 The support is there always, though not always, I admit, 
 the special support to this one disposition against any 
 other. And hence the special activity, I am quite ready 
 to add, is in some cases to be taken as initiated merely cere- 
 brally. But then I object that simply so far and with no 
 more than this we have no memory at all. We have no 
 memory until that which is reproduced is ideally separated 
 from and is ideally connected with my present ; and this 
 ideal separation and connexion is and must be performed 
 always in the way which I have described.^ In short, 
 memory as immediate is to my mind a sheer miracle, and 
 I cannot accept a miracle even where I am assured that it 
 is due merely to the brain. 
 
 , The past, we have so far seen, is perceived by means of 
 serial association, and, before I proceed, it is necessary to 
 warn the reader here against a dangerous misconception. 
 We have in the series a-h-c the association of h with a and of 
 c with h ; but we have not merely these separate associa- 
 
 ' If we wish to avoid mistake here, we must beware of confusion. We 
 must distinguish the exciting cause of a reproduction from the ground of 
 a memory. The ground of a particular memory is that which places it 
 in connexion with a certain member of my past series. But it may be 
 partially excited by that which cannot complete and so date it. A scent 
 may, for instance, remind me of a certain flower, which then by associa- 
 tion calls up its adjuncts involving a dated event in my life. The dating 
 associations here are not those which excite, and the latter may be very 
 frail and slight indeed. The reproduced when excited then dates itself 
 by association with what is constructed from my present. If on the 
 contrary I go backwards or forwards retracing my life, the exciting cause 
 of a memory and its ground may be the same. 
 
XII MEMORY AND INFERENCE 361 
 
 tions, and, if we had no more than this, we should have no 
 series at all. For every series which we know is known by 
 us as one, and, if it had no real unity, the appearance of its 
 oneness would be inexplicable.^ But this unity involves, so 
 far as I can see, and consists in an ideal identity of character. 
 There is some one content that is present through and is de- 
 veloped by the series, and is quahfied by, and itself essentially 
 qualifies, this series. But, if so, the members of the series 
 will be joined not merely by association with one another, 
 for each one must be associated also with one and the same 
 quality. There will hence in fact be no merely successive 
 association any more than there is any merely successive 
 perception. The division of association into that which is 
 simultaneous and that which is merely successive is in 
 principle vicious, and any inquiry based on it is foredoomed 
 to failure. The succession should be represented not as Xa-b 
 
 X 
 
 but rather as /\ . And so we perceive how the whole 
 a — b 
 
 series may thus be thought of as one, and how the idea of 
 the whole is united with and so may reproduce any of the 
 members, singly or at irregular intervals, and again in either 
 direction. For beside the mere association of member with 
 member we have as its complement in every series the con- 
 nexion of each member with the idea of the whole.^ And 
 
 ' Cf. Chap. X, pp. 307-9. 
 
 ' This consideration, I need hardly add, should never be lost sight of, as 
 at times it has been, in investigating the subject of ' successive ', ' re- 
 gressive ', and again ' indirect ' association. Another aspect of the same 
 problem is the existence of general forms or schemata of series. It seems 
 clear, from abstract considerations as well as from particular facts, that 
 these must exist and be used in the retaining of concrete series. Our 
 awareness of gaps and our transition over them, and our power of repre- 
 senting series in an abbreviated form, point in this direction. But these 
 schemata, being themselves presumably psychical and associative, tend to 
 confirm the doctrine of our text. There are some results bearing on this 
 point in the investigations of Schoraann and Miiller. The subject is both 
 very obscure and very difficult, and it deserves more attention than it 
 appears to have received, a remark which applies emphatically to the 
 perception of a series in general. 
 
562 SOME REMARKS ON chap. 
 
 with this brief warning on a matter of the greatest impor- 
 tance I must pass on to pursue further the subject of this 
 chapter. 
 
 We are aware of and think of the past as past always by 
 an ideal construction from the present, and the immediate 
 presentation of the past as such would be a gratuitous 
 miracle. But the past comes to us not by memory alone 
 but also in mere fancy and again by pure inference, and it 
 is clear that we are here concerned with serious differences. 
 I may for instance remember that yesterday I sent a letter 
 to the post ; or I may imagine how I might have done this, 
 though in fact I know that I did not ; or again, while I 
 cannot remember my act, I can perhaps prove that it 
 happened. I will now briefly discuss the nature of these 
 differences, beginning with mere fancy in its contrast with 
 thought, and taking thought here in the sense of proof or 
 inference. 
 
 How does mere imagination differ from inference ? The 
 question, difficult in itself, has been obscured by a funda- 
 mental error, a superstition about the abstract nature of 
 thought proper. Deferring the consideration of this, I will 
 state briefly the true ground of distinction. In inference 
 there is, or at least there is supposed to be, a continuous 
 necessity, and there is necessity because in a word there is 
 identity. The self-same subject develops itself ideally in 
 the process, and is qualified in the conclusion. And it 
 quahfies itself throughout by itself, without the intrusion at 
 any point of an extraneous connexion. We say that b is c 
 and c is d and d is e, and each of these is not because of any- 
 thing outside, but simply. Hence Ab must be Ae because 
 in the end it is so. And whatever difhculties may be raised 
 as to the possibihty of using in our actual practice this type, 
 this type at least represents what we aim at and seek to find 
 in inference. It may help us to perceive this if we suppose 
 
XII MEMORY AND INFERENCE 363 
 
 that the type is modified. Let us assume no longer that 
 6 is c simply, but admit that & is c only by the help of x. 
 The premiss must now be written h[x) is c, and the old 
 conclusion will not stand. We cannot any longer assert 
 that A& must be Ae. It only may be so, and, so far as it 
 is so, it is so because of x. The Kb that is e is now not the 
 A6 with which we started. We can no longer assert that 
 the subject has been qualified throughout further without 
 becoming something else. The subject of the conclusion is 
 Kb together with a foreign condition x, and the conclusion 
 is therefore conditioned, and, if you assert it of mere A&, it 
 is conditional or faulty. 
 
 It is a defect of this kind which vitiates the result of mere 
 imagination. That result, we should agree, has no necessity. 
 In my mind's wandering the subject Kb may have actually 
 now become Ke, but we cannot add that the thing is so really 
 and of itself, for A6, also and just as actually, may become 
 something incompatible and may appear as A6-not-^. In 
 mere imagination, because the thing may be otherwise, it is 
 not really what it is. Necessity is not present, and necessity 
 is absent because there is a breach of identity. The subject 
 Kb becomes ke, but you cannot add ' of itself '. Something 
 extraneous has at some point entered in and has vitiated the 
 process, and you have passed from & to c not because h is c, 
 but only because the passage has happened. An element has 
 intervened not belonging directly to the pure essence of b, 
 but attached to b merely as b is now present in psychical 
 fact ; and it is this unknown addition, this x, which by a 
 chance association has carried A& to e. Such is the defect 
 in identity which distinguishes mere imagination from in- 
 ference, ^ and where this defect is remedied imagination 
 becomes at once the strictest thinking. 
 
 It may be instructive to notice here the superstition to 
 which I referred. The distinction of mere imagination from 
 
 ' Compare my Principles of Logic, p. 410. 
 
364 SOME REMARKS ON chap. 
 
 thought consists in the absence or presence of logical control, 
 and that control lies, as we have seen, in the preservation of 
 ideal identity. But where this principle has not been grasped 
 most incredible doctrines have found favour. Thought is 
 abstract, we may be assured, while imagination is concrete. ^ 
 Now I might ask if mere fancy may not be itself highly 
 abstract, but, passing this by, I will go on to a plainer 
 objection. To maintain all thought to be abstract is to 
 be brought into coUision with evident facts. For the lower 
 animals surely can reason, while they hardly are able to 
 think abstractly, except in certain theories. And in our 
 own lives the field covered by what is called intuitive under- 
 standing is certainly not all abstract, or again on the other 
 side devoid of judgement and inference. An obvious in- 
 stance is the thinking and judging about spatial arrange- 
 ments in an individual case. And the writer who will assert 
 that such conclusions as He is the guilty man, or That is 
 the right way, are either all abstract or are else not acts 
 of thought, is to my mind past argument.^ Inference of 
 course is always abstract if that means that it impUes 
 
 ' See for example Prof. Sully, Human Mind, i, p. 384. He finds 
 himself later in conflict with fact, and admits (p. 395, note) that the de- 
 marcation is ' not to be taken absolutely '. But the real question surely 
 is whether the very principle of distinction is not false and contrary to fact, 
 and, if so, how we can be justified in using it. If Prof. Sully's view is 
 that between thought and mere imagination there is in principle really 
 no difference at all, that the distinction drawn between them is merely an 
 affair of language and convenience, and depends, perhaps usually though 
 certainly not always, on degree of concreteness, that is a doctrine which, 
 however unsatisfactory, would be intelligible. But such a doctrine hardly 
 entitles any one who holds it to speak of these processes as if they really 
 were two, to lay down a ground and principle of distinction, and to go on 
 to speak of ' a connexion between the two ' (p. 381). Such a position 
 seems quite inconsistent and indefensible, though I fear it is not un- 
 common. 
 
 " I am tempted to say this again of any one who can maintain that 
 thought must depend upon language. There arises here, of course, the 
 further question, how far thinking which is not throughout dependent 
 on language, and which is in this sense intuitional, can be genuinely 
 abstract. This is an interesting and important question, but we are not 
 concerned with it here. 
 
XII MEMORY AND INFERENCE 365 
 
 analysis and selection, and involves always a principle of 
 necessity which can, or could conceivably, be abstracted. 
 But in any other sense judgement and inference need cer- 
 tainly not be abstract, but may be concrete to an indefinite 
 extent. In short, to set up imagination and thought as two 
 separate faculties, and to speak of one using the other or 
 again being applied to its service, is from first to last errone- 
 ous and indefensible. Imagination, if of a certain kind, 
 is not something employed by thought, but is itself thinking 
 proper. If, on the other hand, by mere imagination we 
 mean our mental flow so far as that is subjected to no control 
 whatever, and is so not ' used ' at all, this certainly is not 
 imagination in the higher sense of the word. Mere imagina- 
 tion, where regulated logically, itself is inference. And 
 again, so far as serving other ends and subjected to other 
 kinds of control, it becomes and itself is contrivance, fancy 
 and creation in various forms, intellectual, practical and 
 aesthetic. It is the special nature of the end and the special 
 nature of the control which makes the difference in principle, 
 and in the case of inference we have seen in what that 
 difference consists.^ 
 
 From this our inquiry may return to the subject of 
 memory. The mere imagination of the past, we have seen, 
 is, Hke inference, an ideal construction from the present, and 
 yet it fails to be inference. Memory is also an ideal con- 
 struction from the present, and thus we are led to ask in 
 what way memory differs from inference and from fancy ; 
 
 ' I do not know whether Wundt (Grundzuge, ii, p. 490) really means 
 to say that all imagination involves a plan and an idea which it develops. 
 Such a statement seems to be in collision with the obvious fact of mental 
 wandering. The nature of the different kinds of control over mere wan- 
 dering is, so far as I see, the only ground from which this whole question 
 could be satisfactorily treated. I certainly could not myself attempt that 
 treatment, and I do not myself know where to send the reader for satis- 
 faction. Wundt's exposition seems not only -confused in detail but based 
 on no clear principle whatever. Such principles of division as ' passive ' 
 and ' active ' are, for instance, much worse than merely useless. 
 
366 SOME REMARKS ON CHAP. 
 
 for that there is some difference seems plain. I may, to 
 repeat our instance, infer that on last Monday I must have 
 posted a letter, or I may remember the fact, or again I may 
 merely imagine it, and these three attitudes are not the same. 
 Now, as against fancy, it is clear that memory has necessity. 
 It does not qualify its subject by a predicate the opposite of 
 which can also be remembered, and which for this reason 
 does not qualify the subject itself. Memory, in other words, 
 is a judgement and an assertion about its subject. Hence 
 it is often again said to involve belief, a point which I shall 
 consider lower down.^ Thus memory, being a judgement, 
 is so far the same as inference, and we must go on to ask if 
 they are the same altogether. 
 
 If inference is understood in the sense in which we have 
 taken it above, inference and memory certainly differ. For 
 in memory there is a sequence and a continuity which is 
 necessary, but on the other hand the necessity is not wholly 
 intrinsic, or, if wholly intrinsic, is not so visibly. We do not, 
 as in inference, go from A6 to Abe, because b is c. The 
 sequence in memory cannot be so stated. The premisses are 
 not Ab, be, but must be written as A&, Be. Now certainly 
 b is contained in and is an element in B, but, with only so 
 much, the sequence fails to be logical. For you cannot logi- 
 cally proceed from Ab, Be, to A-e, unless you assume that Be 
 is equivalent, say, to 6-B-e, and not merely to b{x)-c. The 
 essential question is as to how the difference, which turns 
 b into B and which so brings in c, is related to b ; whether, in 
 short, and how far this difference is really accidental. Let 
 us take once more the example which we used above. When 
 I remember that on Tuesday last I sent my letter, the send- 
 ing does not follow of itself from the mere idea of myself on 
 last Tuesday. Thus I cannot prove that I sent the letter, 
 and I can even imagine that in fact I did not send it. The 
 connexion, therefore, between the day and the act is not 
 
 ' PP- 3 7(3-7 ■ 
 
XII MEMORY AND INFERENCE 367 
 
 visibly logical, and it may be urged further that the con- 
 nexion is not logical at all. The predicate, it may be said, 
 does not in memory truly and really belong to the subject 
 of the process. The predicate, on the contrary, is added 
 brutally from without, and is attached by something quite 
 external; and in memory, therefore, as was the case with 
 mere chance imagination, ideal continuity is broken. 
 
 Now a breach of visible continuity I have agreed must be 
 admitted, and memory therefore will fall short of inference. 
 There is no proper inference where you predicate the con- 
 clusion of the subject because the subject is conditioned by 
 something not intrinsically developed from its own nature. 
 But in memory on the other hand the constraint is not 
 wholly external. For the necessity is taken to lie within 
 the content of the ideal process which develops the subject. 
 From the idea of myself on Tuesday I pass to the sending of 
 my letter because of something which belongs to the nature 
 of things which is taken as present at that date. The com- 
 pulsion in other words is assumed to come, not from mere 
 matter of fact, but from the special character of a certain 
 concrete fact.^ We wrote the premisses of inference as A&, 
 be, and of mere imagination as Ab, Be, where B was equi- 
 valent to b{x), and where about the x we could say nothing 
 whatever. But in memory that addition to and condition 
 of b, which constitutes B, is taken not to be a mere x. The 
 bond of union on the contrary is supposed to fall within the 
 area of a specified content. The result is therefore logical 
 so far and not merely psychical. It is logical so far as 
 the X has been partly determined, and so far as the condition 
 of the result has thus been brought within the process, and 
 no longer, as in mere imagination, falls outside in the un- 
 known. On the other hand, because the x cannot further 
 
 ' I shall add at the end of this chapter some further remarks on the 
 logical difference between memory and imagination, and on the ambiguity 
 of the term ' matter of fact '. Mere imagination gives ' matter of fact ', 
 in one sense, more than memory does. 
 
368 SOME REMARKS ON chap. 
 
 be specified, the result, though taken as necessary, still 
 falls short of a logical conclusion. For the condition which 
 carries A& to c may quaUfy A6 beyond its own nature, and 
 the conclusion therefore may not be true if you predicate 
 it of Kb. And so far as in the proper sense we remember, 
 this ignorance and this inabiUty is still implied.^ In memory 
 the predicate somehow belongs to the subject by the necessity 
 of the content. The necessity is therefore intrinsic so far, 
 since it falls within the process. On the other hand, because 
 it is not known to belong intrinsically to the subject itself, 
 we have no inference proper. 
 
 But though memory is not inference, in all memory an 
 inference is involved. To connect my letter with the idea 
 of last Tuesday I must first of all possess myself of that idea. 
 But this possession involves, as we saw, a process from the 
 present to something different, a process made through and 
 resting on a point of ideal identity ; and a passage of this 
 sort seems certainly to be an inference. From the present 
 Ac I go to the past C because of the c within C, and to go 
 otherwise is not possible. You may object that the initial 
 difference here between c and C is really external to c, just 
 as again the further connexions given by memory were 
 admitted not to be internal. This objection goes deep and 
 would raise questions which I cannot discuss in this chapter, 
 but for our present purpose it may be dismissed. It would, 
 if admitted, show that we have a defective inference here, as 
 perhaps almost everywhere,^ and it would not show that we 
 
 " Hence to draw an inference from a recollection as such is not possible. 
 For the mere recollection impUes that we have not got the premiss which 
 we desire to employ. To draw an inference from one individual fact as 
 such to another fact is as impossible actually as it would be senseless in 
 principle. So far as you remember, we may say, so far you are debarred 
 from reasoning. But on this subject I am confident that better ideas 
 are beginning to prevail both in psychology and in logic. 
 
 " In now republishing the above I would call the attention of the reader 
 to the fact that, in my Principles of Logic, pp. 518-9 (published 1883), it 
 is clearly stated that, even if the form of the inference is impeccable, 
 every inference is subjected to the risk of error on account of the doubt 
 as to the identity of the middle term. Cf. Chap. XIII, pp. 392 foil., 407. 
 
XII MEMORY AND INFERENCE 369 
 
 use no inference at all. And the premiss which is and must 
 be employed is this connexion of c with its difference, not 
 taken as subject to the condition of an individual case but 
 as unconditioned and simple. The connexion is of course 
 not really simple in an absolute sense, but it is simple in the 
 sense of being taken as unconditioned by the present fact 
 as such. And if you do not use it so, you clearly cannot 
 transcend the present at all. In other words this con- 
 nexion is not itself an affair of memory or of ' matter of fact ', 
 since it underlies these as their condition. The connexion 
 is direct, and the process where it is used, even if it is used 
 unjustifiably, I must therefore call an inference.^ 
 
 In the proper sense of inference then memory involves an 
 inference but itself really is not one.^ If, however, the term 
 
 ' We see here that inference both logically and in time precedes memory. 
 I am convinced that, while in fact many or most of the lower animals 
 certainly reason, perhaps none of them is able to remember in the proper 
 sense of memory. 
 
 ^ The above and what follows may, I hope, justify the doctrine I have 
 stated elsewhere, that memory in its essence involves an inference and 
 so is inferential. I have never said or meant that memory consists in 
 mere inference, and that you could make the goodness of the inference a 
 test of memory. The question as to how memory, involving an inference, 
 differs from inference proper, was not discussed or raised by me at all. 
 The statement in my Principles of Logic, p. 75, as to the want of a point 
 of identity in mere imagination, is certainly, as it stands, obscure and 
 perhaps misleading. Whether my mind was clear when I wrote it I 
 cannot now tell. What I should have said is that wherever we take 
 ourselves merely to imagine, there not only is no intrinsical necessity 
 attaching the result to the starting-place, but we also recognize that the 
 identity of the subject is lost and that there is a breach in continuity. 
 In memory, on the other hand, though the result is not taken as the 
 necessary ideal development of the subject itself, yet we ignore the doubt 
 as to a solution of continuity. We connect the end of the process with 
 and attribute it to the beginning, because the process comes to us from 
 one end to the other without an apparent break or loss of the subject, and 
 without the suggestion of an alien intrusion, or again of a sufficient com- 
 peting alternative. In imagination the connexion between subject and 
 predicate is that of casual occupancy, but in memory we have possession 
 which to such an extent is de facto that the question of title is not raised, 
 or, if raised, is assumed to be somehow satisfactorily settled. With 
 regard to the distinction between inference and mere imagination, that 
 is given correctly in my Principles, p. 410. 
 
 1574 B b 
 
370 SOME REMARKS ON chap. 
 
 were used in a looser way, the answer might be different, 
 and the whole sequence might perhaps be called an inference. 
 It would be here as in a case which involves observation. I 
 may see a man and recognize him as a certain person by a 
 genuine inference, and I then may perceive him to act in 
 a certain manner. I may, on this, attribute the perceived 
 act to the inferred person, and this whole process might be 
 termed an inference. And in the same way memory also 
 might be called an inference, for the reason beside that it 
 does not involve perception. I do not think, however, that 
 we need here consider this looser use. Nor will I stop 
 here to discuss a possible attempt to confound inference 
 with memory on the ground that all inference in the end 
 is irrational habit. For the secondary distinction between 
 inference and memory proper would still remain, even if 
 both were in the end mere results of memory in the sense 
 of habit. I could not in this chapter attempt to deal with 
 such a fundamental question,^ and must pass onto another 
 branch of our inquiry. 
 
 A memory, we have seen, is a state of mind which differs 
 from a mere imagination of the past, and in passing from 
 one to the other we are aware that we take a new attitude. 
 But how in the end can we tell that in memory our attitude 
 is justified, and that our remembrance really is any better 
 than mere fancy ? So far, indeed, as we can apply inference 
 and can rationally construct the past order, we seem to stand 
 on safe ground. But when we are left at last with an idea 
 of the past which shows no visible inconsistency, but about 
 which we are able to find no further evidence, what test can 
 we apply ? The answer must be that we do not possess any 
 valid criterion. There are marks which give us a certain 
 
 ^ A sceptical objection of this kind, if based on a psychological ground, 
 seems (Appearance, p. 137) inconsistent with itself. The proper way to 
 urge the objection is to compare the actual inferences which we must use 
 with that ideal of inference which alone we can take as satisfactory. 
 
xii MEMORY AND INFERENCE 371 
 
 degree of probability, and there are characters which more 
 or less strongly impel us to take the idea as real, but there 
 is in the end no criterion which is not fallible. I will briefly 
 mention the characters which usually distinguish what we 
 call a memory from a mere imagination. The interest of the 
 subject is in the main confined to psychology ; we should find 
 some dif&culties there into which I shall not enter, and the 
 order of my statement does not pretend to be systematic. 
 
 We may place first the characters of clearness and strength, 
 and in the next place fullness of detail, a detail which is not 
 visibly rational. Next may come the sense of familiarity, 
 and after that fixity of connexion ; and I will then go on to 
 add a few remarks, (i) I will not venture to ask here what 
 clearness and strength are to mean, but, whatever they mean, 
 a mere imagination may have as much of them as a memory 
 (or even more), and this seems even plain, (ii) The same 
 may be said with regard to mere fullness of detail, for a 
 simple imagination may be very full in comparison with 
 a memory. The character of the details is, however, a sign to 
 be noticed. If the particulars are many and yet appear as 
 an accidental conjunction, not depending upon any general 
 idea but seemingly irrelevant, that, so far as it goes, is 
 a mark of genuine memory. But this mark of irrational 
 detail is, however, no test, (iii) The sense of familiarity is 
 again deceptive. Its nature has been much discussed,^ but 
 I think we may represent it as follows. There is in memory 
 an absence of strangeness. The detail comes without shock 
 to a mind which does not expect it and yet is already 
 adjusted to receive it. And this adjustment points to an 
 associative disposition set up by past experience, but it 
 points ambiguously. For your present accidental mood 
 may favour and support strongly some idea about the past, 
 and this idea may in consequence strike you as natural 
 
 '■ The word ' assimilation ' tends to introduce us liere, in the pages of 
 Wundt and others, into a world of what I will venture to call the merest 
 mythology. 
 
372 SOME REMARKS ON chap. 
 
 and true. And again a mere imagination, if you repeat it, 
 becomes in this way familiar, and itself thus creates the 
 inner association which then offers itself as a witness to 
 independent fact. And there is, once more here, no sure way 
 of distinction between the false and the true, (iv) Fixity of 
 connexion is again not a trustworthy test. Where an idea 
 is connected with a certain date strongly and fixedly in such 
 a way that the opposite is maintained with difficulty, and 
 where in addition this connexion is constantly recurrent, we 
 tend to take it as memory. And where, besides this, the 
 detail appears as a mere conjunction of coinciding particu- 
 lars, we feel ourselves confirmed. But mere imagination 
 is unfortunately well known to present all these features, 
 and it is impossible to find an infaUible criterion or remedy. 
 There are certain characters which usually are the result of 
 that past fact to which the present idea refers. Foremost 
 among these is that fixity and necessity of non-rational but 
 integral detail which belongs to and points to an individual 
 experience ; and, when to this is added the sense of fami- 
 liarity, then memory seldom fails to appear and is commonly 
 justified. But the above characters can each, and all 
 together, be present in a false imagination. 
 
 The veracity of memory is not absolute, and memory itself 
 is subject to the control of a higher criterion. Our justifica- 
 tion for regarding memory as in general accurate is briefly 
 this, that by taking such a course we are best able to order 
 and harmonize our world. There is in the end no other 
 actual or possible criterion of fact and truth than this, and 
 the search for a final fact and for an absolute datum is 
 everywhere the pursuit of a mere ignis fatuus. You may 
 look for it in outward perception, or you may seek it in 
 inward experience and intuition, but in each case you are 
 misled by one and the same error in a different dress. This 
 is a subject too large to be dealt with here as a whole, but 
 I will notice before proceeding a recent instructive attempt 
 to prove that memory is not fallible, 
 
XII MEMORY AND INFERENCE 373 
 
 The position taken by Prof. Ladd on this point seems far 
 from clear. ^ I understand that for him it is a vital matter 
 to show that memory is at least in part infallible, but for 
 the rest his procedure seems obscure and even inconsistent 
 with itself. He admits the extreme fallibiUty of memory in 
 detail, but contends that at least it cannot be wrong in its 
 assertion of my past existence. But how far, and in what 
 sense, when bared of or transformed in detail, my past 
 existence remains mine, is a matter not discussed, nor, 
 apart from this, is there any evidence produced for the 
 truth of the contention. If wherever else a witness can be 
 tested he is shown to be fallible, you can hardly assume 
 him to be infallible in or beyond a certain point, simply be- 
 cause in or beyond that point you have in fact always found 
 him to be right. And with regard to memory of my past 
 existence the case stands as follows. All the memories that 
 we can examine belong to minds which have had some 
 previous existence, and it is very probable that memory can 
 exist only as the result of some foregoing psychical develop- 
 ment, however short. And, if this is so, then memory will 
 be for this extraneous reason, and will be so far, infallible. 
 It will be infallible, we may say, accidentally and in fact, 
 but not in principle. Its evidence will depend on and be 
 restricted to that which is otherwise known. And such an 
 infallibihty is, I presume, for Prof. Ladd's purpose useless. 
 And even so much as this can, perhaps, not be demonstrated. 
 For that memory should supervene suddenly at a certain 
 point of physiological development in such a way that its 
 report of a past psychical self would be wholly mistaken, 
 seems not clearly and in principle to be impossible. If so, even 
 the limited inf aUibility of memory seems not proved ; but in 
 any case, even if proved, I have shown its dependent nature.^ 
 
 ' Philosophy of Mind, pp. 133 foil. I have at present no acquaintance 
 with Prof. Ladd's other works. 
 
 ^ If a man mistakenly remembers events ten years before he was born, 
 is it satisfactory to add : There you see at once that his memory is really 
 
 infallihlp fnr 1ip liuil aK a far.1- Knnip. aj'.tnjll nast (aS VOU Sawl before he 
 
374 SOME REMARKS ON chap. 
 
 From this obscure and unsafe position Prof. Ladd passes 
 to a second, which, itself untenable, seems not even consistent 
 with the first. All reasoning, he argues, goes from premisses 
 to a conclusion, and our knowledge of the conclusion depends 
 upon our memory of the premisses. Hence, if that is falUble, 
 every possible act of reasoning is discredited. Far then from 
 being able to show that memory is fallible, we have even to 
 assume the opposite if we intend to have any conclusion 
 whatever. And with this we have a sure and certain remedy, 
 Prof. Ladd argues, against the disease of scepticism. But 
 the ground of the argument seems to me incorrect, and the 
 conclusion drawn quite mistaken. The argument should 
 prove, it seems to me, that memory is not fallible at all. 
 Hence, when a particular memory is shown by reasoning to 
 be false, we are left, it would appear, in hopeless confusion. 
 For we must either accept both contradictories at once, or, 
 if we select, we select on no principle, and surely this must 
 be admitted to amount to scepticism. What we are to do 
 when memory is thus divided against itself, and how mere 
 memory is to sit in judgement on itself, are matters not 
 explained. In short, that argument for the supremacy of 
 reason which holds good against scepticism, becomes, if you 
 transfer it to memory, wholly and entirely sceptical. ^ 
 
 made that mistake about his past ? And even this amount of de facto 
 infalUbility rests on the assumption I have noticed in the text. It is 
 therefore so far precarious, as well as in any case derivative. 
 
 ' How is mere memory to be a ruler and judge of itself ? I cannot see 
 how this Is to be possible. If, on the other hand, memory is to subject 
 itself to the judgement of reason, I cannot see how anywhere it is to claim 
 independent authority, and to be treated as infalUble or as more than 
 de facto not mistaken. These are points on which I seek enUghtenment 
 so far in vain. If, for instance, it is urged that, in order to make the 
 world intelligible, I must postulate that memory is right, unless so far as 
 I have some special reason to think it anywhere wrong, I entirely agree. 
 Certainly, I reply, and without doubt, we must make this assumption. 
 But if, on this, I am told that, if so, we have an independent and ultimate 
 postulate, I am forced to demur. Most evidently not so, I answer, if the 
 assumption is made in order to make the world intelligible. If you leave 
 out that, then, I agree, the postulate becomes ultimate, but it becomes 
 at the same time arbitrary and, so far as I see, quite indefensible. If 
 
XII MEMORY AND INFERENCE 375 
 
 Prof. Ladd's conclusion then is really sceptical, but the 
 foundation of his argument, to return to that, consists in 
 a mistake. It is not the case that reasoning depends on 
 memory, and such an idea implies a wrong view about 
 inference. In the first place in inference there need be no 
 premisses drawn out and put before the mind, and a very 
 large tract of our reasoning must in this sense be called 
 intuitive. Prof. Ladd has seen this, but without more ado 
 he drives the evidence bodily out of court. Everything of 
 this kind is ' a merely mechanical movement of the ideas ', 
 a conclusion which I venture to regard as quite monstrous 
 and a sufficient disproof of its foundation. That foundation 
 is, however, in itself untenable. To assume that in an 
 inference, where I go from premisses to a conclusion, I depend 
 upon memory, is to maintain that in inference I am neces- 
 sitated en route not to know what I am about, and arrived 
 at the end must have forgotten, and so be forced to remem- 
 ber, the starting-point and the way — and this surely is 
 erroneous. The normal type of inference is surely the 
 unbroken development of an identical subject,^ which does 
 not leave the mind by the way and which, therefore, can 
 hardly be remembered. This is the normal type, and I 
 will add that, so far as this fails to be present, the operation 
 is really not an inference.^ With this I must pass from the 
 subject of memory's faUibiUty. 
 
 I will add some words on the question which has been 
 
 raised about Belief. Memory, we saw, takes its ideas of the 
 
 we are to think at all, we must postulate that reason is in principle in- 
 fallible, and is the ultimate judge of its own errors. But to postulate 
 that memory is in principle infallible seems to me to be, on the one hand, 
 wholly unnecessary and, for any legitimate purpose, quite useless ; and, on 
 the other hand, it appears to me to be in the end almost devoid of meaning. 
 
 ' There are some further remarks on this head in the following chapter. 
 
 ^ Even in an indirect argument, where I divide A into Kb and Ac, and 
 then by disproving Ac prove Kb, I do not in the operation depend upon 
 memory. Certainly at the end of my disproof of Ac I may have forgotten 
 A6, but I then return to the beginning with the knowledge that A is not 
 c, and now with that in my mind reach the conclusion Kb from A. The 
 knowlpflcrp +>ia+ A i<3 nrif r. rlnos Tint here dftnend nn memorv. It miErht 
 
376 SOME REMARKS ON chap. 
 
 past as real, while in mere imagination there is no such 
 claim. It is the addition of behef, then, we hear it said, 
 which turns imagination into memory, and our main task 
 is to find in what this addition consists, or at least to set it 
 down as ' a final inexphcabiUty '. But the whole question 
 is in this way misunderstood and the issue radically per- 
 verted. To take for granted the existence of ' mere ideas ' as 
 self-evident and as a matter of course, and to treat beUef in 
 these as something supervening, or even adventitious, which 
 we have then got to explain, is fundamentally erroneous. 
 It is to make an assumption quite false in its principle and 
 in its consequences most misleading. The presence of and 
 the possibility of these ' mere ideas ' is, on the contrary, the 
 very thing which calls most for explanation. No such ideas, 
 we may say with confidence, can possibly exist in an early 
 mind. To entertain an idea in which you do not beheve, 
 a suspended idea held in separation from the presented 
 reahty, is a late and, when we reflect, an enormous mental 
 achievement. It implies a disruption of that immediate 
 unity of theory and practice which is at first throughout 
 prevalent and is also necessary. At an early stage of mind, 
 every suggestion which does not conflict with the felt present 
 is appropriated by that present and is necessarily believed 
 in, so far as we are able as yet to speak of belief. The sug- 
 gestion, on the other hand, which is not beUeved in, cannot 
 possibly be retained theoretically, but, apart from appetite 
 or fear, is banished forthwith. It is not my business here 
 to attempt to show how mere ideas become possible, and 
 
 so depend if, e.g., I had merely found in my notes that I had one day 
 proved Ac to be false, and if I used that bare result. But so far that 
 result obviously does not pretend to be itself made in my inference at all. 
 And with direct reasoning it seems clear that, so far as the subject has 
 lapsed from the mind by the way, there is properly no inference. The 
 operation, to become an inference, must in some form be repeated without 
 that lapse. The retention of an identical content before the mind, and 
 the assumption that where I have seen no difference by the way there is 
 no difference, can neither of them be called memory except by an abuse 
 of language. The points raised by Prof. Ladd arc certainly well worth 
 raising and discussing, but his treatment of them seems not satisfactory. 
 
XII MEMORY AND INFERENCE 377 
 
 again how far, and in what sense, the simple entertainment 
 of them still involves judgement and their reference to a 
 modified Reality. It is sufficient to have noticed in passing 
 a common mistake and to have pointed out its nature. 
 The main question, we may say, is not about the plus of 
 behef, but about the minus of mere thinking. The main 
 question in other words is. How is it possible not to believe ? 
 Then, when that point is clear, we may approach with con- 
 fidence a different and subsequent problem, What is the 
 difference between primitive belief and the belief or judge- 
 ment which comes after doubt, and which really does super- 
 vene upon our ' mere ideas ' ? And when we have seen 
 that mere ideas consist in the disruption of a unity, we shall 
 not find it hard to perceive the nature of that which super- 
 venes. It is the restoration of those ideas to the unity from 
 which they were separated, and to which they are now once 
 more j oined i n a higher sense . It is in this restoration that we 
 must seek and find the real nature of that addition which we 
 observe in belief. But the question of the separation is funda- 
 mental, and, if it is ignored, the whole inquiry is wrecked.^ 
 
 I should like to append to this chapter some remarks on a 
 point to which I have adverted (p. 367), the question, that 
 is, about what is to be called ' Matter of fact '. So large a 
 
 ' In this matter Prof. Bain's doctrine of Primitive Credulity has been 
 of great service to psychology. I must, however, in passing remark that 
 I am forced largely to dissent from his view as to belief. I dissent further 
 from the mere identification of judgement with belief, but I cannot enter 
 here into the difference between them. I would further direct the reader's 
 attention to the fact that I may disbelieve in that which I certainly 
 remember. The memory is here a judgement necessary in and on its own 
 ground, but that region has here been disconnected from the world which 
 I call my real world. This attitude is, of course, my common attitude 
 towards the ' imaginary '. The judgement will be here a kind of condi- 
 tional judgement. The difference I have noted between either the theo- 
 retical or practical acceptance of an idea after it has been held as a mere 
 idea and its acceptance previously, has great importance. There is a re- 
 union of the element, which was held aloof, once more with the felt reality. 
 And it is this re-union which gives that feeUng of ' consent ' which has 
 been found so inexplicable. On the question of ' mere ideas ' and ' the 
 ima.fyin^.rv ' «pr P.hai.t TTT 
 
378 SOME REMARKS ON chap. 
 
 subject, it is obvious, cannot properly be discussed in passing, 
 and what follows, though not new, is offered mainly as an 
 invitation to further inquiry (see Index, s.v. Fact). 
 
 ' Matter of fact ' seems a highly ambiguous phrase, and 
 for our present purpose we may distinguish three different 
 senses, or three aspects of one sense, (i) The word may 
 stand for that which is merely felt or is simply experienced, 
 something which therefore excludes, so far, anything like 
 judgement, truth, or falsehood. In this meaning of the 
 word, imagination, memory and observation all alike are 
 above, or if you please are below, matter of fact ; for their 
 connexions are all more or less analytic and abstract. (2) On 
 the other side, these connexions will be matter of fact in 
 varying degrees in proportion as they are external and 
 apparently devoid of any intrinsic reason. (3) And again, 
 they may be matter of fact as belonging to and as dependent 
 on a certain point in our ' real ' series. It is on these two 
 later shades of meaning that I am about to make some very 
 brief remarks.^ 
 
 The "merely imaginary ' marks the furthest extreme of 
 matter of fact in the second of our meanings. It is not an 
 affair of mere sense, since it qualifies a subject by an ideal 
 predicate ; but its bond of connexion, on the other side, is 
 bare matter of fact. This connexion or conjunction on the 
 one hand is actually there, but on the other hand it seems 
 entirely irrational, since there is no more reason for it than 
 for its diametrical opposite. The connexion therefore is, but 
 it is true and real only by virtue of unknown conditions, and 
 therefore in an unknown form. You pass from subject to 
 predicate not on any ground which appears as intrinsic, not 
 because of anything which seems comprised in your content, 
 
 ' A man is, I presume, called for good or evil a " matter of fact ' person, 
 according as he confines himself to the actual events of what we call ' our 
 real world ', in opposition either to the ' imaginary ' or again to wide 
 general principles of truth and conduct. For the limited reality of ' our 
 real world ' the reader is referred to Chapters III and XVI. 
 
XII MEMORY AND INFERENCE 379 
 
 but on the strength of what falls outside. This unknown 
 bond is for you no more than the nature of the universe at 
 large, and you may call it matter of fact in general. In this 
 sense of matter of fact memory and observation possess less 
 of it than does mere imagination. 
 
 But if we pass from the second to the third meaning of our 
 term, and understand matter of fact not as general but as 
 special and individual, the case is altered, and observation 
 and memory must now be admitted to stand above mere 
 imagination. For in them the predicate is not attached to 
 the subject by a merely unknown cause, but is taken as con- 
 nected with it by the nature of what appears at a certain 
 point of our real series. Their truth therefore belongs to, 
 and is conditioned by, what is known at least in part. The 
 connexion on the one side remains outward and an unin- 
 teUigible conjunction, so far as its bond, though locahzed, is 
 not made explicit. The condition cannot be specified and so 
 brought within the subject, and the judgement to this extent 
 remains irrational and mere matter of fact. But on the 
 other side, so far as the connexion falls within, and is con- 
 ditioned by, a Umited area of content, so far as it belongs, in 
 other words, to a special matter of fact, it has so far already 
 ceased to be a mere conjunction, and has become intrinsic 
 and rational.^ 
 
 It is impossible within these hmits to attempt to show how 
 the process once begun is carried further. The growth of 
 our knowledge consists, we may say, in the sustained 
 endeavour to get rid of mere matter of fact, to make the 
 bond of connexion explicit, and to bring the condition of 
 the predicate within the content of the subject. A genuine 
 
 ' A mere imagination, if you take it as an occurrence in my history, 
 belongs to matter of fact in the above sense of Kmited and individual 
 fact. But this is because you have taken it not logically but psycho- 
 logically. If you confine yourself to its logical aspect and consider it with 
 reference merely to what it asserts, it is of course so far not an event in 
 my life and a thing which can be observed. It so far is not matter of fact, 
 but possesses matter of fact in the sense of matter of fact in general. 
 
38o ON MEMORY AND INFERENCE chap, xii 
 
 and complete truth cannot be confined within one part of 
 our real series, but, to be complete and genuine, must take 
 in the rest. And observation, if repeated,^ and in a higher 
 degree artificial experiment, transcend the individual case 
 and pass into general truth, truth not conditioned by the 
 fact of any date. But whether in the end, and, if so, how 
 far and in what sense, the externality of the predicate can 
 wholly disappear, is a question which here cannot be dis- 
 cussed (see Chapters VIII and IX) . 
 
 ' In this respect memory remains inferior. To speak broadly and 
 apart from a certain qualification, we have in memory a mere result 
 which cannot be developed, and we cannot, as in continued and repeated 
 observation, inquire further into the conditions of the result. For in 
 memory (in the main) we are not in direct contact with these special 
 conditions. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 
 
 My object in this chapter is to throw light on the ultimate 
 value of memory as a test of truth. ^ Memory, I shall con- 
 tend, must have a subordinate position and vahdity, and 
 otherwise we are reduced inevitably to total scepticism. 
 Philosophy, if it is to be more than an exercise more or less 
 desirable, must have an answer, I presume, to sceptical ob- 
 jections. On the other hand, I shall contend that there is no 
 answer which does not involve the denial of memory's inde- 
 pendence. Philosophy cannot exist apart from absolute 
 sovereignty, and we have to choose between monarchy and 
 chaos. But this means that in the end we can recognize 
 nothing in the shape of a self-sufficient element or autono- 
 mous detail. 
 
 As soon as doubt is raised as to what we are finally justi- 
 fied in beheving, that doubt, it is clear, drives us back on 
 reflection. And truth, if we go on to find it, will be a judge- 
 ment which, when we reflect, satisfies us. Now, as to the 
 nature of this special satisfaction there is of course much to 
 be discussed, and there are points on which here I am un- 
 able to enter.^ But what I have to insist on here is a point 
 which seems to be vital. Our last judgement, and that is our 
 present judgement, must be taken or rather must be treated 
 as infallible. This does not mean that a further reflection 
 may not cause us to reject it. It means that, until that 
 
 ' This chapter appeared first in Mind for April 1908. It was written 
 some four or five years before that time, and hence, for better or worse, 
 contains no reference to any controversy of later date. 
 
 ' Most of these are dealt with in other parts of the present volume. 
 
382 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap. 
 
 reflection comes, we must hold the judgement as true, and 
 that we cannot, while making a judgement, entertain the pos- 
 sibihty of its error. Psychologically I should agree that there 
 are various intensities of behef, and that, when I judge, my 
 degree of confidence and my whole emotional tone may on 
 each occasion be different. But the actual presence of an 
 idea which is directly contrary to what I judge, would, 
 taken psychically, be an effective hindrance to the presence 
 of the judgement. It would prevent the making of the 
 judgement or would destroy it if made. And again, when 
 we view the matter logically, there seems left no room for 
 doubt. As soon as a judgement is made you can of course 
 then proceed to reflect on it. In this way what was your 
 judgement can be turned into the object of a later thought. 
 And taken thus you can approve of it and find it true, or 
 you can reject it, in part or altogether, as a more or less 
 complete mistake. Or again, unable to decide, you may 
 •regard it as doubtful. But in any case your reaffirmation, 
 denial or doubt, goes beyond and supersedes the original 
 judgement. They each add an element which in no case 
 leaves that judgement as it was, but everywhere destroys in 
 some sense its first character and force. As the object of 
 later reflection, this, that was my present judgement, has 
 been transformed, and now, whether it is doubted, denied 
 or reaffirmed, it has been made subordinate to a later 
 moment. It has been included and embraced in a new 
 logical present, and its life, so far as it now lives, must be 
 drawn from that inclusion. A mere past judgement, when 
 I reflect on it, loses at once by my reflection its own inde- 
 pendent value. I am logically beyond it, while I obviously 
 cannot go beyond my present judgement while that remains 
 present. My present judgement therefore, while it exists, 
 cannot possibly be doubted, and, however strange this may 
 sound, that judgement cannot be allowed or even suspected 
 to be fallible. 
 
XIII ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 383 
 
 Such a doctrine tends naturally to be misunderstood, and 
 it suggests obvious objections, some of which I will proceed 
 to notice in passing. If every judgement can be superseded, 
 how, I shall be asked, can any judgement be final ? But, 
 even if all past judgements hitherto had been corrected as 
 wrong, I do not see how you could doubt the judgement 
 which at present you make. For, even if you make your 
 judgement subject to a doubt, and if you so condition it, at 
 least this conditional judgement of yours is made uncon- 
 ditionally. And, further, the supersession of a judgement 
 need not mean its correction. If a judgement is reaffirmed, 
 it has been set on one side in its old character of ' this 
 judgement ', but that which it affirmed has been made 
 dependent on my judgement which now is. The truth of 
 my judgement has therefore become independent of its past 
 assertion, but it certainly need not have been corrected or 
 vitally transformed. And it is not difficult again to reply 
 to a further objection. If every judgement is found, as 
 being something human, to have the character of f allibihty, 
 how, we may be asked, can any judgement escape from this 
 sentence ? But a judgement, I reply, may be fallible only 
 in its general character as being one judgement among others. 
 Hence if you take it differently, as it certainly is taken in 
 my actual present judgement, any such partial aspect may, 
 without misgiving, be set on one side. The probability of 
 error in other words was antecedent and abstract, and it 
 cannot be applied to this case as this case actually exists. 
 And if you insist that experience proves that every possible 
 judgement is fallible in essence, you have involved yourself 
 now in contradiction with yourself. For if this doctrine of 
 yours is not certain, the conclusion which you draw from it 
 vanishes, while, if it is certain, it for that very reason must 
 itself become doubtful. 
 
 The objections we have noticed, it is clear, possess no 
 force. We must continue so far to maintain that our last 
 
384 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap. 
 
 judgement in reflection is supreme. And memory, if so, 
 cannot have independent worth, nor is it possible that my 
 judgement can in the end depend on memory. But, before 
 proceeding to defend and to explain this view, I will briefly 
 point out what follows if the opposite is maintained. 
 
 The independent value of memory is often asserted. It 
 suggests itself at times as an obvious fact, while at other 
 times it comes in to stop a hole in some theory, and it may 
 even be offered as a sure remedy for scepticism. But to me 
 it seems that no long consideration is required in order to 
 perceive that such a doctrine is ruinously sceptical. Memory 
 is used in a number of different senses.^ It may stand for 
 my present judgement as to some past event of mine, or its 
 meaning may be stretched so as to include everything which 
 falls under retentiveness. So far therefore as in a judgement 
 we have a succession of perceptions or ideas, we must (it will 
 be said) postulate memory in some sense in order to prevent 
 a solution of continuity. For otherwise, with a broken 
 succession of different subjects, we infalUbly must lose all 
 we gain by the way, and at the end of the process can have 
 nothing to show. And again, since our present meaning 
 must depend on our past experience, we cannot now, it is 
 further urged, even begin to think at all, except so far as we 
 take our stand on the faculty of memory.^ 
 
 Now no one can deny that in a sense we depend on past 
 experience. For, apart from any other consideration, it is 
 from past experience that in the main our minds are filled. 
 And generally to suppose that without the past we should 
 have an intelligible present seems obviously absurd. We 
 bring, to the present from the past, materials, furniture and 
 implements, and no one, so far as I am aware, could even 
 
 '■ Seep. 353- 
 
 ' See Dr. Venn, Empirical Logic, pp. 116-18. Dr. Venn appears to 
 accept here some traditional psychology which at best is doubtful. I do 
 not know how he would propose to meet the sceptical result from his view 
 of memory. This last remark applies again to other writers. 
 
xiii ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 385 
 
 seek to deny this. But this, on the other hand, is not really 
 the point which is at issue. The result of the past, I main- 
 tain, is to be used as material with regard to which the 
 decision of the present is supreme. This result has not got 
 to be accepted, as it comes, and in the form which it bears ; 
 and taken in its own character it has no ultimate and in- 
 dependent worth. To contend on the other hand for our 
 ultimate dependence on memory, is to claim in effect for 
 this mere result from the past a position and value which is 
 independent and absolute. And, held in any form, such a 
 doctrine, I urge, must lead us to ruin. 
 
 In the first place it gains little if any support from Common 
 Sense. Common Sense goes no further than to take some 
 memory as practically certain, while it allows that memory 
 in general may be mistaken and is corrigible. But, on the 
 other hand, anything which stands independently seems not 
 capable of correction. If however, passing from Common 
 Sense, we consider the facts, we seem forced to admit that 
 memory is fallible to an indefinite extreme. If you add to 
 ordinary mistakes those cases of error which are called 
 pathological, and include in these the results of hypnotic 
 experiment, there seems no limit to the possibility of 
 memory's failure.^ And the position is no better where the 
 meaning of memory is improperly widened, and covers in 
 general our present use of past perception or judgement. 
 For past experience may be incorrectly retained or con- 
 nected wrongly with a present instance, and at what point 
 here a line can be drawn I am unable to perceive. In short 
 to hold that memory is not fallible seems to entail the denial 
 
 ' I have above, pp. 373-5, criticized Prof. Ladd's position with regard 
 to this point, Philosophy of Mind, p. 133. To hold that memory cannot 
 be wrong as to the fact of my past existence is, even if tenable in the 
 abstract, quite futile, because it is tenable only in the abstract. If my 
 memory may be wrong so far as it says anything about my past exist- 
 ence — and this apparently Prof. Ladd does not deny — how much is left 
 for it to assert infallibly I hardly comprehend. But see the pages 
 referred to. 
 
 1574 C c 
 
386 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap. 
 
 of plain fact. But if on the other hand my present judge- 
 ment is to depend on something falling outside of itself, 
 then unless that something (whatever it is) can be taken as 
 infallible, my judgement must be taken as liable to error. 
 In other words, if memory is to have an independent stand- 
 ing and value, we are condemned, so far as I see, to unUmited 
 scepticism. 
 
 Still, it will be objected, if the alternative you offer is to 
 throw away all past results, your alternative itself in the end 
 is ruinous. But it is your mistake, I reply, which brings in 
 such a vicious alternative. To say that no past result has 
 independent and absolute value is not to deny that past 
 results are in another way indispensable. Past results are 
 in short to be used as material out of which my present 
 judgement has to make a construction ; but there is no 
 standing conjunction in this material which is in principle 
 sacred.^ Any past judgement is taken as falhble in prin- 
 ciple, and as capable of being overruled by a present judge- 
 ment which rearranges its material. On the other hand 
 there is no question as to the throwing away of all or of any 
 material. The question is whether the material, when used 
 in my present judgement, has any connexions which, taken 
 as they stand, retain absolute vaUdity, or whether on the 
 contrary the vaUdity of all now depends on my present 
 judgement and is subject to that. I have shown that the 
 independent worth of past connexions means present ruin. 
 On the other side the superiority of present to past judge- 
 
 ^ I regret that I cannot, while correcting this paper for the press, remark 
 on the position lately taken by Mr. Russell and again by Prof. Stout. 
 But in passing I would emphasize the following point. Our object is to 
 make the widest and most harmonious construction. In order to carry 
 out this object we accept, and we must accept, remembered past facts. 
 But we accept them only provisionally, and subject in any particular case 
 to correction in the light of further knowledge. The reason why we do 
 not in the same way accept what is offered by mere fancy, is that on such 
 a principle of action we could not make the intellectual construction 
 which we seek. [This foot-note belongs to the year 1908, and 1 now refer 
 the reader to Chap. VII of this volume] 
 
XIII ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 387 
 
 ment entails, apart from misunderstanding, no mischievous 
 consequence. It is compatible with the doctrine that any 
 judgement once made must stand until over-ridden, a 
 doctrine the truth of which will be discussed lower down. 
 The fact in short that all judgements are, as judgements, 
 corrigible, does not imply that every judgement is in fact 
 to be corrected. And again the general rule on which we 
 act with regard to memory, our presumption, that is, that 
 memory is correct except so far as we have a special reason 
 to doubt it, in no way conflicts with the superiority of 
 present judgement. It would conflict with this only if 
 our last judgement were to pronounce the above rule to be 
 invalid. And if it is urged that memory, though corrected, 
 is corrected only by further memory, such an objection, it 
 seems to me, can be easily disposed of. What it states is 
 not true except in part, and is not true in the end. For 
 memory at times seems to be corrected not by memory but 
 by inference. And, apart from this and in general, I am 
 unable to understand how an infallible memory can possibly 
 correct itself. It is to me on the other hand intelligible that 
 diverse memories can and do radically conflict, and that such 
 a collision, if we have no higher criterion, leads inevitably 
 to scepticism. In fact and in truth memory, wherever 
 corrected, is corrected by a judgement. This judgement in 
 different cases may differ widely. It may make use of a 
 greater or less amount of materials, and it may or may not 
 be itself a memory-judgement. Certainly, where our last 
 judgement is a memory-judgement, it remains none the less 
 infallible, but this, it is plain, does not show memory to be 
 infallible in general. We have a special memory- judgement 
 which we cannot doubt so long as it remains our last judge- 
 ment. This judgement, however, is infallible not because it 
 is memory but because it is our last judgement. Memory in 
 short becomes for you infaUible only where you judge that 
 all memory is infallible. But such a judgement, we have 
 
388 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap. 
 
 seen, is dispelled by reflection, and must give way to another 
 which pronounces it false. 
 
 I have so far urged that a present judgement cannot be 
 treated as faUible, and that as against this nothing outside 
 can possess any force. And I have argued that to assign an 
 independent and ultimate value to memory leads necessarily 
 to scepticism. On the other hand the doctrine which I 
 advocate requires explanation, for it seems itself to invite 
 and to justify sceptical doubt. ' If to rest on memory ', it 
 will be objected, ' is to build upon sand, it is after all upon 
 sand that your doctrine is based. For you cannot deny 
 that your judgement requires time and is successive, and you 
 cannot deny that the result of past experience now quaUfies 
 your judgement. Even if in some instance you contend that 
 this is not visibly the case, yet in no instance can you exclude 
 the doubt or even the presumption that really it is so. And 
 hence, if you will not invoke a " faculty of Memory ", and if 
 you will not go on to assume that this " faculty " is infalhble, 
 your own conclusion will in any case fall into ruin. For 
 your judgement in the end will stand on something external 
 and foreign, something the truth of which will remain at best 
 precarious. And your judgement itself, when arrived at its 
 end, will fail to connect its end with that beginning of itself 
 which now has perished. It is only through memory that 
 a judgement is one, and any judgement that is not one, is no 
 judgement at all.' This objection seems serious, and we 
 must endeavour to meet it. 
 
 We are led at once to recall a principle, well known but 
 often neglected, the distinction between a judgement viewed 
 in its logical and, on the other side, in its psychical aspect.^ 
 Every judgement on the one hand asserts an ideal content. 
 It asserts this of something which is other than that con- 
 tent and other than the judgement itself. Again, on the 
 
 ' I may remind the reader that I am not here replying to scepticism in 
 general, but only to one kind of sceptical objection. 
 
XIII ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 389 
 
 other hand, every judgement is a state of myself. Now a 
 state of myself has lapse and has duration indefinitely 
 divisible, and it is a product which results from external 
 conditions. But you cannot take these characters, which 
 belong to my state when I assert, and use them to qualify 
 that which I assert. On the contrary my assertion in this 
 latter sense must, except for certain purposes, be taken as 
 independent of my state as asserting. And for our present 
 purpose certainly we must so take it as independent. The 
 thing affirmed is different from what goes on in my mind as 
 I affirm it, and you cannot take the nature and the origin 
 of this last and apply them to qualify the matter which 
 I affirm. My judgement that ' ginger is hot in the mouth ' 
 contains no reference to any origin *in past instances of 
 ginger. And again this judgement does not involve an 
 internal sequence and lapse, and warrant an ensuing doubt 
 as to the identity of ' ginger ' when ' mouth ' is reached. 
 Everything of this kind is at once extraneous and so far 
 unknown. And when by reflection it is reached, you have 
 ipso facto left your original assertion and have passed on to 
 others. These other judgements, with regard to your state 
 when asserting, cannot except through a mistake be made 
 to conflict with your original judgement. And they them- 
 selves, when made, are valid merely so far as they are 
 assertions. And in this character they themselves exclude 
 any reference to your psychical state as at present you 
 make them. 
 
 Every judgement may be taken to involve a psychical 
 lapse and succession, but this aspect of its existence falls 
 outside of the judgement as logical. If, for instance, the 
 judgement asserts a succession, this is not the succession 
 which belongs to its existence as a psychical fact. And 
 again the judgement need not assert any succession at all. 
 In this case within the judgement there is no succession ; 
 and whether we begin (as we say) with the subject or begin 
 
390 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap. 
 
 with the predicate, and whether again the process endures 
 for the fraction of a second or for an hour or for a century — 
 this is all in itself indifferent to the content asserted. And 
 no lapse or change outside this content can affect the unity 
 of our judgement. Nothing in short can affect our judge- 
 ment except from the inside. And hence anything external, 
 whether it is psychical lapse or again the previous existence 
 or worth of some element in the judgement, must remain 
 irrelevant. If it is to enter the judgement it must put off 
 its external character. And thus within the judgement no 
 complexity of detail or structure prevents the judgement 
 being one, so long as no element is allowed to retain an 
 independent force. You may urge that my judgement 
 stands or falls with the truth of some element contained 
 within it, and you may insist that this truth comes from 
 nowhere but previous experience. But all this to my judge- 
 ment is either unknown and so nothing, or else, if known and 
 admitted, is the destruction of my judgement, as such. 
 These considerations, true or false, have in any case gone 
 beyond my present judgement, and they have taken me, if 
 anywhere, on to a new judgement. But this new judgement, 
 like the former one, itself guarantees its own contents, and 
 to me, while it lasts, cannot seem to be fallible. 
 
 Such a doctrine, I know, must appear to be ridiculous. It 
 is absurd, I shall be told, to suggest that there is no reason 
 for my judgement being true except the fact that it is there, 
 and it is perverse to recommend me to hold my judgement 
 standing in order to keep it infaUible. But I have made, 
 I reply, no suggestion of this kind. I agree on the contrary 
 that it is our duty to ask and to reflect, and to supersede one 
 judgement by another. Thus ' He is the person who did that 
 last week ', may be superseded by ' The truth of that depends 
 merely on my recollection ', and this by ' After all one must 
 trust one's memory ', and this again by ' In the present case 
 the main point is uncertain '. But it does not follow that 
 
XIII UN MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 391 
 
 before a judgement is superseded I am to take it as fallible. 
 And I agree once more that there is a reason why judgements 
 are true or else false. There is a character which, when I 
 reflect, leads me to prefer one judgement to another, and 
 leads me even to reject both of them if neither will satisfy; 
 But this character, I would urge, is not external to my 
 judgements, and to make the truth of a judgement depend 
 on something which falls outside itself, must lead in the end, 
 if you follow it to the end, into scepticism or nonsense. 
 But at present I am not inquiring into the nature of this 
 character. The point on which I am insisting here is one- 
 sided, if you please, but none the less I must insist on it as 
 evident and necessary. I cannot, while I make a judgement, 
 at the same time also doubt it. I cannot doubt or deny 
 a judgement without going beyond this judgement and 
 without making it a part in some wider ideal whole. ^ And 
 at least I cannot deny it except by another judgement which 
 I cannot at once make and regard as fallible. And, while 
 I make a judgement, that which falls outside it is so far 
 nothing to me. The psychical existence with its lapse and 
 its duration is nothing. The priority or independence of 
 any portion of its content is nothing. These things cannot 
 be anything for our judgement till they are brought into 
 that judgement ; until, that is, one judgement is superseded 
 by another, itself now infaUible. We may end with the 
 decision that there are conflicting ideas between which we 
 are unable to decide, or we may conclude that, in the end 
 and in its full exactitude, no conclusion is tenable. But 
 even here our decision and our conclusion, if we make it. 
 
 ' By doubt here I do not mean the mere psychical oscillation in which, 
 after failure or rejection, the judgement merely comes back again as it 
 was. I mean by doubt the state where the judgement is made an object, 
 and where another idea is held as opposed to it. Again in denial the 
 reader must remember that a judgement may be denied from a basis which 
 is not made explicit. The denial here merely takes the form of. This 
 judgement does not satisfy me. 
 
392 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap. 
 
 is indubitable, until at least it has been banished or super- 
 seded by something beyond itself. And, while I agree that 
 this contention may perhaps be called obvious and trivial, 
 I must insist that it is not on that account to be treated 
 as false.'^ 
 
 We have so far seen that my present judgement cannot be 
 taken as fallible, and further that in a sense it must be self- 
 contained. Whatever independent reason there may be for 
 or against its assertion, that reason, while independent, is 
 nothing to my judgement. And if it becomes something for 
 me, then forthwith I have gone beyond my original judge- 
 ment, which thus has ceased to exist. This conclusion, if 
 trivial, seems certain, but it leads at once to a further ques- 
 tion : What am I to mean by one judgement, and how am I 
 to know that one judgement is over and has been succeeded 
 by another ? For, if on this point I remain in doubt, our 
 doctrine, however true, will remain inapplicable. When I 
 say to-day that ' Caesar is sick ', and to-morrow that ' he is 
 well ', we naturally should take this as a succession of judge- 
 ments. But if I tell you that ' he has crossed the street and 
 has now entered that shop ', you probably take these succes- 
 sive events to be expressed in one judgement. Indeed 
 otherwise we should be led to doubt if in the end any judge- 
 ment is one. And hence it is necessary to seek a principle 
 by which to decide whether in any given case we have 
 several judgements or one judgement. 
 
 The singleness of a judgement lies in the identity of its 
 subject.^ Its unity in other words admits no solution of 
 logical continuity. The subject throughout must be one, 
 and it must remain one for me, and otherwise we have 
 
 ' In what sense a judgement is self-contained, and how we are able to 
 correct one judgement by another, are of course further questions. They 
 involve dif&culties which are discussed elsewhere. 
 
 ^ On this whole matter the reader is referred to Prof. Bosanquet's 
 logical works. 
 
XIII ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 393 
 
 either two judgements or none. I take this answer to be 
 correct, but it needs further explanation, and I will begin by 
 excluding a view which for our present purpose is too wide. 
 The whole of experience, it can be said, forms a single con- 
 tinuous judgement, for, so far as it is intellectual, it is the 
 qualification of one real subject. And all our diversity be- 
 longs to and is predicated of this unbroken reality. Such a 
 doctrine states what I accept in principle as a fundamental 
 truth, but for our present purpose this truth is stated too 
 widely. The judgement we are seeking here is that judge- 
 ment which I myself make as one, and in which the unity 
 of the subject is unbroken for me. And, unless the whole of 
 experience is now the object of my reflection, the unity of the 
 subject must fall within narrower limits. There are past 
 judgements that have been made and that now are forgotten, 
 while there are others which, forgotten or not, have at some 
 time been overridden and corrected. And, since these 
 judgements clearly are not now present to my mind when 
 I judge, they cannot for my mind be included in my present 
 judgement. The one subject, though so determined, is not 
 determined so for me, and this last qualification seems here 
 to be essential. 
 
 What I mean by one judgement is an ideal determination 
 of reality in which for my mind the subject remains one and 
 unbroken. It is not enough that at the end I merely have 
 still the same subject, for I may have the same subject in 
 a succession of different judgements. A judgement is one 
 when its subject keeps hold throughout of the diversity, and 
 carries with it to the end everything which it has gained in 
 its process.^ The dropping on the road of that character 
 which has been taken up by the way is the fault which makes 
 a solution of logical continuity and draws a line across the 
 process. I have a single judgement where for me the one 
 subject qualifies itself continuously and qualifies itself 
 
 ' Everything, that is, which is essential. See below, pp. 396 foil. 
 
394 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap. 
 
 cumulatively. Our most natural expression here is in short 
 the much abused term ' development ' or ' evolution '.^ 
 
 Before illustrating the above by some ordinary examples, 
 I must first call attention to a point of importance. By the 
 subject of a judgement I do not mean the mere grammatical 
 subject, or that again which at first sight may seem to be 
 the real subject. The real subject is that, whatever it is, 
 which does in fact qualify itself continuously in the way 
 I have mentioned. In any given judgement to discover 
 what this individual subject is, you must inquire into the 
 meaning of the special judgement before you. And the 
 answer cannot be reached by the application of any general 
 rule.^ 
 
 I will now give some instances of the principle which we 
 laid down above. If I first say that A has travelled from 
 Paris to London, and then later add that A has travelled 
 from London to Liverpool, we have probably two judge- 
 ments. If I say on the contrary that, having travelled from 
 Paris to London, he thence went to Liverpool, there is pre- 
 sumably but one judgement. The first half of the journey 
 has in this latter case not dropped off from the subject, and 
 hence we have here no solution of continuity. To assert 
 ' John is in London ' and then ' William is in London ', may 
 or may not be one judgement, but ' John and WilUam are 
 in London ' is certainly one assertion. For here, when we 
 arrive at William, we have not let fall John. The most 
 
 ^ I seem to observe now that scarcely any one who sets a value on 
 himself intellectually, ventures to use the former of these words when he 
 can bring in the latter. It is perhaps difficult for any of us wholly to 
 avoid cant. 
 
 ' The doctrine of ' the universe of discourse ' (the phrase is far from 
 being elegant) has been useful, but it fails here to give us much help. It 
 rightly calls attention to the truth (the discussion of which will be found in 
 Chapters VIII and IX) that judgements are made subject to an unexpressed 
 qualification. Thus when we say that a chimaera does not or again does 
 exist, the term ' existence ' in each case has a different meaning. But if 
 we ask whether " existence ' here is or is not the real subject of the judge- 
 ment, the doctrine of the ' universe of discourse ' seems to fail us. 
 
XIII ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 395 
 
 natural example is the seeking of means for an end ; and let 
 us take the attempt to trace mentally a path up a cliff or 
 across a morass or torrent. We are forced perhaps to make 
 in idea a variety of partial passages before we find a way 
 which will lead from the beginning to the end. Now this 
 way, when we find it, is a continuous ideal sequence, and it 
 is assuredly one judgement. Its stages on the other hand, 
 while you trace them piecemeal, are many judgements in 
 succession, and so are the fragmentary mental passages 
 which have refused to come together. It is one judgement 
 where the subject, on arriving at the second step, takes that 
 step in the character of a subject which has been qualified 
 by the first step, a subject which carries the beginning and 
 every stage of its process continuously with it to the end.^ 
 And we fail to have a single judgement so far as the subject, 
 when arrived at the end, has dropped by the way any part 
 of its career. But the whole mental collection once again 
 and in a different way may become one judgement. For I 
 may take it not now as a connected ideal means to my end, 
 but as one continuous sequence of psychical events and as 
 one passage in my history. In brief, though it is not true 
 that all judgements express succession, the example of a 
 series best illustrates the unity of judgement. Anything so 
 far as I take it as a series is assuredly one judgement, for, as 
 so taken, it consists in a single subject which develops itself 
 without break or loss.^ The nature of this subject, I should 
 agree, is not easy to fix, but without it I am forced to con- 
 clude that a series is unmeaning. If like a child or an idiot 
 I thoughtlessly repeat ab, db, that obviously for myself is 
 no series at all. It is a series for me so far as I take the 
 sequence abah as one process. And I do not take it as one 
 process unless the second ab is qualified by the first, unless, 
 that is, the subject of the series carries the first ab with it to 
 
 ' This statement is once more m^ade subject to explanation given below. 
 ' a. Chap. X, pp. 307-9. 
 
396 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap. 
 
 the second and so on continuously. Every process of 
 reasoning will on the same principle be contained in one 
 judgement, so long, that is, as the subject is unbrokenly 
 determined. Suppose, for instance, that I have proved that 
 there was no possible person, outside A and B, at a certain 
 place. If I then, without that result leaving my mind, 
 show that A was elsewhere, and that hence B was present, 
 this whole process, it seems to me, must be called one judge- 
 ment. And it will be one judgement again even if the first 
 result has left my mind, and if then, learning that A was 
 elsewhere, I resume this knowledge which has lapsed and so 
 draw the conclusion. But it will be only so far as resumed 
 that my first result enters into my final judgement. My 
 first result, if you take it apart from the further judgement 
 that A was elsewhere, is merely one judgement which then 
 is succeeded in time by another. And these two successive 
 pieces of knowledge, as separate, are simply two judgements. 
 But so far as one subject carries with it the whole content 
 unbroken from the beginning to the end, we have one process 
 of inference and with this a single judgement.^ And it is 
 one inference and one judgement just because, and just so 
 far as, it does not admit the existence of anything discon- 
 nected and independent. It is one judgement, we may say, 
 so far as it excludes anything like memory. 
 
 I will pass now from the general question to consider some 
 special difficulties. Has the subject in a judgement, we may 
 be asked, really to carry on everything ? Is not on the 
 contrary some acquired detail often dropped by the way ? 
 Certainly I should agree that not every detail need be carried 
 on to the end. And I should agree that such a retention is 
 often both useless and impossible. If for example I judge 
 that a vehicle has passed from A to D, my final judgement 
 may or may not contain its passage through B and C. But 
 
 ^ Cf. here Chap. XII, pp. 362 foil. 
 
XIII ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 397 
 
 as to the observed incidents, however trifling, which have 
 qualified the whole movement, it is absurd to suppose that 
 their presence in the judgement is essential. These things 
 are not essential because they fall outside the judgement's 
 purpose and interest, and because everything which is 
 external to this is irrelevant. I cannot ask here in what 
 the interest of a judgement consists, but every judgement, 
 I must insist, is made in some special interest. It is this 
 interest which defines and limits the amount of identity 
 required in the subject, and determines what details may be 
 called accidental. Such details may never have been taken 
 up by the subject, or again, if taken up, they need not be 
 carried on, or, even if carried on, they may at the end be 
 neglected. Such a process, it is clear, must imply some 
 abstraction, and therefore, we may add, must run the risk 
 to which in the end all judgement is liable. But certainly 
 the subject in a judgement need retain no qualification which 
 is not essential. And hence with every judgement, such as 
 ■ the carriage has passed from A to D ', we may have other 
 judgements as to the details which happened to the carriage 
 in its passage. And these judgements may be called accom- 
 paniments of the main judgement, and are not now contained 
 in it. Nothing in short need be contained in the judgement 
 except what is relevant to its purpose. And our present 
 conclusion may be summed up thus, that we have one 
 judgement so far as one ideal content develops itself for me 
 continuously without loss from beginning to end. We may 
 go on from this point to consider a further difficulty. 
 
 The subject of the judgement, we have seen, must remain 
 continuously before my mind, but there is a question as to 
 the sense in which it has so to maintain itself. When I 
 trace a genealogy it is clear that I end with a judgement, 
 but as to the subject which maintains itself, and as to how 
 much that subject carries on, we are left after all in some 
 perplexity. And there are cases where our perplexity is 
 
398 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap. 
 
 heightened. If I have seen a man enter a certain house, and 
 if I watch to observe who comes out, certainly here once 
 again the result is a judgement. That same subject which 
 appeared at the beginning is further determined at the end 
 of the process. On the other hand we can hardly say that 
 everywhere this subject has, perhaps through some hours, 
 been maintained before my mind. 
 
 The difficulty which we find in such cases is due, I think, 
 to several causes, {a) The subject in the first place, if present 
 throughout, may be present in more than one shape. The 
 subject may have a character which is more or less fully 
 individualized, or again it may be abbreviated and made 
 schematic to a greater or less degree, (b) In the second 
 place the real and the apparent subject may differ widely, 
 and the former may remain though the latter has lapsed, 
 (c) In the third place, though the subject and with it the 
 judgement has lapsed, yet the process at its end may result 
 in a judgement. And, since in this ensuing judgement the 
 original subject may once more appear, it may hence natur- 
 ally seem to have been present throughout. 
 
 [a) Every judgement, we may remind ourselves, is made 
 in a certain interest ; and hence, to discover the shape in 
 which the subject is present, we should begin by asking 
 for the sense in which that subject is wanted. When, for 
 instance, I trace a pedigree from A to Z, I may for the 
 moment perhaps desire only to know that the connexion is 
 direct and unbroken. Thus I begin with A, and I end with 
 the judgement ' A is the direct ancestor of Z '. And A in 
 this case may throughout the process have remained before 
 my mind, and may never for one moment have lapsed by 
 the way. But how much has qualified A on its road, and 
 in what precise sense A at the end has been modified, is 
 a question which may admit of various answers. Where 
 the series is very short all its steps may possibly remain 
 before my mind, and each severally may in some shape 
 
XIII ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 399 
 
 appear in the final judgement. But such a complete reten- 
 tion is in most cases neither possible nor wanted. If what 
 I require is to join Z to A by a certain kind of connexion, 
 then the length of the line and its other characters may be 
 called immaterial. The genealogy with its several steps 
 may be present only in a form which is highly abbreviated 
 and schematic. And in fact all that in the end connects 
 A with Z may be the idea of progression through a series, 
 which in respect of its length and its constituent members is 
 left more or less general and undefined. But, so long as A 
 has maintained itself throughout in an unbroken progress, 
 there has been in any case a single judgement throughout. 
 For the several stages of A's journey on its way to Z, if you 
 take them in their particular character, are here mere 
 external and irrelevant incidents, 
 
 (b) There is one judgement (we know) so long as one 
 subject develops itself continuously. But, even where the 
 subject may appear to have lapsed, this lapse, we must add, 
 need not affect the real subject of the judgement. For the 
 real subject (this distinction is of supreme importance) may 
 be different from that which at first sight offers itself to us 
 as such. When I trace a genealogy from A to Z, there may 
 come a point at which A is no longer before my mind, but 
 then on the other hand A may not have been the real subject 
 of the process. The actual object of my inquiry may be in 
 fact the whole series. Hence it is the whole series which 
 determines itself continuously before me, and is here the 
 genuine subject of my judgement. I may seek, for example, 
 to discover the length of this series, or again the presence 
 of some quality in its several members or in their modes of 
 sequence. And so far as, however vaguely and schematic- 
 ally, the series as a whole maintains itself before me and 
 develops itself ideally, the result so far is a single judgement. 
 It is accompanied probably by other judgements which 
 I make on the way. But these, so far as they are let fall 
 
400 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap. 
 
 and not carried on to the end, will fail to appear in my final 
 judgement. They will be mere incidents which once be- 
 longed to past stages of its course. 
 
 In the same way, when watching a house, I may perceive 
 the exit of A or of B, and may end with the judgement that it 
 was A or B who there entered and remained. A man known 
 to be inside may be no doubt here the genuine subject, and 
 throughout he may have been waiting before my mind to be 
 determined further. But on the other hand the subject 
 may have been not the man but the house, or again more 
 generally the whole scene or situation concerned. But so 
 long as while watching I have kept before me something, 
 however vague, to be determined further, and so long as my 
 judgement at the end does determine this subject, there has 
 been an unbroken judgement throughout. And through the 
 whole process of watching this final judgement, we must say, 
 has been continuously in making. 
 
 (c) On the other hand the state of watching, if prolonged, 
 tends naturally to degenerate. There may be no constant 
 subject there which develops itself without lapse before my 
 mind. And in this case the process may result in a judge- 
 ment, but you cannot say that this judgement has been 
 present throughout. When I set myself to watch a house, 
 I may allow the subject more or less to lapse from my mind. 
 I place myself usually, as we say, so as to keep the door in 
 sight or so as perhaps to hear it if opened. I keep myself, 
 that is, so that any change of a certain kind at once attracts 
 my attention. But here my not forgetting, as we say, to be 
 attentive does not imply the continuous presence of an idea 
 before my mind. It does not in short mean that aU the time 
 I am attending actually. The house may be associated 
 with the general scene and with my felt uneasiness, so that 
 its absence from my view tends to recall me with a kind of 
 shock. On the other hand the renewed sight of the house 
 renews my uneasiness, and any observed change in it along 
 
XIII ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 401 
 
 the line of my more special association at once arrests and 
 occupies me. Then comes a judgement, and this judgement 
 qualifies, we may agree, the original and the main object of 
 my watching. But since the subject has not developed 
 itself unbrokenly before me, there has not been here, I must 
 insist, a single judgement. Certainly I may have had before 
 me through all the time a more ultimate subject that has not 
 lapsed. Reality as the general scene in which I am included 
 has perhaps maintained itself as my object. And this 
 general object will from time to time have qualified itself 
 by a changing succession of miscellaneous judgements. But 
 on the other side these judgements have, at least for my 
 mind, not been the development of my subject. A judge- 
 ment has been made and then dropped, and has given way 
 to another judgement which in its turn has passed away. 
 And hence, when at the end my final judgement is reached, 
 these foregoing judgements have not led up to that result 
 and they are not contained in it. And I may even, let us 
 suppose, for a time have been asleep, and am roused, let us 
 say, by the unbarring of the door. The judgement, which 
 follows here, will qualify the subject which I have set my- 
 self to watch, but you could not add that this subject has 
 been continuously before me. The subject of my judgement 
 has been recalled at the end, and it is at the end that this 
 final judgement begins. 
 
 The matter is so important that I may be permitted 
 perhaps to repeat and to insist on these distinctions. A feeling 
 which is in my mind and quaUfies my felt self is one thing, 
 and an object qualified ideally before my mind is another 
 thing. And what we call a condition of watchfulness or 
 of attention or of standing will, may amount to little or 
 no more than an emotional state. ^ It need not involve 
 the development of a single ideal content throughout the 
 
 ' And it hardly, taken at some moments, need even amount actually to 
 that. Cf. Mind, N.S., No. 41, p. 26. 
 1574 D d 
 
402 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap. 
 
 process, and the process is therefore not one judgement or 
 vohtion. Even a melody, as I hear it, is not in itself a single 
 judgement or idea. Certainly it is a whole, and it may be 
 attended by and it may result in one or more judgements, 
 but in itself it is not the progressive qualification of a subject 
 which develops itself ideally before the mind.^ And again 
 we must hold fast the distinction between a judgement 
 passed at the end of a sequence, and a judgement which 
 throughout the sequence has made itself continuously. 
 When I observe A, which after an interval is to be followed 
 by B, A, as perceived, may produce in me a certain felt 
 state. Then, when B supervenes, its perception may cause 
 an alteration in that feeling, an alteration which I recognize 
 as having the familiar quality, say, of stronger or weaker. 
 And on this I judge that B is stronger or weaker than A. 
 But it does not follow that throughout the interval A has 
 remained before my mind. For, when B produces a felt 
 change with a recognized quahty, the whole situation may 
 by association reproduce A, which has lapsed, and A, being 
 reproduced, is thus qualified by the judgement. Hence you 
 cannot infer in this case the continuous presence of A, and 
 you cannot on the other hand contend that A is absent from 
 the final judgement. For to judge about anything in its 
 absence seems really meaningless.^ And, on the other side, 
 the presence of A at the end is consistent with the fact that 
 it has lapsed on the way. 
 
 The unity of a judgement, we have now seen, lies in the 
 continuous development of one ideal content. This unity is 
 
 ' I cannot wholly follow Prof. Royce here ; but a melody, perceived as 
 a continuous object, I agree, so far implies judgement. 
 
 ^ This, however, appears to be the conclusion which was adopted by Prof. 
 Schumann, Zeitschrift fur Psych., Bd. xvii, an article noticed in Mind, 
 N.S., No. 33, by the Editor. To myself not only this conclusion but Prof. 
 Schumann's general view of judgement, as there developed, is quite unin- 
 telligible. What precisely his observers took to be and not to be before 
 their minds, when after an interval they made their judgement, is a point 
 to which insufficient attention seems to have been directed. I would 
 
XIII ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 403 
 
 logical, and to base the essence of it on a psychical state 
 seems at best superfluous. You may argue that it is one 
 judgement where we have a single act of attention, and this 
 answer at first sight may appear satisfactory. But when on 
 the other side we inquire as to the' singleness of the act, we 
 must fall back, it seems to me, upon the oneness of the idea.^ 
 Again the unity of a judgement can be sought in its interest, 
 and from this we may go on to argue that it consists in the 
 singleness of a purpose or conation. But if you ask where 
 the unity of this conation resides, then once more I should 
 say we come back to an idea, and to that unbroken con- 
 tinuity which we have urged as essential. At all events an 
 inquiry into this logical essence is needed, and it cannot be 
 avoided by any reference, however correct, to any psychical 
 state.^ 
 
 Thus an answer to the question of the unity in a judge- 
 ment does not in principle call for an appeal to psychology. 
 On the other hand there are points where such an appeal, 
 although not necessary, seems desirable, and I refer specially 
 to the duration which we allow to a judgement. Certainly 
 the content of the judgement is one thing and its psychical 
 duration is another thing, and in principle we have seen that 
 the duration is irrelevant. On the other side every judge- 
 ment is a psychical event and has therefore duration. 
 Wholly to deny the existence of this aspect seems a funda- 
 mental error,* and even to ignore it in practice may lead to 
 
 venture to suggest that here (as too often happens), from want of theo- 
 retical inquiry beforehand, the experiments were largely based on a vicious 
 alternative. 
 
 ' Cf. Mind, N.S., No. 41. 
 
 ^ I am not asking above how the unity of the idea is in fact maintained. 
 That is a further question which here I think it is not needful to discuss. 
 All that I am urging is this, that the unity of the ideal content is essential, 
 and that, unless you both recognize this unity and also treat it as a feature 
 belonging to or resulting from a certain psychological state, the appeal 
 to psychology has added nothing. And in any case the addition seems 
 here quite unnecessary. 
 
 ' This fatally unsound position seems to me to be taken by Prof. Mtin- 
 sterberg in his Grundzuge d. Psychologie. 
 
 D d 2 
 
404 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap. 
 
 inconvenience. Thus to regard all experience, or even all 
 my experience, as one judgement may fairly, as we saw, be 
 called inconvenient. And wherever for me there is a break 
 in the progressive development of the subject, we agreed to 
 deny the unity of the judgement. Taking this as our 
 principle we may perhaps with advantage apply it still 
 further. Let us take an instance where the subject, say 
 a house to be watched, remains continuously before my 
 mind. Here I notice first that a person A has left the house, 
 and then after an interval I notice the exit of B, and I judge, 
 on this, that the house contained both A and B. Now if 
 for one moment of this process A has lapsed entirely from my 
 mind, we cannot say that one judgement has been present 
 throughout.^ But suppose that the subject, as qualified by 
 A, has maintained itself till B has been added, can we then 
 say that the development has been continuous throughout ? 
 Logically we can affirm this, but psychically the ideal move- 
 ment, while I waited for B, made no advance. And it is 
 better perhaps to allow that the process has not been 
 continuous, and to make the final judgement begin on the 
 perception of B. And even in tracing a genealogy, where 
 the ideal advance of the subject does not pause, but where 
 this unbroken process may last through a considerable time, 
 it is wiser, I think, in practice not to insist on so much 
 duration for, the judgement. I should prefer to hold that 
 the subject is qualified through a succession of judgements, 
 and that the final judgement as to the whole applies this 
 result, but is not itself actually there till we come to the end. 
 But, if on this point the reader prefers to take a different 
 view, I could not insist that he is in error. 
 
 Logically the duration of a judgement, if viewed merely as 
 psychical, is irrelevant. But taken otherwise that duration 
 
 ' The qualification of the house by A is not present, we may presume, 
 actually on the exit of B, but is then recalled. The judgement therefore 
 begins at this point. 
 
XIII ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 405 
 
 may give cause for misgiving. The longer a subject has 
 remained before my mind, the less chance, you may urge, 
 has that subject of preserving its identity.^ And this is 
 not because change, while only psychical, can quaUfy our 
 subject, but because we fear that some change may in fact 
 not have remained psychical merely, but on the contrary 
 may have been taken up into the subject's content. And 
 again we may doubt whether a subject can really be war- 
 ranted to be the same, because I during its career have not 
 noticed a difference. But, so far as the purpose of this 
 chapter is concerned, we already have discussed the force of 
 these suspicions. As long as our judgement is present, then 
 to whatever length it has been extended, that judgement 
 for us is infallible. And we can apply the above objections 
 to our judgement only by subordinating it to a further 
 judgement which itself is infalHble. Nor is it necessary, 
 I think, here to enlarge further on this head. We cannot 
 allow that in principle the duration of a judgement can be 
 an argument against its unity. On the other hand in 
 practice it is better to meet and, if we can, to obviate 
 objections. If at the end of a series my judgement extends 
 the real identity of the subject, so as logically to include the 
 whole series, and so that now throughout the whole series 
 we have one development of ideal content, that, I imagine, 
 is all which can be called essential. And so long as this is 
 effected, it does not matter how schematically it is done, or 
 at what point of the psychical process my judgement begins, 
 whether at the first stage, or in the middle, or at the close 
 of the process. Hence if to postulate an act of judgement 
 enduring beyond a certain duration is inconvenient, such 
 a postulate to me seems uncalled for and undesirable. The 
 duration of a judgement should therefore perhaps be re- 
 stricted to whatever can be fairly taken as one psychical 
 ' now '. 
 
 ' Cf. here Chap. XII, p. 368. 
 
4o6 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap. 
 
 And for this restriction there is a ground which is deeper 
 than mere convenience. A judgement in the last resort 
 must in a sense depend on my feeUng. It is true or false 
 in the end because it is felt to satisfy me in a certain manner, 
 or felt again in a certain way to be offensive.^ This aspect 
 of the case has necessarily its psychical side. If in the end 
 my judgement is coincident with a certain feeling, the dura- 
 tion of that feeling cannot well be disregarded. And with 
 respect to this duration also it is better to avoid any strain 
 on the facts. In any case we have seen that by extending 
 the actual duration of our judgement we should have gained 
 nothing worth fighting for. 
 
 I will pass from this to deal, rapidly and in conclusion, with 
 several questions. Every judgement, while I make it, must 
 be taken by me as infallible, but, when once it has been 
 made, the situation seems altered. A judgement, we say, 
 may be corrected by a later judgement. It may be subordi- 
 nated to this later judgement, and over-ridden by it in a way 
 which here I am unable to discuss. But can we say that 
 every judgement remains standing until in this way it has 
 been rectified explicitly ? Such an assertion would assume 
 that judgements once made remain always before me, and 
 maintain themselves in living connexion with every later 
 judgement. And this assumption would obviously be con- 
 trary to fact. In fact our past judgements may be wholly 
 forgotten, and, where not forgotten, they may often be said 
 to be unconsciously modified and altered, unknown to us, 
 in order to suit our altered present. Subject to this limita- 
 tion a judgement, once made, may perhaps be said to stand 
 till corrected. But on the other hand we can maintain this 
 only if we assume that a certain condition is satisfied. 
 A past judgement holds not because once it was made, nor 
 
 ' This is not the place to discuss this whole question, together with the 
 special nature of theoretical satisfaction (see the Index). 
 
XIII ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT 407 
 
 merely because it is not in actual conflict with our present. 
 It holds because, and so far as, we assume identity between 
 our present and our past, and because, and so far as, our 
 past judgement was made from the basis and on the prin- 
 ciple which stands at present. An assumption of the same 
 kind, I may add, is all that justifies our behef in testimony, 
 and, so far as you cannot infer in the witness a mental state 
 essentially one with your own, his evidence for you has no 
 logical worth. Another aspect of the principle which we 
 have just been applying, is the doctrine that what has been 
 once true is true always. Differences of time and of place 
 do not count except so far as they themselves enter into 
 the truth; or, again, the truth in its essence is unchanged 
 however much places and times alter. This doctrine may 
 wear even a more formidable shape, for it may insist that, 
 whatever else in the world is or is not, any truth remains 
 true. We have here to face the conclusion that all truth 
 must be abstract, and to meet the doubt whether, if that is 
 so, any genuine truth is possible. But once more this is no 
 place for the discussion of such problems.^ 
 
 We may finally deal with the postulate as to memory's 
 general correctness. This remains standing and valid 
 although the infallibihty of memory has been rejected as 
 illusory. We are accustomed in practice to assume that 
 memory is correct so far as we have no special reason for 
 doubting it. And this assumption is rational, but it is not 
 ultimate. Its warrant is that it enables us best to introduce 
 order into our world, and to make our experience as a whole 
 more concordant and inclusive. And, if so, our assumption's 
 force is obviously derivative.^ We may put this otherwise 
 by saying that our assumption as to memory's general truth 
 is based solely on experience. This assumption again can 
 be confirmed from the psychical side. As far as we have 
 
 ' The reader is now referred to Chap. IX. 
 ' Cf. Chap. XII, p. 374. 
 
4o8 ON MEMORY AND JUDGEMENT chap, xiii 
 
 reason to believe that the psychological conditions of correct 
 memory were present, we have a reason for accepting its 
 evidence as true. And such a belief for the most part and 
 in general can be justified. But it is clear on all sides that 
 we are not in possession here of any ultimate postulate. 
 
 I may now briefly resume the main results of this chapter. 
 My present judgement must be taken by me as infaUible, and 
 on the other hand memory cannot claim any independent 
 or ultimate force. Any such claim, we saw, led inevitably 
 to ruinous scepticism. The main difficulty in the case, we 
 found, arises from a confusion between what I assert and 
 my state as asserting it. My psychical state may be com- 
 plex, and full of lapse and of dependency on something 
 foreign. But none of these characters can be transferred to 
 the judgement itself, and its independence and its unity 
 remain unaffected. This suggested the doubt as to what in 
 the end is the unity of a judgement, and we found an answer 
 in the continuous and progressive development of the subject 
 for me. Nothing can be dropped by the subject except what 
 falls outside of and is incidental to the judgement's end. 
 And we then went on to ask for the sense in which the 
 subject must throughout be present to my mind, and were 
 led here to offer some important distinctions. With regard 
 to the duration of a judgement we allowed in principle no 
 appeal to psychology, but we found it better for several 
 reasons to limit that duration. We finally touched on the 
 question how far a judgement once made remains standing, 
 and stated the rational ground for our assumption that 
 memory is in general correct. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? 
 
 It may throw some light on the general position defended 
 by myself, if I briefly state the answer which in my opinion 
 should be given to this question. I will begin by emphasiz- 
 ing what to myself is the main and vital issue. Mr. Russell 
 in a recent essay ^ ventures on the following assertion : 
 ' Returning now to Julius Caesar, I assume that it will be 
 admitted that he himself is not a constituent of any judge- 
 ment which I can make.' To my mind the opposite of this 
 admission appears to be evident. It seems to me certain, 
 if such an admission is right, that about Julius Caesar I can 
 have literally no knowledge at all, and that for me to 
 attempt to speak about him is senseless. If on the other 
 hand I am to know anything whatever about Caesar, then 
 the real Caesar beyond doubt must himself enter into my 
 judgements and be a constituent of my knowledge. And 
 I do not understand how Mr. Russell can suppose that on 
 any view like mine a different answer should be given. 
 
 The problem of the ultimate reality of Julius Caesar is 
 obviously one which in a limited space cannot be thoroughly 
 discussed. I can here deal with it but partially, and only 
 on the assumption that the general conclusion which I have 
 advocated is sound. To me the Universe is one Reality 
 which appears in finite centres, and it hence is natural to 
 ask at once if Julius Caesar is to be identified with a finite 
 centre. The reply is obviously in the negative. A finite 
 centre is not a soul, or a self, or an individual person. 
 
 ' Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. xi, pp. 1 18-19. 
 
410 WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? chap. 
 
 Hence in the following pages we have throughout to bear 
 these distinctions in mind. And these distinctions are so 
 important, and they seem to be so difficult to apprehend, 
 that I must begin by attempting, even at considerable length, 
 to make them clear to the reader. 
 
 There is, however, one point to which I must first call 
 attention. The Universe to me is one Experience which 
 appears in finite centres. I take this to be true, but on the 
 other hand it is not the whole truth. It is the truth to my 
 mind so far as truth is attainable by me, but it nevertheless 
 remains imperfect, and in the end it is not intelligible. Our 
 ultimate conceptions, that is, are necessary, and in a sense 
 they are really ultimate. But there are features in them 
 which without any satisfactory insight we have to accept, 
 since we are able to do no better. The complete experience 
 which would supplement our ideas and make them perfect, 
 is in detail beyond our understanding. And the reader, 
 throughout what follows, will, I hope, not ignore this 
 general warning.^ 
 
 To proceed then, a finite centre, when we speak strictly, 
 is not itself in time. It is an immediate experience of itself 
 and of the Universe in one. It comes to itself as all the 
 world and not as one world among others. And it has 
 properly no duration through which it lasts. It can contain 
 a lapse and a before and after, but these are subordinate. 
 They are partial aspects that fall within the whole, and that, 
 taken otherwise, do not qualify the whole itself. A finite 
 centre itself may indeed be called duration in the sense of 
 presence. But such a present is not any time which is 
 opposed to a past and future. It is temporal in the sense 
 of being itself the positive and concrete negation of time.^ 
 
 ' See my Appearance (the last chapter) for a discussion of this matter. 
 
 " I will allow myself to add two passages from an early work of my 
 own. ' The present is the filling of that duration in which the reality 
 appears to me directly ; and there can be no part of the succession of 
 events so small or so great, that conceivably it might not appear as 
 present.' . . . ' Presence is really the negation of time, and never can properly 
 
XIV WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR? 411 
 
 The distinctions of a past and future beyond the present 
 time, and of one centre of experience as separate from 
 others, are essentially the products of ideal construction.^ 
 And the same remark holds with regard to the duration in 
 time of any finite centre. Hence these ideas properly are 
 true only of the world of objects, and in the end a finite 
 centre (if we are to express ourselves strictly) is not an 
 object. It is a basis on and from which the world of objects 
 is made. We may speak, as I have spoken myself (A ppear- 
 ance, p. 529), of a finite centre's duration. But we can do 
 this only on sufferance, and so far as by reflection we have 
 transformed into an object the nature of that which lies 
 behind objects.^ 
 
 And thus in the end a finite centre has no identity with 
 any past or future of itself. It has, or it contains, a char- 
 acter, and on that character its past and future depend. And 
 the special quality which makes my self one self as against 
 others, remains (I will return to this point) in unbroken 
 unity with that character. But the identity of a centre or 
 a self with itself in time is essentially ideal. Its being 
 depends on construction and holds good only through a 
 breach in the immediate given unity of what and that. 
 And so, to speak strictly, there is in my life neither continu- 
 ance nor repetition of a finite centre. For a centre is 
 timeless, and for itself it is not even finite as being itself one 
 thing among others. To speak of its continuance and its 
 sameness is to apply to it expressions which we are forced 
 
 be given in the series. It is not the time that can ever be present, but 
 only the content.' Principles of Logic (pub. 1883), pp. 52-3. The reader 
 win of course not understand me here to claim originality for a doctrine 
 which I inherited. 
 
 ' Cf. here Chap. XII. 
 
 " From such a position as mine it is obvious that the question whether 
 change is in the end real, admits of but one answer. The Universe con- 
 tains change, but the Universe itself cannot change. I would gladly 
 deal here or elsewhere with any arguments in favour of an opposite con- 
 clusion. But, to speak frankly, those arguments, so far as I know them, 
 have failed to understand the position which they seek to attack. 
 
412 WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? chap. 
 
 to use, but which in the end and in their proper sense cannot 
 be justified. 
 
 The duration of a finite centre in time, and a plurality of 
 centres which do not share their immediate experiences as 
 immediate, are (I would repeat) necessary ideas. They are 
 conceptions without which we could not express ourselves, 
 and through which alone we can formulate that higher truth 
 which at once contains and transcends them. Such ideal 
 constructions, on the one hand, beyond question are real, 
 and their reality is affirmed both in thought and volition. 
 But they are neither immediately given nor in the end are 
 they wholly intelligible. They are special appearances the 
 full and ultimate reality of which cannot in detail be known. 
 
 It is interesting to inquire into the stages of that process 
 by which we enter into possession of our everyday world, 
 and it is important to trace in outline that development by 
 which we come to distinguish outward things from our 
 selves, and our own self from others. But in principle we 
 are concerned here not with the origin but with the nature 
 of our knowledge. We have seen that a finite centre, so 
 far as it exists as an object, so far as it endures in time, 
 and is one of a number, is made and subsists by ideal con- 
 struction. There really is within the Absolute a diversity 
 of finite centres. There really is within finite centres a 
 world of objects. And the continuance and identity of 
 a finite centre, together with the separation of itself from 
 all others, can become an object to that centre. These 
 things are realities, and yet, because imperfect, they are 
 but appearances which differ in degree. That they are 
 supplemented and without loss are all made good absolutely 
 in the Whole, we are led to conclude. But how in detail 
 this is accomplished, and exactly what the diversity of finite 
 centres means in the end, is beyond our knowledge. 
 
 To repeat myself thus may perhaps be useless, and is 
 certainly not pleasant to myself. And yet I will pause to 
 
XIV WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? 413 
 
 dwell on a point which seems still to trouble some critics. 
 How I am to transcend my finite centre and to climb 
 the walls of my pit, is, they urge, inconceivable. But 
 that they themselves argue here from premisses which I 
 reject they seem not to realize. I will venture, therefore, 
 once more to set down what I have perhaps already said 
 too often. 
 
 From the side of the Universe, so to express ourselves, 
 the one Reality is present in a plurality of finite centres, 
 but so that these do not directly share their experiences as 
 immediate. None the less the one Universe is there, and 
 it is real throughout, and it is also a higher experience in 
 which every unshared diversity is unified and harmonized. 
 How this ' also ' is possible, and how there can be such 
 a thing as appearance, we on the one hand do not under- 
 stand. But, on the other hand, that the thisness of each 
 finite centre must prevent the one Absolute from knowing 
 itself and from realizing itself in and through finite centres, 
 otherwise than in their several immediacies — of this again 
 I assuredly am ignorant. My critics may perceive and 
 may even comprehend this alleged incompatibility, but to 
 my mind the incompatibility does not exist. For rejecting 
 a higher experience, in which appearances are transformed, 
 I can find no reason, while on the contrary I have more than 
 sufficient reason to accept it. 
 
 Again, to view the same thing from the side of my finite 
 centre, all my experience and knowledge is that of the 
 Universe and this centre in one, and therefore clearly 
 without exception all my knowledge is ' transcendent '. 
 The entirety of the object-world, the prolongation in time 
 of my finite centre, its conscious limitation as one among 
 others and as mine and not yours, the whole of this dis- 
 tinguished region comes from and lives through transcend- 
 ence. To ask as to the possibility of my passing beyond 
 my finite centre seems therefore senseless. My being is 
 there only because and in so far as my being is also and 
 
414 WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? chap. 
 
 already beyond, and is one with the life of the all-pervading 
 Universe. You may insist that the felt immediacy on 
 which my self is based makes an impassable obstacle. It 
 is something (you are sure) connexion with which prevents 
 the Universe from knowing itself as possessed also of other 
 such connexions. But the whole of your contention rests 
 to my mind on misconception and prejudice, while its 
 assumption of knowledge as to what is possible seems to me 
 even ridiculous. 
 
 What I mean by truth and reality is that world which 
 satisfies the claim of the Universe present in and to what 
 I call my self. Here is the one criterion, and to me no 
 other criterion is possible. This satisfaction, I am sure, 
 implies that the Universe immanent in my self is present 
 also otherwise and elsewhere. The Reality therefore I take 
 to have this character, and, though I cannot understand 
 how it is so, I find no reason in my own want of compre- 
 hension. Thus by the radical incompatibility, of which 
 my critics speak, I am not moved. For they have them- 
 selves made their own difficulty, because they have begun 
 by falsifying the nature of things. It is they who have 
 dismembered the living whole, and have sunk it in the pits 
 which they have dug, and out of which they challenge it 
 to rise. But this illusory construction of their own is 
 possible only because in the end it is not true. Their 
 divided world is made thinkable only by that totality which 
 itself throughout upholds and is beyond it. 
 
 After this digression, which I hope the reader will excuse, 
 I will return to our main inquiry. I will proceed to ask as 
 to the meaning of a soul and again of a self. Neither of 
 these ideas must be confused with what we call a finite centre, 
 and with each there is a demand for careful distinction. 
 
 What is a soul ? A soul is a finite centre viewed as an 
 object existing in time with a before and after of itself. 
 
XIV WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? 415 
 
 And further the soul is a thing distinct from the experiences 
 which it has, which experiences we take not as itself but 
 as its states. The finite centre was an experience which is 
 in one with its own reality. It comes to itself (we saw) 
 immediately as a content which is the Universe. And thus, 
 when by a construction you prolong the finite centre in 
 time, you have still not arrived at the idea of a soul. In 
 order to reach this, you must go on to distinguish the con- 
 tent as experienced from that which experiences the content. 
 The latter, you must say, has these experiences, and yet 
 has them not as other things but as states of itself. And 
 to whatever other reality these experiences may be due, 
 to whatever other world they may belong, and to whatever 
 things, other than the soul, they may stand in relation, 
 all this in one sense is indifferent. If you confine your 
 attention to the soul as a soul, then every possible experience 
 is no more than that which happens in and to this soul. 
 You have to do with psychical events which qualify the 
 soul, and in the end these events, so far as you are true to 
 your idea, are merely states of the soul. Such a conception 
 is for certain purposes legitimate and necessary, and to 
 condemn it, while used within proper limits, is to my mind 
 mistaken. But, outside these limits, what we call the soul 
 is, I agree, indefensible. It is vitiated by inconsistencies 
 and by hopeless contradictions into which there is here no 
 need to enter further.^ 
 
 Whether the soul is essentially one among other souls need 
 not be discussed. I cannot myself see that an affirmative 
 answer is necessary, but the question here seems not 
 relevant. We may say the same of the doubt whether 
 
 ' See Appearance, and Mind, No. 33. The reader will bear in mind 
 that, though feeling is in itself not an object, on the other hand, when 
 you go on to view it as an event, you have so far made it objective. For 
 psychology everything psychical which happens is in one sense an object, 
 though most certainly not everything is an object for the individual soul 
 in question. 
 
4i6 WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? chap. 
 
 without a body a soul is possible. And with regard to 
 a soul's identity I will merely state that, so far as I see, 
 this point, if it is to be settled, must be settled more or less 
 arbitrarily. But such inquiries have little or no bearing 
 on our purpose.^ We are concerned here simply with the 
 distinction between a soul and a finite centre, and I will 
 pass from this to consider a similar point with reference to 
 the ' self '. How does a self stand towards a finite centre 
 and again towards a soul ? We have to do here, I agree, 
 with an intricate and difficult problem. And I regret that 
 in what follows I can do no more than set down that result 
 which to myself seems tenable. 
 
 The self in the first place is not the same as the finite 
 centre. We may even have a finite centre without any self, 
 where that centre contains no opposition of self to not-self. 
 On the other hand we have a self wherever within a finite 
 centre there is an object. An object involves opposition, 
 theoretical and practical, and this opposition is to a self, 
 and it must so be felt. As to the duration of a self, that in 
 principle need be no more than momentary. If we keep 
 to ordinary usage a different reply would have perhaps to 
 be given, but the usage, so far as I can judge, does not rest 
 on any principle. And, again, for myself I cannot see that 
 to be a self implies what is called memory. Wherever you 
 take a finite centre as containing the opposition of not- 
 self to self, and as having, of course, some duration through 
 which this opposition remains or recurs, you have reached 
 that which we term a self. It is usual, of course, for the 
 object to consist at least partly of other selves, but to my 
 mind this feature is certainly not essential. 
 
 We have, then, first (i) an immediate felt whole without 
 any self or object.^ Next (ii), where we find an object 
 
 ' On these matters see my Appearance. 
 
 ' On this and the following points cf. Chap. VI. 
 
XIV WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? 417 
 
 against a self, this opposition is still a content within a 
 totaUty of feehng. And the relation (so to speak of it) is 
 not yet itself an object. There is not as yet in the proper 
 sense any relation, because the self, so far, itself is no 
 object. And, even when the correlation of self and not-self 
 has been objectified, this complex object comes against 
 the self still in that way which (to be strict) is no relation. 
 The manner in which, in order to be an object, the object 
 is felt, must be expressed by a preposition. The preposition 
 implies the presence of two things before us. And thus, 
 if we are not to be silent, we have no choice but to use 
 a form of statement, while we deny an implication involved 
 in that form. Further (iii) the self, although not yet an object, 
 is experienced content, and it is itself a limited content and is 
 so felt. Any view for which the self is not thus experienced 
 as hmited content, leaves us in my judgement without any 
 self that is experienced at all. But from such a result it 
 would follow that the self must either remain completely 
 unknown, or at least must be known as something which 
 is no self. And again I do not understand how in any felt 
 whole there is to be an opposition, unless, as against the 
 object, the all-containing whole also itself becomes something 
 limited. While remaining, that is, still the unbroken whole, 
 it is felt also specially in one with a restricted content. 
 This limited self (I would once more add) may in self- 
 consciousness itself become, more or less, an object ; but, 
 notwithstanding this, it always must continue to be felt, 
 and otherwise, as a self, it would bodily disappear, (iv) On 
 the nature of that limited content felt as self I can here 
 say nothing in detail. Far from remaining always the 
 same, it varies greatly. There is much of it which from time 
 to time has come before us as objective, and on the other 
 hand there are elements which remain throughout in the 
 background. And all this will be true even of that central 
 group on which our personaUty seems to rest. But on these 
 1574 E e 
 
4i8 WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? chap. 
 
 aspects of our problem I can here do no more than touch 
 in passing.^ (v) I will go on to emphasize the point which 
 it is essential for us to keep in view. All that is experienced 
 comes, we saw, within a finite centre, and is contained 
 within that whole which is felt immediately. Now on the 
 one side the self must be less than this felt totality, but 
 on the other side the self must remain implicit in the un- 
 broken unity of feeling. The self (to repeat this) may become 
 an object, and yet the self still must also be felt immediately, 
 or it is nothing. As so felt it still belongs to that world 
 where content and being remain, at least formally, un- 
 separated. The self's unity with that finite centre within 
 which and before which the whole Universe comes, remains 
 a unity which is implicit and non-relational. For, though 
 it may come before the background as an object, the self 
 (to repeat this) is a self only so far as it remains felt as in 
 one with that whole background. I am fully aware that 
 this statement is in one sense not intelligible. On the other 
 hand to myself it serves to convey, if not to express, an 
 indubitable and fundamental fact, a basis without which 
 the world is ruined. And with this I must leave the 
 matter to the reader's judgement. 
 
 (vi) The question why one finite centre, rather than any 
 other, should be mine, can now be readily answered. My 
 self, we have seen, depends on that which cannot become 
 merely an object, and hence it remains intimately one thing 
 with that finite centre within which my Universe appears. 
 Other selves on the contrary are for me ideal objects, the 
 being of which is made by opposition and construction.^ 
 
 • See Appearance, chap. ix. 
 
 ' That any mind should have an immediate and direct experience of 
 another mind seems, to me at least, out of the question. So far as I know, 
 the only ground for such a doctrine is to be found in a false alternative. 
 There is an apparent failure to perceive the extent to which my knowledge 
 even of my own self is itself ideal and not immediate. My self and other 
 selves are, each alike, constructions made in my experience. But my 
 self is connected there with the basis of feeling, as other selves, in my 
 
XIV WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? 419 
 
 They have, as such, no content which, except as within an 
 ideal construction, can be felt in immediate union with the 
 given foundation of my world. 
 
 It is true that other selves and God are far more than 
 mere ideal objects. On the contrary, the wills of others 
 can, as we say, be taken up into mine or mine resolved into 
 theirs. And, however we phrase it, this real unity of 
 emotion and action is most certain ; and I know that God's 
 will or that of others is carried out in my volition into actual 
 fact. Nay, in comparison with the reality of this higher 
 common will, anything that is merely my own can be 
 experienced as unreal and worthless. And yet, so far as 
 within my centre the overruling end is realized, the volition 
 is mine in a sense in which it belongs to no other being. 
 It realizes and it expresses that which is felt as itself in 
 unbroken unity with what is given, while it is only with 
 a different centre that another's will can be felt as thus 
 intimately one. I can be aware of a common will which is 
 realized in and by myself. I can be sure that, present also 
 in another person, this same common will is also felt directly 
 as his own. But, though each of us knows certainly of the 
 other's feeling, neither of us can experience it as it comes 
 in direct unity with immediate experience. 
 
 It is only because it is an object that the other, for me, 
 is another at all. Our joint experience, which I feel, I can 
 feel as yours only on the strength of an ideal construction, 
 which does not cease to be such because it is also a familiar 
 fact. Our common feeling may in you, as in me, be referred 
 ideally to both me and yourself. But that which in your 
 experience makes in the end your feeling to be yours is no 
 construction, while in my experience it depends on and 
 
 experience, most certainly are not connected. If, however, we are to 
 believe in memory in the sense of a direct knowledge of the past, and 
 are to believe, again, in a direct experience of others' states, I do not see 
 why, in principle, we should not claim to experience Caesar, even to-day, 
 directly from the inside. 
 
 £62 
 
420 WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? chap. 
 
 consists in nothing else. Here is the solution of the puzzle 
 well known to those who reflect on hfe, and who are driven 
 for ever alternately to affirm and to deny that thoughts 
 and emotions are shared. 
 
 It does not follow from the above that I myself am my 
 world, or that I possess any superior importance or reality. 
 As against the Universe, against the community or God, 
 I may find myself, as we saw, to be trifling and contemptible. 
 The nothingness of the self, in fear and in the condemnation 
 of the higher Will, is familiar to us all. I have indeed 
 a special and a singular reality possessed by naught else. 
 This reality of mine is even indispensable to the Universe. 
 But the same thing holds again of the meanest rudiment 
 of fact or least vestige of appearance. That which is in- 
 dispensable has its place ; but what kind of place and what 
 amount of value belongs to it we have still to ask. The 
 World and God without myself are in the end inconceivable — 
 so much is certain. But this tells us nothing as to the degree 
 and as to the manner in which I serve to conduce to their 
 reality. In short I cannot suppose that those critics who 
 charge me with Solipsism can have much of an idea as to 
 the position in which I stand. My self is not my finite centre, 
 and my finite centre is but one amongst many, and it is 
 not the Universe. It is the whole Universe entire and 
 undivided, but it is that Universe only so far as it appears 
 in one with a single centre. Feeling is the beginning, and 
 it is the source of all material, and it forms the enfolding 
 element and abiding ground of our world. But feeling is 
 not that world, and it is not the criterion of Reality. The 
 criterion for each of us is that system of developed content 
 which we call true and good and beautiful. But for further 
 explanation the reader must be referred to other chapters. 
 
 (vii) The intimate connexion of the finite centre and the 
 self leads us continually into error. We identify the two, and 
 then, faihng perhaps to distinguish the finite centre from the 
 
XIV WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? 421 
 
 Universe, we are landed in Solipsism. Or in any case the 
 self, once confused with the prolonged finite centre, drifts 
 into the position of a soul. And, since everything experi- 
 enced within a soul must be taken as its adjective and state, 
 we fall at once into dilemmas from which no exit is possible. 
 
 The true relation of the self to the soul may be now 
 stated briefly. The soul is a self so far as within that soul 
 we have the felt opposition of not-self to self. Whether 
 within a soul there can at any time be more than one self, 
 is a question which here we need not answer. For myself any 
 decision on this point would have to remain more or less arbi- 
 trary. The same reply must be given if we are asked whether 
 personal identity and the identity of the soul are indistinguish- 
 able or at least must coincide. But it is not necessary for 
 us here to embarrass ourselves with these problems.^ 
 
 Passing them by, we may observe how a want of clearness 
 as to the relative positions of soul and self leads us fatally 
 to confusion or ruin. On the one hand the self is a content 
 which falls within the soul, and must, I suppose, in a sense 
 be regarded as its ' state '. Hence, if we forget to distinguish 
 the self from the finite centre, which finite centre, as pro- 
 longed, we have turned into the soul-thing, the result is 
 certain disaster. Every psychical content will belong to, and 
 will be an adjective of, the self, while again the self will be 
 an adjective and a state, in the end, of itself. On the other 
 hand, if the soul be taken as an aggregation or collective 
 unity, the self tends to become a mere ' ingredient ' which 
 with others is found in this vessel. The self has here been 
 turned into a mere object and its essence has vanished. For 
 that essence, as we saw, lived in feeling and was inseparable 
 from immediate experience as a whole. 
 
 The foregoing discussion has, I fear, been wearisome, 
 ' Cf. Appearance, chapters ix and x. 
 
422 WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? chap. 
 
 though the importance and the difficulty of its subject is 
 obvious. I will now pass from it to deal with the question 
 of the individual's reaUty. What is it that we are to call 
 the real Caesar ? Let us begin at once by asking as to the 
 hmits of his being, and, again, let us start by assuming 
 the following conclusions. A soul exists, as such, only for 
 a certain period of some history, and the states of no soul 
 can be observed directly by others. These two theses, let 
 us add, will hold good of a self. What a man feels as himself 
 is not accessible directly to others, and any such feehng 
 is an event which falls within a single part of the time- 
 series. The reader who is unable to endorse these statements, 
 will perhaps, for the sake of argument, accept them provision- 
 ally. And is the real Caesar, let us now ask, confined within 
 the boundary of such a limited soul or self ? 
 
 (a) Even these limits, it may be argued, are already far 
 too wide. The real Caesar is the man who is actually 
 perceived, and, further, the man is not a body but is mental, 
 and no one, we have agreed, but the man himself can perceive 
 his own mind. The reality of Caesar must be therefore 
 confined to his own self-knowledge. But from the above 
 it follows that no one else, not even Caesar's own mother, 
 ever knew the real Caesar, and that we ourselves now are 
 even more ignorant, if greater ignorance can exist. And yet, 
 even with this, the being of Caesar has not been narrowed 
 to its strict reaUty. For how much of Caesar was ever given 
 even to himself in direct knowledge ? That knowledge, 
 whenever actual, was certainly confined to one present time. 
 The past of Caesar and his future never came within his 
 own experience. It was the being of a fleeting moment of 
 which alone he was aware, and aware even of that, we may 
 add, but imperfectly ; and it is in this fragment or succession 
 of fragments that at last we have reached the actual hero. 
 In other words the real man has, if not essentially, at least 
 mainly become a thing unknowable even by himself. And, 
 
XIV WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? 423 
 
 again, for us on our side, he has become simply nothing at 
 all, and what we are to mean when we speak of him I cannot 
 imagine. But this whole restriction of the individual's 
 reality was founded on prejudice, and it leads inevitably, 
 as we have seen, to theoretical ruin. 
 
 (&) If, however, leaving this error, we go on to fix other 
 limits, and now confine the reality of Caesar within the 
 period of his own lifetime, is our position more secure ? 
 On the contrary we seem left at once without any principle 
 at all — unless the identification of Caesar with his perishing 
 body is perhaps to serve as a principle. And in short our 
 narrowing of his true being to the mere period in which he 
 lived, seems once more to rest on prejudice. Based on no 
 principle, it is in collision both with common sense and 
 consistent theory, and may be finally dismissed. 
 
 How far then, we ask, is the reality of the individual to 
 extend ? It extends, I reply, in a word just so far as it 
 works. As far as any man has knowledge, so far, I insist, 
 the man himself really is there in what is known. And 
 it seems even obvious that his reality goes out as far as 
 what we call his influence extends. The real individual is 
 in short ' that sphere which his activity doth fill '. The 
 question within what hmits a man feels and is aware of 
 himself, does not, we saw, when it is answered, give you the 
 bounds of his reahty. And, if it is objected that the Umits 
 have now become too indefinite to be fixed, I reply that 
 I both recognize and accept this consequence. It is a conse- 
 quence which conflicts, so far as I see, with nothing better 
 than prejudice. 
 
 Why should I be forced to beheve that the great minds 
 of the past, where they influence me, are unreal, and are 
 themselves simply dead ? Surely I am right to ask here 
 for a reason, and for a reason that will bear scrutiny. ' Then 
 you imagine also ', I perhaps may hear, ' that a man's will 
 really can survive his death.' Long ago, I reply, I have 
 
424 WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? chap. 
 
 urged that this imagination is the fact and the literal truth. i 
 A man's will is there where that will is carried out into 
 existence. This of course does not imply that the man now 
 feels and is directly aware of his will. It really denies 
 that the man's will is confined within the sphere of his 
 direct awareness. And, if this denial is not right, I am 
 still waiting to learn upon what ground it is wrong. For 
 I am acquainted with no ground which I at least could call 
 rational. 
 
 We must accept a like consequence with regard to dead 
 Caesar's knowledge. A man actually must be there, wherever 
 his knowledge extends, even if that knowledge is of the 
 unseen present or of the past or future. So far as Caesar 
 in his own day foresaw ours, his proper reahty was not 
 limited to his own world or time. He was and he is present 
 there, wherever anything that the Universe contains was 
 present to his mind. Caesar of course was not, and he is 
 not, in our own time as we ourselves now are there. The 
 distinction is obvious and to ignore it would be even absurd. 
 On the other hand this separation only holds within limits, 
 and it is perfectly compatible with the real presence of 
 Caesar in his known object. The further result that Caesar's 
 knowledge will affect the being of, and will make a difference 
 to, his object, must again be affirmed. But as to the amount 
 of such a difference of course nothing is implied. Differences 
 may be there, and yet may fairly be called inappreciable. 
 For certain of our purposes, that is, they may be taken 
 as negligible.^ 
 
 It is then not evident, it is far from being evident, that 
 the real Caesar is unable to come within my knowledge. 
 He enters into my judgement on the contrary just as I, if 
 he had foreseen me, might have been an actual constituent 
 of his known world. Such a view, I fully admit, brings with 
 
 * Mind, N.S., No. 44, p. 11. Cf. Mind, O.S., No. 49, p. 21, for the 
 question as to the object of desire. ' Cf. Chap. XI, pp. 336-7. 
 
XIV WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? 425 
 
 it its difficulties, but the denial of it, so far as I see, entails 
 absolute disaster. There surely can be no knowledge of 
 anything except what is real, nor about anything which 
 itself falls outside our knowledge. 
 
 We are here confronted by that error which consists 
 in the sundering of ideal from real experience. If we know 
 only by ideas, we never (it is an old argument) are able 
 to reach reality, that reahty, at least, which we find in direct 
 awareness. But the whole division, when you take it thus 
 as absolute separation, is false. We never anywhere know 
 merely by ideas, and in the end a mere idea is but a ruinous 
 abstraction, just as, on the other hand, wherever we have 
 an object, our knowledge cannot fail to be ideal. That 
 ideal construction in which for us the entire past consists, 
 is based on and is inseparable from present feeUng and 
 perception. If these do not support and do not enter into 
 that extension of themselves which is the past, that past 
 has disappeared. You may insist that Caesar, at least as 
 he knew himself, falls outside of our construction, but even 
 this contention, understood as you understand it, is false. 
 My idea of Caesar is not in the full sense an immediate 
 experience of Caesar's mind, and as to this there is no question. 
 But I have none the less an idea of Caesar's immediate 
 experience, and my idea is true, and, so far as it goes, it is 
 real, and actually, so far, it is Caesar's own direct awareness 
 of himself. The difference here is not a wall which divides 
 and isolates two worlds. The immediate experience and the 
 idea of it, are, on the contrary, one in substance and in 
 reahty. Why they should not be so, I fail to perceive, and 
 I am convinced, that if they are not so, our knowledge is 
 illusion.^ There is immediate experience assuredly which 
 
 ' When (to use the instance given by Mr. Russell in his essay referred 
 to already) we assert that Scott was the author of Waverley, what we 
 presuppose as true and real is the idea of a unique individual man at 
 such and such a determinate place in our unique 'real' order of space 
 and time. This idea, Mr. Russell contends, is not a constituent of any 
 
426 WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? chap. 
 
 for itself is not an object, nor has any idea of its own being. 
 But in the Universe as a whole any such falling apart of its 
 complementary aspects is made good. And ex hyp. we 
 are concerned here with a case where the immediate ex- 
 perience of the individual is known even to others. 
 
 The past and future (once more to repeat this) are ideal 
 constructions which extend the given present. And our 
 present world itself is a construction based on feeling and 
 perception, ' construction ' here meaning for us (the reader 
 will note) a living outgrowth of the continuous reahty. The 
 past and future vary, and they have to vary, with the changes 
 of the present, and, to any man whose eyes are open, such 
 variation is no mere theory but is plain fact. But, though 
 ideal, the past and future are also real, and, if they were 
 otherwise, they could be nothing for judgement or knowledge. 
 They are actual, but they must remain incomplete essen- 
 tially. Caesar's direct feeUng and self-awareness are known 
 by us really. Our knowledge does not go far, but, so far 
 as it goes, our idea is the veritable reaUty. And, if it were 
 anything else, then once more surely we could have no idea 
 of Caesar. The immediate experience which Caesar had of 
 himself, if you take that, not in its general character, but 
 in its unbroken felt totality of particular detail, remains 
 
 judgement. It is on the contrary, lie says, something indeterminate which 
 falls outside our proposition. 
 
 Any such doctrine to my mind is both false and utterly ruinous. I urge 
 that in connexion with present perception, and by an ideal extension 
 of that, we get the idea Of a unique series and order, with a unique man 
 at a certain part of that series and order. Such an idea is incomplete, 
 but it is positive and determinate, and most assuredly it does enter into 
 our judgement. And, if this is not so, then what Mr. Russell has to show 
 is how our judgement can possibly be anything but senseless, and again 
 how in fact our judgement even is possible. 
 
 With regard to Mr. Russell's contention that there are propositions 
 without any denotation (p. 122), I of course reject this. The sense in 
 which all propositions have denotation, and all are existential, has been 
 long ago discussed by me (I admit imperfectly) in my Principles of Logic. 
 Cf. Chap. Ill of this volume. The general view advocated by Prof. 
 Bosanquet and myself seems (I would venture to add) to be ignored by 
 Meinong and again by Mr. Russell. 
 
XIV WHAT IS THE REAL JULIUS CAESAR ? 427 
 
 inaccessible. It is a feeling which comes within our know- 
 ledge, but which we do not ourselves actually feel. Caesar's 
 experience however, as thus inaccessible, does not fall within 
 history. It is at once below, and (as some would add) above 
 the temporal order of events. Our knowledge of the past and 
 future is, in short, an actual and yet an imperfect knowledge 
 of reaUty. In this we have seen that it is like the knowledge 
 we possess of those persons who are nearest. And the same 
 conclusion holds even as to that which we can know of our 
 own selves. Any self-knowledge which contains a past or 
 future of our selves, is ideal. Any distinction of our own 
 self from that of others, and even any appearance of our 
 self as an object to our own selves, will bear the same 
 character. And, when you have narrowed your awareness 
 to that which both in substance and in form is direct, have 
 you anything left which you can fairly take as being by 
 itself the genuine knowledge of your own self ? But into 
 the discussion of this last point I will forbear to enter here.^ 
 
 The real individual then (we find) does not fall merely 
 within a moment, nor is he bounded by his birth and death, 
 nor is he in principle confined to any limited period. He lives 
 there wherever the past or future of our ' real ' order is 
 present to his mind, and where in any other way whatever 
 he influences or acts on it. If you complain that these 
 limits are too indefinite, I will not ask you to reflect also 
 whether the individual's reality does not pass even beyond 
 the temporal order. I will content myself here with urging 
 that at least any limit in time can in the end be seen to 
 be arbitrary. We must treat the individual as real so far 
 as anywhere for any purpose his being is appreciable. If 
 this is to be inconsistent, it is still perhaps our least incon- 
 sistent course, and it is our way, our only way, of satisfactory 
 knowledge. 
 
 ' Cf. Appearance, and Chap. VII, p. 205. The reader will, I hope, 
 bear in mind the difference between the felt basis on which the knowledge 
 of self depends, and, on the other side, that knowledge itself. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 
 
 The following pages will contain little beyond that which 
 I have published already/ and I admit that on this subject 
 I never had much to say. But, in view of misconceptions, 
 I am led to venture here even on mere repetition. And there 
 are points again where I desire to lay a different emphasis 
 upon some aspects of the question. But I cannot hope that 
 the positive result will seem satisfactory to most readers. 
 
 I have not, I know, to repeat to those who are acquainted 
 with my book that for me the Absolute is not God. God 
 for me has no meaning outside of the religious consciousness, 
 and that essentially is practical. The Absolute for me cannot 
 be God, because in the end the Absolute is related to nothing, 
 and there cannot be a practical relation between it and the 
 finite will. When you begin to worship the Absolute or 
 the Universe, and make it the object of religion, you in that 
 moment have transformed it. It has become something 
 forthwith which is less than the Universe. This is at least 
 what I have advocated, and, if I have been misunderstood, 
 I cannot admit that the fault is wholly mine. 
 
 But from the above it follows that there is a fundamental 
 inconsistency in religion. For, in any but an imperfect 
 religion, God must be perfect. God must be at once the 
 complete satisfaction of all finite aspiration, and yet on the 
 other side must stand in relation with my will. Rehgion 
 (at least in my view) is practical, and on the other hand in 
 the highest religion its object is supreme goodness and power. 
 
 ' Appearance, chapters xxv and xxvi. 
 
XV ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 429 
 
 We have a perfect real will, and we have my will, and the 
 practical relation of these wills is what we mean by religion. 
 And yet, if perfection is actually realized, what becomes of 
 my will which is over against the complete Good Will ? 
 While, on the other hand, if there is no such Will, what 
 becomes of God ? The inconsistency seems irremovable and 
 at first sight may threaten us with ruin. 
 
 An obvious method of escape is to reject the perfection 
 of God. God will still remain good, but in a Umited sense. 
 He will be reduced to a person who does the best that is 
 in him with limited knowledge and power. Sufficiently 
 superior to ourselves to be worshipped, God will nevertheless 
 be imperfect, and, with this admitted imperfection, it will 
 be said, our religion is saved. For the practical opposition 
 and struggle between our will and God's, the hindrance or 
 furtherance (as the case may be) of either will by the other, 
 will be utter reality. It will be fact and truth not conditioned 
 by anything standing higher than, or going beyond, itself. 
 
 Now certainly on such terms religion still can persist, 
 for there is practical devotion to an object which is taken, 
 with all its defects, to be at a level far above our own. 
 Such a religion even in one sense, with the lowering of the 
 Deity, may be said to have been heightened. To help 
 a God in his struggle, more or less doubtful and blind, 
 with resisting Evil, is no inferior task. And if the issue 
 were taken as uncertain, or if even further the end were 
 known to be God's indubitable defeat and our inevitable 
 disaster, our religion would have risen thereby and would 
 have attained to the extreme of heroism. But on the other 
 hand, if religion is considered as a whole and not simply 
 from one side, it is not true that with the lowering of God 
 religion tends to grow higher. A principal part of reUgion 
 is the assured satisfaction of our good will, the joy and peace 
 in that assurance, and the added strength which in the 
 majority of men can come perhaps from no other source. 
 
430 ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE chap. 
 
 To sacrifice altogether or in part this aspect means on the 
 whole to set religion down to a lower level. And it is an 
 illusion to suppose that imperfection, once admitted into 
 the Deity, can be stopped precisely at that convenient limit 
 which happens to suit our ideas. The assertor of an im- 
 perfect God is, whether he knows it or not, face to face with 
 a desperate task or a forlorn alternative. He must try to 
 show (how I cannot tell) that the entire rest of the Universe, 
 outside his limited God, is known to be still weaker and more 
 limited. Or he must appeal to us to follow our Leader 
 blindly and, for all we know, to a common and overwhelming 
 defeat. In either case the prospect offered entails, I should 
 say, to the religious mind an unquestionable loss to rehgion. 
 
 And yet it will be urged that we have ourselves agreed 
 that all other ways of escape are closed. For, if God is 
 perfect, we saw that religion must contain inconsistency, 
 and it was by seeking consistency" that we were driven to 
 a limited God. But our assumption here, I reply, is precisely 
 that which we should have questioned from the first. Is there 
 any need for our attempt to avoid self-contradiction ? Has 
 religion really got to be consistent theoretically ? Is ultimate 
 theoretical consistency a thing which is attainable anywhere ? 
 And, at all events, is it a thing attainable in life and in 
 practice ? This is the fundamental question upon which the 
 whole issue depends. And I need not pause here to ask 
 whether it is quite certain that, when God is limited, the 
 Universe becomes theoretically consistent ? 
 
 I have elsewhere discussed the question of theoretical 
 consistency.^ With a certain exception (and how far this 
 is an exception I have explained) I have argued that all 
 truth must be imperfect. Truth cannot in the end become 
 consistent and ultimately true, but, for all that, it is satis- 
 factory in varying degrees. The idea that in the special 
 sciences, and again in practical life, we have absolute truths, 
 
 ' Chap. IX. See also the Index of this volume. 
 
XV ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 431 
 
 must be rejected as illusory. We are everywhere dependent 
 on what may be called useful mythology, and nothing other 
 than these inconsistent ideas could serve our various pur- 
 poses. These ideas are false in the sense that they are not 
 ultimately true. But they are true in the sense that all that 
 is lacking to them is a greater or less extent of completion, 
 which, the more true they are, would the less transform 
 their present character. And, in proportion as the need 
 to which they answer is wider and deeper, these ideas already 
 have attained actual truth. 
 
 Viewed thus the question as to what may be called reUgious 
 ideas is seriously changed. To insist on ultimate theoretical 
 consistency, which in no case can we reach, becomes once 
 for all ridiculous. The main question is as to the real nature 
 and end of rehgion, and as to the respective importance of 
 those aspects which belong to it. The ideas which best 1 
 express our highest religious needs and their satisfaction, \ 
 must certainly be true. Ultimate truth they do not possess, 
 and exactly what in the end it would take to make them 
 perfect we cannot know. But in this respect they are like 
 the whole body of special truths attainable by us, or indeed 
 by any other possible finite beings, whether in this life 
 and world or in any other. What we have to consider is 
 the relative importance of that purpose which the ideas 
 serve, and how well, viewed from all sides, they aid and 
 express its satisfaction. 
 
 If the object of religion is to realize in the fullest sense 
 in my will the supremacy of goodness, then the ideas and 
 the practices called for by this object are true and right. 
 The test in every case is to ask whether our ideas and prac- 
 tices reaUy answer to our need, while to judge them from the 
 outside by applying some other criterion is mistaken and 
 dangerous. This I take to be the principle, but I cannot 
 here discuss doubts as to the genuine essence of religion, 
 and still less can I offer to decide on those particular ideas 
 
432 ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE chap. 
 
 and practices which religion warrants or would forbid. How 
 far these issues can be settled otherwise than by practical 
 development I indeed do not know, and in any case I recog- 
 nize in myself no special competence to deal with them. 
 What I would emphasize is the principle which has been 
 laid down above. If religion is practical, then it is certain 
 that my will must count. On the other side, if goodness is 
 to be realized, except imperfectly, goodness must be master 
 of the world. The ideas that are to express this impUcated 
 whole must be more or less inconsistent and, in a word, 
 mythological. But the demand for a theoretical consistency 
 which mutilates the substance of religion, starts from error 
 in principle and leads in the result to practical discord or 
 sterility. 
 
 I will touch briefly on two points which I have elsewhere 
 discussed, laying at that time perhaps an undue emphasis 
 on one aspect of the matter. I refer to the ' personality ' 
 of God and the ' immortality ' of the soul. I shall assume 
 here, rightly or wrongly, that a personal God is not the 
 ultimate truth about the Universe, and in that ultimate 
 truth would be included and superseded by something higher 
 than personality. A God that can say to himself ' I ' as 
 against you and me, is not in my judgement defensible 
 as the last and complete truth for metaphysics. But, that 
 being admitted, the question remains as to what God is 
 for religion. The reUgious consciousness must represent to 
 itself the Good Will in its relation with mine. It must 
 express both our difference and our unity. And must not, 
 it will be asked, that representation take the form of a 
 ' personal ' God ? I answer that to insist here on ' must ' 
 to myself seems untenable,^ but on the other hand I am fully 
 prepared to accept ' may '. But there is one condition on 
 
 ' The doctrine that there cannot be religion without a personal God is 
 to my mind certainly false. 
 
XV ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 433 
 
 which I have to lay stress. The real presence of God's will 
 in mine, our actual and literal satisfaction in common, must 
 not in any case be denied or impaired. This is a religious 
 truth far more essential than God's ' personaUty ', and 
 hence that personality must be formulated, no matter how 
 inconsistently, so as to agree with this truth and to support 
 it. But, apart from this condition, how far and in what 
 sense we are justified in ascribing personality to God I have 
 no wish to discuss. Whatever ideas really are required in 
 practice by the highest reUgion are true. In my judgement \ 
 their truth is not contradicted by metaphysics, so long only 
 as they will not offer themselves as satisfying our last | 
 intellectual demands. And exactly how religious truths ■ 
 are to be in the end supplemented and corrected, I would 
 repeat that, as I understand the matter, metaphysics 
 cannot say. Within the outline which it takes as real 
 there is room for all truth, and all truth assuredly is com- 
 pleted. But the answer in concrete detail is beyond the 
 finite intellect, and is even beyond any mere under- 
 standing. 
 
 Before proceeding I may warn the reader against a dan- 
 gerous mistake. It may be said that, if anywhere, we find 
 personality in religion. Personal striving and discord, 
 satisfaction and peace, are essential to that experience. 
 And hence, if there is a difficulty as to the personaUty of 
 God, why not avoid this by confining all that is personal 
 to the side of man ? Why not insist, it will be urged, not 
 merely that God is self-conscious only in me, but also that 
 this self-conscioiisness in the end is merely mine ? Any 
 such contention must however be rejected for a double 
 reason. Religion, in the first place, is throughout a two- 
 sided affair. Hence to place on one side (whichever that 
 side is) the felt struggle and harmony, and the consciousness 
 3f unity and discord, is to remove the essence of religion. 
 How far we may go in representing mythologically each 
 
 1574 F f 
 
434 ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE chap. 
 
 self, man and God, as one over against the other, as I have 
 said, I do not discuss. That certain special feeUngs must 
 be located each in one side only, seems obvious. But on 
 the other hand the religious consciousness is a whole which 
 includes and is superior to the opposition of its subordinate 
 elements. The terror of sin, for instance, and the wrath 
 of God belong inseparably to one substantial unity, and 
 this unity further can be experienced, can be known and 
 felt in some measure as overriding each aspect. This self- 
 conscious totality can neither be divided, nor yet attributed 
 merely to one side or the other. Further, and in the second 
 place, to assume certainty and reality in the case at any 
 rate of my personahty seems quite untenable. To identify 
 myself with my feeling centre would be, for example, to 
 fall into ruinous error. For within that centre is experi- 
 enced the real presence of the whole Universe, including 
 God and my self ; and, further, that self is but a limited con- 
 struction, more or less ill-defined and precarious, built one- 
 sidedly out of materials which fall within my centre. This 
 is the conclusion at least for which I have contended else- 
 where,^ and which I have been forced to regard as certain. 
 We encounter here the main hindrance to the adoption 
 of a view of religion such as that which I have accepted. 
 On the assumption that individual men, yourself and my- 
 self, are real each in his own right, to speak of God as 
 having reaUty in the religious consciousness, I agree, is 
 nonsense. God must be another independent individual, 
 and, if not that, is not real at all. On the other hand, 
 unless this whole assumption is rejected or ignored, the 
 essential content of the religious consciousness must, I sub- 
 mit, be lost or denied. And the independent reahty of the 
 individual, when we examine it, is in truth mere illusion. 
 Apart from the community what are separate men ? It is 
 the common mind within him which gives reality to the 
 
 ' Appearance, and cf. Chap. XIV of this volume. 
 
XV ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 435 
 
 human being, and taken by himself, whatever else he is, 
 he is not human. When he opposes himself to the com- 
 munity it is still the whole which lives and moves in discord 
 within him, for by himself he is an abstraction without life 
 or force. If this is true of the social consciousness in its 
 various forms, it is true certainly no less of that common 
 mind which is more than social. In art, in science and in 
 religion, the individual by himself remains still an abstrac- 
 tion. The finite minds that in and for religion form one 
 spiritual whole, have indeed in the end no visible em- 
 bodiment, and yet, except as members in an invisible 
 community, they are nothing real. For religion in short, 
 if the one indweUing Spirit is removed, there are no 
 spirits left. 
 
 If you can deny social reahty, if you can maintain, for 
 example, that the State is a mere aggregate or abstraction, 
 and can af&rm that the human individual taken by himself 
 is still there and still human, then at least you are con- 
 sistent. And it is but a consequence when you refuse also 
 to admit the reaUty of the one spirit which is present in 
 religion. But otherwise I fail to understand how your 
 difficulty is rational. For me, if the individual by himself 
 anywhere is a fact, the whole Universe is wrecked, while, 
 from the other side, if anywhere the community is real, 
 the reality of God in religion seems a matter of course. 
 The Supreme Will for good which is experienced within 
 finite minds is an obvious fact, and it is the doubt as to 
 anything in the whole world being more actual than this, 
 which seems most to call for inquiry. If you turn this^ 
 indweUing will into a mere relation between yourself and 
 another individual, religion has perished and the world is so 
 far destroyed. The question which, so much being admitted, 
 you can go on to ask, is whether and in what sense the 
 reality of the immanent Will is also personal. 
 
 I have stated already that I cannot accept a personal 
 
 F f 2 
 
436 ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE chap. 
 
 God as an ultimate truth.^ I cannot, for one thing, deny 
 the relation in reUgion between God and finite minds, and 
 how to make this relation external, or again to include it 
 in God's personahty, I do not know. The highest ReaUty, 
 so far as I see, must be super-personal. At the same time 
 to many minds practical religion seems to caU for the beUef 
 in God as a separate individual. And, where truly that 
 behef is so required, I can accept it as justified and true, 
 but only if it is supplemented by other behefs which really 
 contradict it. And these other behefs, I must add, are 
 more vital for religion. A God who has made this strange 
 and glorious Nature outside of which he remains, is an 
 idea at best one-sided. Confined to this idea we lose large 
 realms of what is beautiful and subUme, and even for 
 reUgion our conception of goodness suffers. Unless the 
 Maker and Sustainer becomes also the indwelling Life and 
 Mind and the inspiring Love, how much of the Universe is 
 impoverished ! And it is only by an illusion which is really 
 stupid that we can feel ourselves into, and feel ourselves 
 one with, that which, if not hfeless, is at least external. 
 But how this necessary " pantheism ' is to be made con- 
 sistent with an individual Creator I myself do not perceive. 
 The resulting tendency to seek a refuge in polytheism I of 
 course understand, but the belief that in this way we escape 
 inconsistency remains to myself unintelligible. 
 The so-called ' pantheism ' which breathes through much 
 
 ' I do not think that the facts of dual or multiple personality can help 
 us here. It is, I believe, found that the more inclusive of these per- 
 sonalities is, at least in general, the lower. And it is perhaps the case 
 that the opposite relation is excluded by a principle. Still I do not deny 
 the possibility of a higher inclusive will which can say ' I ' to itself, whether, 
 for instance, in the case of the State or some other human community, 
 or again in the case, say, of some planet or even of the Universe. The 
 difficulty, however, remains that any such will must be finite, and that, 
 when you try to make it more, you pass at once into another form of 
 being and knowledge. God's ways, in short, must be so different from 
 our ways that in the end, we may say, we find them cease even to be 
 God's ways. 
 
XV ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 437 
 
 of our poetry and art is no less vitally implied in religious 
 practice. Banish all that is meant by the indweUing 
 Spirit of God, in its harmony and discord with the finite 
 soul, and what death and desolation has taken the place of 
 living religion ! But how this Spirit can be held consist- 
 ently with the external individual Person, is a problem 
 which has defied solution. To confine ourselves to the 
 latter is, in principle, to bring disaster on our religion, and 
 in practice tends to empty and to narrow it by an attempt 
 at consistent one-sidedness. Or, shrinking from that, we 
 have either to fall back on some irrational mythology, or 
 else, not troubling ourselves much about a creed, play fast 
 and loose, as suits the occasion, with our personal God, 
 For the reality of God means his own actual presence within 
 individual souls, and, apart from this presence, both he 
 and they are no more than abstractions. Hence in genuine 
 religion you have a ' pantheism ', which is not less there 
 because it expresses itself by what in fact is an inconsistent 
 polytheism. And you can break with this only by an 
 individualism which reduces God to one finite person among 
 others, a person whose influence remains utterly external. 
 If in short for religion you need a personal God, you must 
 accept also a creed which is not consistent. And, so far 
 as you refuse, the price you pay is injury or ruin to 
 religion. 
 
 The difficulties in the way of any view such as mine will 
 always be serious. It will recommend itself to few except 
 those who have realized that on any opposite view the 
 difficulties are worse. Ir you can accept individuaUsm — 
 the doctrine that I and you, apart from any substantial 
 unity, are real — then what I have to offer must be rejected. 
 But on the other side how much is implied in its rejection 
 I have tried to show. This may be called the first obstacle, 
 and a second obstacle lies in the demand everywhere for 
 strict theoretical consistency. No one is likely to content 
 
438 ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE chap. 
 
 himself with the doctrine which I advocate, if he believes 
 that there is no truth except the truth which is self-consistent 
 and ultimate, and that this absolute truth is required for 
 religion. And the idea that Absolutism, as I understand 
 it, can fully warrant relative and inconsistent truths, will 
 to many seem even monstrous. This pursuit of consistency, 
 however, must lead to fatal one-sidedness. We may have an 
 over-emphasis on the universal aspect, and with this will 
 come the belittling of what is individual and personal ; or, 
 on the other hand, with a stress laid on the practical struggle, 
 we arrive at a dualism by which the Universe will be in 
 principle torn apart. But when a blind devotion to con- 
 sistency is seen to involve either in the end worse incon- 
 sistency, or else the mutilation of religion, there will be 
 perhaps more readiness to be content with that relative 
 truth which is based on Absolutism. 
 
 I will now pass on to say a few words about what is called 
 ' immortality '. I do not think that my individual exist- 
 ence, whether before my birth or after my death, could 
 possibly be disproved by metaphysics, and in favour of each 
 existence have been urged metaphysical arguments which 
 I do not discuss.^ But on the other side any such existence, 
 so far as established by metaphysics, would, I should say, 
 be of a character which for religion is irrelevant and worth- 
 less.^ What is wanted for religion is not the mere con- 
 tinuance, in either direction beyond this life, of something 
 which in a sense may be called myself. The main demand 
 of religion is for the assurance that the individual, as one 
 with the Good, has so far conquered death, and that what 
 we call this life with its before and after is not the main 
 reality. If and so far as it is necessary in the interest of 
 
 ' On this subject see Dr. McTaggart's Studies in Hegelian Cosmology 
 and Some Dogmas of Religion. Compare also the following chapter of 
 this volume. 
 
 * There are some further remarks in this chapter. Supplementary Note B. 
 
XV ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 439 
 
 religion to represent this fundamental truth in the form of 
 prolonged existence, I approve and I adhere to such a 
 doctrine. But for myself I feel the gravest doubt with 
 regard to such a necessity. 
 
 I have no desire to discuss once again the arguments for 
 what is called immortality. From a religious point of view 
 their value, at least to my mind, seems limited.^ What 
 appeals to me, if I may be allowed to repeat it, is the demand 
 of personal affection, the wish that, where a few creatures 
 love one another, nothing whether before or after death 
 should be changed. But how can I insist that such a 
 demand (whatever one may dare to fondly hope or dream) 
 is endorsed by religion ? And the rest of the arguments 
 leave me not merely unconvinced but cold. On the other 
 side I readily admit a difference, and, if you please, a defect 
 in my temperament, and a difference also, and, if you like 
 to say so, a weakness in my imaginative power. And 
 wherever after due consideration it is found by any man 
 or any set of men that rehgion calls for a genuine individual 
 personal existence after death, I am on the side of such 
 a doctrine. I think that the beUef, so far, is right, and, 
 under this condition, may be called true. Exactly what 
 its truth comes to in the end however, I think that we 
 cannot know, and, so far as we are religious, I am sure 
 that we ought not much to care. And I must insist that 
 the above demand is to be made really in the interest of 
 religion, and not, as lar more often happens, in the interest 
 really of something quite different. 
 We are encountered here once more by the unfortunate 
 
 ' The insatiable divine discontent within our finite personalities, accord- 
 ing to Prof. Royce {William James, pp. 296-7), calls for and impUes 
 satisfaction ; and therefore we are to have ' an opportunity for an endless 
 series of deeds ' . As this, at least to some minds, appears to be the evident 
 condemnation of both God and themselves to the fate of Tantalus, and as 
 Prof. Royce can hardly be unaware of this result, I am once more led to 
 wonder whether on this question of personal immortality there is much 
 use in argument. 
 
440 ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE chap. 
 
 ambiguity of religion. The fears of the old savage spirit- 
 world, with all its terror and all its cruelty, survive deep- 
 rooted in our nature, and by some persons still are taken as 
 religious. And with them remains the old savage demand 
 for feasting and drink, for hunting and fighting, and for 
 concubines and wives after death. In the sense, however, 
 which I would urge that religion really should bear, these 
 fears and desires are not in the very least religious. They 
 are on the contrary that which a true religion aims to 
 subjugate and control, as being in the main superstitions 
 contrary to our best human interests. - Humanity has 
 progressed, so far as it has progressed, not by the ideas and 
 arts of the medicine man but by life and work in the day- 
 Ught. And to seek for truth and satisfaction elsewhere 
 I take to be the essence of superstition. It is imperative, 
 I would once more urge, that, before we seek to deal with 
 questions such as these, we should endeavour to decide on 
 the sense in which religion is to be used.^ 
 
 ' The same remark is again applicable to any mere curiosity as to 
 ' spirits ', or as to our own condition after death. Such curiosity is not 
 in the proper sense religious at all. I am of course not condemning any 
 kind of scienti&c inquiry, so far as it is scientific. And I fully recognize 
 that, for instance, in some present attempts to communicate with the 
 dead there is much which deserves sympathy. Though anjrthing like 
 necromancy to myself is most distasteful, I cannot doubt the genuineness, 
 at least in part, of the motive which prompts these attempts. But there 
 is too much tendency, I think, to forget certain aspects of the matter. 
 And the first point is that mere personal survival and continuance has in 
 itself absolutely nothing to do with true reSgion. A man can be as 
 irreligious (for anything at least that I know) in a hundred lives as in one. 
 And the second point is this. If you are to treat the evidence scientifi- 
 cally, you must divest your mind of preconceived ideas. But, when 
 this is done, and when we are satisfied that we converse with beings 
 other than living men, the question as to what these beings are at once 
 becomes formidable. The old reply, still given, I believe, by orthodox 
 Catholicism, has at least to be considered. The inquiry which is opened 
 is in short not altogether a pleasant one, and the ordinary course, so far 
 as I know, is to avoid it bUndly. What I myself wrote on this head 
 some time ago (Fortnightly Review, December 1885) is, I recognize, one- 
 sided and unsatisfactory ; but it contains, I think, doubts which are far 
 easier to ignore than to remove. For instance, to discuss the question 
 
XV ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 441 
 
 In conclusion I should like to touch briefly on the differ- 
 ence between morality and religion. From the point of 
 view of mere duty, and so far as merely that aspect is 
 concerned, I find no difference at all between religion and 
 morality. True reUgion, it is obvious, calls upon us to 
 be morally good, and on the other side to limit the sphere 
 of moral duty is impossible. But in morality, and still 
 more in religion, there is much beside and beyond this 
 aspect of mere duty, and hence between religion and 
 moraUty there is a real difference. The whole emotional 
 and perceptional side of each should certainly issue in 
 practice, and you may add that in each case the existence 
 of the entire experience is itself the object of a duty. But 
 the experience itself both in religion and morality, when 
 you take it as a whole with all its perceptional and emotional 
 elements, is a much larger thing than that special relation 
 which we call duty. I cannot here attempt to set out 
 fully the contents in each case, and will merely point to 
 what seems to be the root of their difference. In morality 
 proper the moral ideal is, so far, not viewed as existing. 
 I do not mean that it cannot be embodied, or that in any 
 case (Chap. Ill, pp. 31 foil.) it is really in every sense a mere 
 idea ; but still this ideal must be taken as a mere idea so 
 far as concerns its practical relation to my world and to 
 me. The moral idea is a ' to be ' which is ' not yet '. But 
 in religion the ideal good must be taken as real, though, 
 on the other side, as also in part not reahzed. Where for 
 us there is only an idea, I do not see how it is possible to 
 have reUgion. Morality, it is true, can make a religion of 
 morality. It can contemplate its ideal, whether as actually 
 embodied or as mere idea, and can entertain towards its 
 ideal those emotions which we call religious. But, so far 
 
 of the identification of a ' spirit ' without any regard to what is involved 
 logically in the identification of a man, seems to be still the common way, 
 and to myself it still seems to be ridiculous. 
 
442 ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE chap. 
 
 as it does this, it necessarily regards its object as somehow 
 real. It has so far ceased to be mere moraUty and has 
 passed into an imperfect form of religion.^ 
 
 I do not suppose that what I have said above with regard 
 to God and Immortality has given satisfaction. The reader 
 
 ^ Some further remarks may perhaps be offered to the reader. If you 
 contemplate the realized good as a perceived, individual, self-existing 
 object, it is beautiful. To be so contemplated it must of course be loosened 
 from its context, be taken out of its space and time, and have thus become 
 eternal. And it is possible so to take an actual person or action. But 
 with beauty there is no essential relation of my will to the object. 
 
 It is otherwise with the object of religion. That, no matter how far 
 it stands above the world of events, is taken as the felt consummation of 
 my whole being, in which my self is at one with this utter reality. My 
 will is included in the object, and included not by way of relation, but in 
 felt intimate unity in which it is satisfied. But religion has also another 
 side, and here my will is related to the object as to a superior will, and 
 can even conflict with that object. This aspect of relation is essential to 
 religion. It depends on, and is subordinate to, the former aspect in 
 which the entire reaUty, including my satisfied will, is already there in 
 the object and is felt as mine and as absolute. But, though subordinate, 
 this feature of practical relation and of possible discord is necessary for 
 religion, and serves to distinguish it from that which is merely aesthetic. 
 The aesthetic object fails to comprehend and so to demand the whole of 
 my being. 
 
 The object in religion must be ideaUzed so as to be taken out of time, 
 and on the other side it must be no mere idea but be real. And, in the 
 sense of utterly satisfactory, the object is absolute. But, so far as these 
 characters are preserved, the object can be finite. A man's country, 
 the view of his native place or of his home, may, for example, be objects 
 for religion, if the man feels that ' this reality is my consummation '. 
 The finite reality is taken thus out of time and, we may say, as absolute. 
 But there is here a contradiction in principle between the characters of 
 absoluteness and finitude. And, as religion develops, it is seen that the 
 true object of religion can in the end be nothing finite. 
 
 For morality, in the stricter sense, the object (in this unlike the re- 
 ligious object) is not real. Or, if and so far as the moral ideal is taken as 
 real, this ideal, if it is to remain moral, must not appear as the complete 
 realized Good. Wherever the moral ideal is viewed as existing, it may, 
 so far, become beautiful, and in any case it tends to pass into a form of 
 worshipped reality, where mere morality is transcended. Morality, in 
 the sense of duty, emphasizes that aspect of relation and process which 
 religion admits only as overridden by the aspect of realized Good. Thus 
 the moral failure to realize a duty becomes in religion the falling away 
 from one's essential being and reality. And everywhere religion must be 
 taken as the completion and fulfilment of what is moral. 
 
XV ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 443 
 
 too probably has condemned it as evasive and trifling, or 
 even perhaps as dishonest. But this is a sentence which 
 he would have to pass not only here but upon the entire 
 way in which, after and like others, I have found myself 
 compelled to regard the Universe. To us the Universe is 
 a living whole which, apart from violence and partial death, 
 refuses to divide itself into well-defined objects and clean- 
 cut distinctions. On the other hand these definite objects 
 and hard distinctions are demanded by that which counts 
 itself as sound sense and clear thinking. And the demand 
 is right, and its satisfaction is necessary and indispensable. 
 But unfortunately this necessary process and its indis- 
 pensable result must mutilate and distort the living whole. 
 And the consequence is that, as that unity is represented, 
 its divisions clash not only with one another but even 
 internally within themselves. And life as a whole is Uveable 
 because we select arbitrarily those ideas which seem best 
 to suit the occasion, while all the rest of our sound sense 
 and clear thinking is for the occasion ignored. But, where 
 from any cause we cannot do this, we fall into collisions for 
 which we possess and can find no remedy. One man will 
 insist on a God palpable as is the friend whom he holds by 
 the hand, while another man upon the same principle 
 sweeps the heavens with his telescope and finds that God 
 exists nowhere. To one of us there is no religion unless 
 Jesus was preternaturally born of a virgin, rose with his 
 dead body from the grave and ascended with it to the sky. 
 While another man, finding that, except in vital relation 
 with the mental furniture of the early Christians, you have 
 no material by which to reconstitute the historical facts, 
 concludes forthwith that Christianity is no better than 
 humbug. But if such flagrant inconsistency or helpless 
 collision seems everywhere the necessary result of clear 
 thinking, that result cannot by every one be accepted as 
 final. On the other hand, when we attempt to return to 
 
444 ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE chap. 
 
 experience and to do justice to life as a whole, and to follow 
 the life of that whole in its undivided movements, we are 
 driven ever5rwhere to set down as relative those ideas which 
 once seemed absolute and independent. And, in our effort 
 to keep hold of all ideas of experience at once, we lose our 
 grasp of fixed points and our base on the sohd ground. 
 Our dividing-lines and landmarks are obscured, and, instead 
 of reality, we seem to find nothing but that which for ever 
 shifts and evades us. And, if we claim to have passed 
 beyond the coUisions of one-sided thinking into an intel- 
 lectual world which has come back nearer to fact and to 
 life, our claim will seem to be not so much iU-founded or 
 exaggerated as insane or dishonesti For myself I must 
 confess that I see no way, whether now or in the future, by 
 which the clear thinking which calls itself ' Common Sense ' 
 and is satisfied with itself, can ever be reconciled to meta- 
 physics. By metaphysics I do not mean the doctrine of 
 any one school, but I include under that term all speculation 
 which is at once resolved to keep its hold upon all sides of 
 fact, and upon the other hand to push, so far as it can, 
 every question to the end. For ' Common Sense ' it will 
 remain that the final result of reflection will seem not only 
 out of harmony with experience but in collision with sound 
 'thought. And for ' Common Sense ' also it will remain 
 that we shall be able to hve only so far as, wherever we feel 
 it to be convenient, we can forget to think. 
 
 I cannot believe that a general remedy for our disease is 
 to be found in the study of Metaphysics. My own experi- 
 ence, it is true, might tend to support that idea. Meta- 
 physical speculation has led me, if I may speak of myself, 
 neither to scepticism nor to pessimism. It has on the con- 
 trary, I hope, inspired me with a higher and a wider con- 
 fidence, and a better-grounded sympathy with all that is 
 best in Ufe. It has in principle broken down the unnatural 
 barrier between beauty and truth, between poetry and fact. 
 
XV ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 445 
 
 But still even in metaphysics it is difficult to say how far 
 conclusions rest upon personal feeling. And for me to 
 assume that the majority of students will ever be able to 
 justify, each for himself, a result so af&rmative, would not 
 be reasonable. On the contrary I am bound to suppose 
 that for many persons metaphysics would issue, I do not 
 say in conclusions abhorrent to our best instincts, but in 
 theoretical scepticism. By theoretical scepticism I certainly 
 do not understand a positive doctrine about our knowledge 
 and its necessary limits. That would be a result to whichi 
 I must once again be allowed to apply the epithet of stupid. 
 I mean by scepticism the mere denial of any known satisfac- 
 tory doctrine, together with the personal despair of any future 
 attainment (cf. p. 118). And I must admit that with many 
 persons this may be the intelUgent outcome of a sincere 
 metaphysical endeavour. 
 
 Such a scepticism, I would add, if not the best issue, may 
 serve at least as a deliverance from spiritual oppression. 
 For it may free us on every side from the tyranny of intel- 
 lectual prejudices, and in our own Uving concerns from the 
 superstitious idolatry of abstract consistency.^ For such 
 a scepticism all our truths without exception are mere 
 working ideas. And this of course does not mean that all 
 truths are ' practical '. It means that our ideas are there 
 to serve our hving interests, of whatever kind these may be, 
 whether practical or otherwise, and that our ideas are to be 
 subject to those interests which they serve. Hence any 
 claim on the part of these ideas to dictate to us on the 
 ground of consistency or of ' Common Sense ', may at once 
 be dismissed as ridiculous. And, with this, there comes in 
 principle an end to the worship of abstractions, abstractions 
 whether of the school or of the market-place. And there 
 comes the perception that prose and ' fact ' may be fanciful 
 in a more extravagant and in a lower sense than poetry or 
 ' Cf. pp. 123-4, 132-3- 
 
446 ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE chap. 
 
 art. Everything in short in life will be tried, and con- 
 demned or justified, solely on the ground of our highest 
 human interests. 
 
 Such a result, where there is nothing better, may be 
 welcome, and yet such a result is not in general enough. 
 For theoretical scepticism, if it is to have no bad side, 
 demands (we must not forget) some strength of character. 
 And, apart from this, there is a desire deep-seated in our 
 nature for what we call truth, and for the intelhgent and 
 rational justification of our best instincts. We want and 
 we require in short some kind of working creed, and this 
 requirement is hardly met by any mere collection of working 
 ideas. And where there are no metaphysics, or where meta- 
 physics have led to no positive result, such a doctrine 
 apparently would have to rest on what we call religion, 
 individual or general. 
 
 There is, I should say, a need, and there is even a certain 
 demand, for a new religion. We want a creed to recognize 
 and justify in due proportion all human interests, and at 
 the same time to supply the intellect with that to which it 
 can hold with confidence. Whether we shall get this new 
 reHgion, and, if so, how, whether by modification of what 
 exists or in some other way, I am unable to surmise. But 
 it is not, so far as I see, in the power of philosophy to supply 
 this general demand. And I must doubt the possibihty of 
 a religious doctrine able in the end to meet our metaphysical 
 requirement of ultimate consistency. All that, in my 
 opinion, we can reasonably desire, is on one side a general 
 faith, and on the other side such a critical philosophy as 
 would be able in some sense to justify and to support this 
 faith. I think, that is (to use a word perhaps anticipated 
 by the reader), that any positive metaphysical doctrine 
 must remain ' esoteric ', while a rehgion condemned to be 
 esoteric is but a refuge amid general destitution. Therefore 
 a rehgious behef founded otherwise than on metaphysics. 
 
XV ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 447 
 
 and a metaphysics able in some sense to justify that creed, 
 seem to me what is required to fulfil our wishes. And, 
 though this fulfilment is a thing which I cannot myself 
 expect to see, and though the obstacles in its way are 
 certainly great, on the other hand I cannot regard it as 
 impossible. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE A 
 
 ON THE REALITY AND PERSONALITY OF GOD 
 
 I AM anxious on this subject to be frank with the reader, 
 and to answer plainly, so far as I can, or decline to answer, 
 his questions. But there is a difficulty here which the 
 reader may perhaps fail to apprehend. His questions, as 
 he asks them, may imply certain behefs on his part which 
 I do not share. This is eminently the case with regard to 
 God's reality. The reader perhaps may be sure that a 
 thing must be real or unreal, that, whatever things are real, 
 are real alike and equally, and that, in short, with regard 
 to reaUty it is always a case of Yes or No, and never of 
 more and less. Now, if I am forced to take reality as having 
 thus only one sense, I must reply that God is not real at all, 
 any more than you and I are real. Nothing to me in this 
 sense is real except the Universe as a whole ; for I cannot 
 take God as including, or as equivalent to, the entire 
 Universe. This answer is the result of forcing me to reply 
 to a question which I regard as erroneous. But, if on the 
 other hand I am allowed to hold to degrees in reaUty, the 
 conclusion at once is different. God to me is now so much 
 more real than you or myself that to compare God's reality 
 with ours would be ridiculous. This conclusion to my 
 mind is the truth ; but how can I give this reply, if 
 I am asked a question which really impUes that my truth 
 is an error ? Obviously, if we are to understand one 
 another here, the reader and myself must begin by coming 
 first to some agreement as to the meaning of reality. 
 
 When we pass from this source of ambiguity to inquire 
 
XV ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 449 
 
 as to the personality of God, our difficulties are not lessened. 
 And the idea that any and every question asked on this 
 point is a plain question admitting of a plain answer, seems 
 thoroughly untenable. Let me, however, begin by saying 
 that, if I exclude the evidence of the religious consciousness, 
 I, even then, do not deny the possibility or the existence 
 of one or more finite persons, such as to serve as the object 
 of religion, or at least of some rehgion. (A person, I should 
 add, to me must be finite, or must cease to be personal.) 
 But the absence of such a denial, the reader will at once 
 see, amounts almost to nothing, and leaves us, so far, 
 without any actual object for rehgion. We have so far 
 excluded what, to me at least, -is the only evidence which 
 counts. For the main interest and the genuine claim of the 
 religious consciousness is, to my mind, the ground on which 
 everything here must be based. Whatever ideas are re- 
 quired to satisfy the above interest and claim, must, I think, 
 be true, true, that is, really though not absolutely. Hence 
 it is solely by an appeal to the rehgious consciousness that, 
 in my judgement, the question as to God's personaUty must 
 be answered. 
 
 If the reader can go with me thus far, he may further 
 agree that to define the exact nature of the true religious 
 interest becomes at once most important. Any unstated 
 difference of opinion here will probably lead to ambiguity 
 which obscures the issue and tends to vitiate the result. 
 And I may perhaps remind the reader that in my view the 
 essence of rehgion is practical.^ 
 
 If now, passing onwards, I am asked if the personahty 
 of God is required for religion, in the sense that without it 
 religion is ruined, I can answer at once No. Such a state- 
 ment would be to me not only false but absurd. One may, 
 however, maintain in another sense that the personality of 
 God is a necessary truth. If without that behef rehgion 
 
 ' Appearance, pp. 439 foU' 
 1574 G g 
 
450 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE A chap. 
 
 remains imperfect, and if, on the other hand, religion's 
 claim must be perfectly satisfied, it will follow that the 
 above belief is true, and in a sense is even necessary for 
 religion. The argument used here, I should agree, is, as an 
 argument, sound, but whether the conclusion is true or 
 false is a question of fact. The answer depends on the 
 interpretation of actual religious experience in the present, 
 in the past, and, I should be inclined to add, in the 
 future. And I do not myself propose here to offer any 
 answer. I prefer to leave this question to be discussed 
 by others. 
 
 There is, however, still an ambiguity to which I would 
 invite the reader's attention. Suppose that we have 
 settled the definition of personaHty, and have further agreed 
 that God must be personal, there none the less may be 
 doubt as to a point which seems important if not vital. 
 How much personality and of what kind are we to ascribe 
 to God ? The personaHty, for instance, that is proved in 
 a philosophical treatise, may, so far as religion is concerned, 
 be no more than impersonal. And it is not simply the 
 reality perhaps of a special Providence, but the whole 
 matter of personal intercourse, love and friendship, which is 
 really here at stake. ' It is not merely one of the doctrines 
 of reUgion, but the central doctrine, the motive for all 
 religious exercises, that God cares for every one of us 
 individually, that he knows Jane Smith by name, and what 
 she is earning a week, and how much of it she devotes to 
 keeping her poor paralysed old mother.' ^ I propose to 
 leave the issue thus described to be dealt with by others, 
 but I would ask the reader to agree that it must be faced 
 in any satisfactory treatment of God's personality. 
 
 Finally I must insist that we are dealing here, as every- 
 where, with that which in the end is beyond us. Any 
 
 ' Haraerton, Human Intercourse, p. i66. The whole context is well 
 worth reading. 
 
t^- 
 
 XV ON GOD AND THE ABSOLUTE 451 
 
 conclusion to which we come has another side, which more 
 or less perforce we omit, and every conclusion is defective 
 in a way the nature and extent of which we cannot exactly 
 specify. A doctrine such as the personality of God may i_^ 
 be true, as giving in an imperfect and incorrect manner 
 a most essential feature of reality which cannot as well be 
 given otherwise. And the doctrine may be necessary, 
 perhaps, as being for a certain vital purpose the best idea 
 that we can conceive, and the supreme belief on which we 
 have to act. But, however this may be, if we go further 
 and take personaUty as being the last word about the 
 Universe, we fall, in my opinion, into serious error. 
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE B 
 
 ON OUR FEAR OF DEATH AND DESIRE FOR 
 IMMORTALITY 
 
 It may perhaps assist the reader if I add to this chapter 
 some further remarks on what is called the fear of death 
 and the desire for immortahty. I do not doubt that there 
 is here some difference in our individual natures and senti- 
 ments, but the great divergence of opinion among us cannot, 
 it seems to me, be justified on this ground. It rests mainly 
 on what I am forced to regard as confusion and mental 
 impotence. And it may be well for me perhaps to begin by 
 setting down my own feehngs, so far as I know them. 
 
 Certainly in a sense I fear death and desire future life. 
 I shrink, perhaps more than I ought, from the pain of bodily 
 destruction, from the cruelty of severance, and the infinite 
 sadness of being torn from what one loves. And, the older 
 I grow, the more I recoil from any forced venture in the 
 dark. But I recognize that religion, if it were effective in 
 me, would master these feelings. And in any case I know 
 nothing of what is called the horror of ceasing to be. Any 
 
 Gg2 
 
452 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE B.— OUR FEAR chap. 
 
 fear of annihilation which may rise in my mind, seems in 
 me to come merely from a momentary lapse into thoughtless 
 confusion. 
 
 Again, as to personal survival, I should wish to survive if 
 my future life were to be desirable, and I on my side to 
 remain much what I am now. But, if my future Ufe is to 
 be undesirable, I am of course averse from it. And, if I am 
 not to continue to be much what I am, the future life, being 
 the life of another man, does not personally concern me. 
 
 I have spoken already of the hope that after death we 
 might still, or once more, be young, and be with those with 
 whom we would be, the hope that decay and parting are 
 after all hardly real. If this could be more than a hope, 
 then death, I suppose, would have lost its worst terror. 
 Apart from this, I should welcome of course the chance to 
 undo some evil that I have done — ^if, that is, I did not fear 
 that perhaps I might go on to do more, and if the hope of 
 individual perfection appeared to me to be anything but 
 insane. If I believed that whatever I do now would make 
 all the difference to me hereafter, that of course might make 
 me more careful; though to be sanguine about a future 
 where all, no matter what, is retrievable, might possibly 
 produce a different effect. And the idea that by my 
 misdeeds I may be prolonging indefinitely an evil series of 
 hves, would conceivably trouble me more if I regarded life 
 as an evil. Such are my own feehngs, which I do not 
 suppose to be wholly typical, and, passing from these, 
 I will consider more in general what is called the personal 
 interest in immortality. 
 
 The question whether what I do and fail to do now, is to 
 make any difference, worth considering, to any one after my 
 death, must first be dismissed. An answer in the negative 
 (I fully assent to this) would be a very serious matter, 
 but we are not here concerned with it. I am assuming 
 here that we are agreed that death does not end all, but 
 
XV OF DEATH AND DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 453 
 
 that on the other hand my actions have results beyond my 
 own life, results of which I am bound to take account. 
 But consequences to others than myself are not directly 
 here in question. What I am to consider here is my own 
 future, and I am about to ask, supposing that I have a 
 future after death, as to the nature of my present interest 
 in that. What kind of interest is it that I really take in 
 the idea of my future life ? Far from being plain, this 
 question is extremely obscure. In asking it we usually 
 do not realize what we mean by our self. And in the second 
 place we fall constantly into sheer self-deception. We sup- 
 pose ourselves to imagine certain situations, when what we 
 really imagine is not these but something different. 
 
 That in which I take a personal, an individual, interest 
 is the self which I actually feel, and feel as mine now. So 
 far as I take this self to be in the past or future, and so far 
 as I feel myself now in that past or future self, it is to me 
 a matter of personal concern. Memory or anticipation (so 
 much seems clear) is not all that is wanted. To some of 
 my past which I remember, I remain indifferent, since it is 
 alienated too far from my present feeling. And again, if 
 I contemplate a future which is aUenated in the same way, 
 that future fails to concern me personally. To be felt as 
 mine the past or future must be included within the self 
 which I feel now, or (it is the same thing) I must feel myself 
 individually into them. Memory and anticipation are thus 
 by themselves insufficient, and yet on the other side memory 
 seems clearly wanted for personal interest. 
 
 You may be tempted to deny this. You may suppose, 
 for instance, the case of a letter written by me long ago and 
 now wholly forgotten. If I read this letter, I recognize 
 that there is in it something which is mine, and my interest 
 is individual though I do not remember. Yes, I reply, but 
 what I feel here as ray own, is placed by me, however 
 indefinitely, in my past, and that depends upon memory. 
 
454 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE B.— OUR FEAR chap. 
 
 Otherwise it is much as when I read of another's past, or 
 even of another's present, which has features felt to be 
 akin to my own, or again when I meet some person in 
 union with whom my felt personality expands. We have 
 personal interest here doubtless in a sense, but we have not 
 the individual concern felt in the prolongation of myself 
 into the past and future. 
 
 Suppose after my death a man to exist who is to be 
 very like myself. Certainly I prefer to feel that I have now 
 perhaps helped such a man rather than another man less 
 like me. And suppose that I myself am to exist after 
 death and am to be altered considerably, the more I am 
 altered the less and less personal concern do I now feel, 
 until a point is reached where my interest really ceases to 
 be special. The only personal identity which seems to 
 count here is the degree and the amount of likeness in the 
 felt self. From the other side, though felt sameness in 
 character is wanted in order to have continuity recognized 
 between myself now and then, this by itself is not enough. 
 If I am to have an individual personal interest, I must 
 suppose also a memory in the ' then '. I must imagine, for 
 instance, a man after my death reading what I myself 
 write now, and saying to himself, ' Yes, I wrote it.' He 
 must not only feel it to be the expression of his self, but 
 he must make that self continuous in the past (even if there 
 are intervals) with my own. Here is the identity in which 
 I can now take interest as personal to me myself. In 
 whatever falls short of this I can feel a concern which, 
 though never individual, may be special, special until by 
 lessening degrees we arrive at that which is merely general. 
 
 It may help us if we consider the case of a man who, under 
 an anaesthetic, has endured an operation as to which his 
 memory is a blank. Let us suppose that a question is 
 raised now as to whether at the time pain was present or 
 absent. Would the man, if he is sure that he is in any case 
 
:v OF DEATH AND DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 455 
 
 10 worse now, take a personal concern in the inquiry ? 
 ^nd if the same question were raised as to a future opera- 
 ion, would the man, apart from fear that things might turn 
 lut badly otherwise, concern himself any more ? ^ And, 
 t not, why, if there is to be no memory, should he trouble 
 limself as to whether his future life is to be his or another 
 nan's ? To answer that, if he is obtuse about one thing, 
 le need not be obtuse about another, does not help us to 
 ee where there really is obtuseness. And if you reply that 
 ;he man in fact assumes that his state, while anaesthetized, 
 s in any case so alienated as not to be his, while with regard 
 ;o a future life that assumption is not made, I am not 
 shaken in my conclusion. Your alleged fact in the first 
 place seems at best very doubtful. And in any case this 
 mpposed alienation and its opposite are connected in- 
 separably, I would urge, with the absence and presence of 
 memory. The man in the past or in the future who knows 
 nothing about me, whatever else he is, after all will not be 
 myself. The interest that I feel in him may (to repeat this) 
 be more or less special, but it never can really be individual. 
 I can of course transcend my present felt state. I can 
 make an object of what goes beyond it and is even far 
 removed from my life. And with regard to such things 
 I can of course entertain a variety of feelings. In such 
 objects I can take an interest which is in varying degrees 
 special, and which again, from being impersonal, may alter 
 till it becomes in a sense personal. So far, I presume, we 
 are agreed. The question is whether my felt self can take 
 an interest in anything as being its own individual self, 
 unless it regards its present feeling as prolonged into that 
 object. And the further question is whether I can suppose 
 
 " He would take a personal interest in his future self, as that is to be 
 while anaesthetized, if (a) that self is to feel and remember, or if (6) it is 
 to be included in the memory of a later self which remembers. I am of 
 course not assuming that the second alternative without the first is really 
 possible. 
 
456 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE B.— OUR FEAR chap. 
 
 this felt identity to be there in the future, unless I assume 
 also that the future self is aware of the connexion between 
 itself and me, as I now am. These questions I have to 
 answer in the negative, and I am forced also to conclude 
 that, where they are answered otherwise, we have con- 
 fusion and a failure to be clear as to what really is before 
 the mind. Promise me, if I may repeat this, a future self 
 much the same as mine now, and promise me that my 
 present self shall hereafter be present in and present to that 
 future self — and I am here concerned individually. But, 
 with anything less than this, I find an identity which I 
 cannot regard as truly personal, though in a diversity of 
 ways and degrees I can take in it an interest which is special. 
 
 This conclusion is obscured by the weakness of our 
 imagination, and by this I mean our difficulty in realizing 
 what elements are and what are not actually present in 
 our object. There is a constant tendency to import into 
 the object feelings and ideas which are incompatible with 
 that object, and which may even have been formally 
 excluded from its being. And to this tendency we, many 
 of us, seem a helpless prey. Thus, to shrink from pain 
 and from partial annihilation is rational, while, if the 
 annihilation really is total, there is nothing either to shrink 
 or to shrink from. Our fear comes from imagining our- 
 selves present where we are exphcitly set down as absent. 
 What we actually fear is the process where that which 
 cUngs to itself is rudely torn away and apart ; while, on 
 the other hand, the pain of sheer negation is an incon- 
 sistent and illusory idea. At sunset where, sunk before 
 our eyes, 
 
 Le soleil s'est noye dans son sang qui se fige, 
 
 we Usten in our hearts to the complaining of 
 
 Un coeur tendre qui hait le neant vaste et noir, 
 Du passe lumineux recueille tout vestige. 
 
V OF DEATH AND DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 457 
 
 lut, once the heart has ceased to beat, it is but folly to 
 ream that it feels. And again to suppose that I seek 
 lerely ' to go on ' after death, while at the same time I 
 sfuse to ' go on ' as another man, seems (to use plain words) 
 be something Hke stupidity. For obviously I am here 
 esiring for myself a great deal more than merely to ' go on ' . 
 Lgain there is no illusion when we are pained by the thought 
 f parting from what we hold dear. The struggle against 
 he destruction of our being, while it lasts, is terrible, and 
 he prospect of those whom we love missing us and suffering 
 ; cruel. And to sorrow for our loss of those who are dead 
 3 at once rational and human, while to imagine them on 
 heir side seeking to rejoin us in vain would be torture. 
 5ut at once to suppose our dead to have ceased, and yet to 
 rieve not for ourselves but for them, comes from mental 
 onfusion. Whether the dead now remember me or not may 
 oncern me vitally, but whether, if they do not remember, 
 hey are now themselves or some other self, can hardly make 
 , difference to me. What they now have become makes 
 if course a difference to the Universe. But how, if they 
 ecall nothing, personal continuance, or its absence, should 
 )e anything to me or them, I cannot imagine. Again, if we 
 neet hereafter, and if (as some think) we are drawn, without 
 nemory, to one another once more, the question of our 
 ndividual identities (so far as I see) is not likely to concern 
 is. That what we have done in this life may cause our 
 uture love might be true, and yet, if nothing is remembered, 
 ndividual continuance might to us then mean nothing. 
 Vhere love is the passion of which poets speak, the whole 
 nquiry might lack interest. Something has been revealed 
 i^hich is beyond time and sports with the order of events, 
 "here never was a before, and God has made the whole 
 rorld for this present. The sum of the matter is this, 
 hat I understand gratitude towards a past, though I do 
 ot remember it, if that past has brought good, whatever 
 
458 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE B.— OUR FEAR chap. 
 
 it is, into my personal life. But mere individual survival, 
 as an incentive to present affection, is to myself not 
 intelligible. 
 
 Ah, Moon of my Delight who know'st no wane, 
 The Moon of Heaven is rising once again : 
 How oft hereafter rising shall she look 
 Through this same Garden after me — in vain ! 
 
 The desolation that invades us, as we recall these lines, is 
 due not wholly to illusion. That what we have left should 
 search for us hereafter with grief and pain, distresses us in 
 prospect, and this is rational. But illusion begins if we 
 imagine ourselves at once as nothing, and at the same 
 moment as struggUng helplessly in darkness towards light 
 and love. It may aid us perhaps in testing the real nature 
 of our sadness and our desire, if we go on to imagine 
 another man hereafter in the same garden, filled with the 
 same spirit and offering the same unaltered devotion, a 
 devotion recognized rapturously as the same without change 
 or loss. If, with that thought, we still suffer, our defect 
 is human. But, if we justify our pain, and if we insist 
 that we have something here really worth grieving for, then 
 either we do not understand, or we do not love. And, 
 though what I am about to say will perhaps with some 
 right be turned against myself, I must add that, if there 
 were more love, there would, at least on such points, be less 
 misunderstanding. The striving for personal and individual 
 existence and satisfaction is no doubt good in its own place, 
 but, whatever else it is, I cannot take it as essential to love 
 or rehgion. 
 
 The reader will understand that the scope of the above 
 remarks is limited. I have tried to point out the illusion 
 involved in some fears and in some hopes about the here- 
 after. But I have not attempted to argue that all such 
 fear is irrational. To die and go we know not where, to 
 survive as ourselves, and yet to become we know not what — 
 
<v OF DEATH AND DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 459 
 
 such thoughts must always bring disquiet. If we are left 
 ivith that and with no more than that, we have obviously 
 some cause for apprehension. It is here that reUgion, if we 
 tiave a decent religion, should come to our aid. Any but 
 m inferior religion must on one hand condemn all self- 
 seeking after death. But on the other hand it will assure 
 us that all evil is really overcome, and that the victory (even 
 if we do not understand how) lies with the Good. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 ON MY REAL WORLD 
 
 There is an old familiar doubt as to dream and waking. 
 A man is led at times to ask whether his real Ufe may not be 
 a dream and his dreams reality. With this doubt we all of 
 us perhaps are in some sense acquainted. There are moods 
 in which our daylight world seems to have lost actuality, 
 where the reflection and what it mirrors have equal force, 
 and we ourselves seem hardly more than one of the things 
 which we contemplate. And, apart from this, we are 
 tempted from time to time in an idle hour to question and 
 to wonder. Is there not another world within which I 
 might suddenly wake, and from which I should look back 
 upon this life as unreal ? Such doubts and surmises, far 
 from being irrational, are in my opinion even justified. 
 And in any case to consider them may serve perhaps as 
 a way of approach to some ultimate problems of thought. 
 
 What is the world which I am accustomed to call ' my 
 real world ' ? ^ It is (we must reply) the universe of those 
 things which are continuous in space with my body, and 
 in time with the states and the actions of that body. My 
 mental changes form no exception, for, if they are to take 
 their place in time as ' real ' events, they must, I think, be 
 dated in connexion with the history of my body. Now if 
 I make an ideal construction of this nature in space and 
 time, I can arrange (more or less) in one ordered scheme 
 both myself and other animates, together with the physical 
 world. This arrangement is practical since I can act on it, 
 and since I must act on it if I am to continue what I call my 
 ' real ' life. Again, this arrangement is true theoretically, 
 
 ' On this point cf. Chap. Ill, pp. 46 foil. 
 
XVI ON MY REAL WORLD 461 
 
 so far as it serves to bring facts before my mind harmoni- 
 ously and fully. And there are those who would even 
 seek to defend the belief that, beyond the above construc- 
 tion, there is nothing else more vital and real. But any 
 such belief can be seen to be no more than a superstition, 
 and against this superstition the old doubt as to dream and 
 waking can be urged with what seems convincing force. 
 
 My ' real ' world depends, as we saw, on my body, but then 
 that leads to a further question, What is really my body ? 
 If we insist on an answer we have to reply that my real 
 body means my waking body, and that this means my 
 present body. It is simply the body which is for me here 
 and now as I am asking myself this question. The whole 
 centre and foundation of what I call my ' real ' scheme is 
 the body which to me is mine at this here and this now. 
 Such a result may be unwelcome, but, however unwelcome, 
 it seems unavoidable. Why I should then assign to my 
 ' real ' scheme an exclusive or even a superior reaUty, seems 
 far from evident. 
 
 For admittedly in dream, in mere imagination, and in 
 states of hypnotism or madness, I find myself with other 
 bodies. My body, as I dream, may often, I remember, seem 
 more or less helpless and ineffectual. But at other times 
 my dream-body does wonderful things to suit with a mar- 
 vellous environment. As I am awake even now, I can 
 remember that this was so. And suppose that I could not 
 remember, would my failure be a sufficient ground for 
 den5dng both the fact and the possibility, and for insisting 
 on the unique claim of my waking body ? Again, as I find 
 myself now awake, I can act only with my body which is 
 here present. With these other bodies, try as I may, I can 
 do nothing. They are to me here and now both useless 
 and foreign, and, in this sense, they are vdthout doubt 
 unreal. But that this sense should be the only sense does 
 jiot rationally follow. And if I am to set up this one ' here ' 
 
462 ON MY REAL WORLD chap. 
 
 and ' now ' as superior to all the rest, I ought surely to find 
 some ground on which to justify my assumption. 
 
 My waking world, you may reply, dominates, and ought 
 to dominate, because as a system it is vastly more rational. 
 The order of things which I construct from the bEisis of my 
 waking body, is far more consistent and more comprehensive 
 than any other possible arrangement. In this order my 
 own past and future and the past and future of other selves, 
 together with our environment, can be displayed as a 
 harmonious scheme. If the scheme is not perfect, it is at 
 least incomparably better than any scheme set up from the 
 basis of any imaginary body. My real world in short, you 
 may urge, will contain rationally the other worlds, while 
 by none of them is it contained. And surely upon this 
 principle that world alone possesses a right to claim reality. 
 
 The above argument is plausible but it is at the mercy of 
 a twofold objection. For in the first place (i) the facts, 
 even as known to us, will not warrant its conclusion. And 
 in the second place (ii) to argue from these facts to a region 
 beyond them would in any case be illogical. 
 
 (i) Even within our experience it is not always the fact 
 that our normal and waking state is wider and more com- 
 prehensive than other states. On the contrary, of certain 
 dreams, and of some hypnotic and other abnormal con- 
 ditions, the opposite assertion would hold good. The 
 abnormal mind is often wider than the mind which we call 
 normal, and at times it may be said to include and compre- 
 hend the normal mind ; and in certain cases this result, 
 however it is to be explained, appears even to be regular. 
 Again, to speak in general, it may be true that the controUing 
 system of ideas and principles is less orderly and wide in our 
 abnormal states ; but, if we go beyond the general, such 
 a statement becomes indefensible. If there is less tendency 
 in the normal waking mind to dissociation and to fixation 
 of the one-sided, we still have no right to exclude apparent 
 exceptions to this rule ; and again with regard to the normal 
 
XVI ON MY REAL WORLD 463 
 
 mind we are bound to add ' what there is of it '. For our 
 waking mind is narrowed, and it essentially is the result of 
 narrowing in a certain interest. Its memory is so limited 
 that, at least often, it recalls nothing of that abnormal state 
 which on the other hand may know and remember well 
 what is normal. Our waking mind is bounded and con- 
 tracted first for practical purposes, since it has to maintain 
 itself in being against a special environment. And on the 
 basis of this maintenance we have to limit ourselves further. 
 There are positive human ends which go beyond the defeat 
 of that which threatens our mere continuance, and the one 
 way in which to reaUze this ideal order is through concen- 
 tration, through control and selection. Hence, if I consider 
 not merely the life within my actual reach, but compare 
 generally what I call ' normal ' with ' abnormal ' states, 
 I cannot conclude that even within my knowledge the 
 former are always wider, or mantain that at least they are 
 always more orderly. 
 
 (ii) And if my conclusion were so far correct, to push it 
 further would still be forbidden. I must not argue from 
 the facts as they come to me on a certain ground to the 
 denial of facts as they would appear from a different basis. 
 Such a denial, so far as I can discover, would rest on the 
 merest assumption. On the foundation of your waking 
 self you urge that a certain ideal arrangement is best. No 
 one has questioned this or has proposed that your arrange- 
 ment should be dropped. From the same foundation you 
 find, again, that your actions can start and^ucceed. And 
 no one has suggested that your starting-place should be 
 abandoned by yourself. What we object to is your assump- 
 tion that no one anywhere can start from a different basis, 
 or at least that, if he does so, the result will turn out worse 
 theoretically and practically. Those abnormal states which 
 in relation to your environment seem to you to be inferior, 
 and to be inferior even when taken in and by themselves, 
 may really be otherwise when viewed in relation to a differ- 
 
464 ON MY REAL WORLD chap. 
 
 ent environment, and within another mental context their 
 character may be transformed. What we call our real 
 environment may be indeed the merest fraction of the 
 universe, and, such as it is, it might, for anything we can 
 tell, be altered to-morrow. The contention that our waking 
 world is the one real order of things will not stand against 
 criticism. It is a conclusion which in short is based on 
 ignorance which chooses to take itself for knowledge. 
 
 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 supposi- 
 tion 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. Or, again, quit the position of an on- 
 looker even on yourself, and imagine your own self in 
 dream, and that, while you dream, you can recall but little 
 of your waking state. But suppose also that, from what 
 you can recall, you judge that your waking state was more 
 distracted and more narrow, would you not be right if you 
 set down your waking state as less rational and real ? And 
 if you went on further to embrace your dream as the sole 
 true reality, w^uld you not, if reasoning badly, be reasoning 
 still on the principle so widely accepted ? And it is useless 
 to protest that the above supposition is absurd, if you are 
 able to assign no reason for your protest. 
 
 Once more, let us suppose that, as life goes on, your mind 
 becomes gradually aUenated, that you are able still to 
 reflect and yet that things somehow come to you differently. 
 Your former interpretation and order of the world would, 
 if so, strain the given facts more and more, until a point 
 
XVI ON MY REAL WORLD 465 
 
 was reached where you would have to choose between 
 another arrangement and chaos. And, deciding for another 
 system built on a diverse foundation, why, in so deciding, 
 would a man not have chosen rightly and rationally ? Can 
 a man (here is the main issue) do anything more rational 
 than to make the best order in his power out of the material 
 which is given him ? And does not the nature of this 
 material depend vitally on his present position ? And has 
 he not to regard that position, whatever it may be, as being, 
 at least for this relative purpose, an ultimate fact ? For 
 myself I see no way but one in which these questions can 
 be rightly answered. 
 
 In what sense, then (we may ask once more) , and how far 
 are we justified when we regard such states as dream and 
 madness as irrational and take their dehverance as unreal ? 
 We believe in the first place their content to be more narrow 
 and less consistent ; and within our actual knowledge that 
 belief (we have seen) is, 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 ex- 
 ample, 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 connexion 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 judgement 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 Umits, we must all agree, such an assumption 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 
 
466 ON MY REAL WORLD chap. 
 
 now as given. I cannot will myself away into another 
 sphere, even if there are other spheres better and more real. 
 If my hfe is to continue, and if I am to reaUze in it a rational 
 order and scheme of conduct and knowledge, there is but 
 one course possible. I must start from what I find, now 
 and here, in feeling and perception ; I must from this basis 
 construct what I call the real world of facts and events ; 
 and for most purposes I must accept at least this order as 
 real. There is a higher reahty doubtless beyond all fact and 
 event, but it is within my own world that this higher world 
 must reaUze 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 Reahty 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 hfe 
 can be built. 
 
 It is well to remember that my hfe 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. I will permit 
 myself, therefore, still to dwell for a while on this theme. 
 Other systems, as real as my own or more real, seem beyond 
 doubt to be possible. Into one or more of these orders 
 from time to time I may enter in my dreams, and in one 
 of them, for anything that I can tell, I might awake to- 
 morrow. And in the words ' from time to time ' and 
 ' to-morrow ' I am using the ideas, we must remind 
 ourselves, which take their meaning only from my ' real ' 
 scheme of facts. Even my present being may be double. 
 At times in dream, or even perhaps always by night or day, 
 I may be leading a different life somewhere else. Romuald's 
 twofold existence in Gautier's exquisite tale of La Morie 
 amour euse might conceivably be fact. We may have many 
 lives sundered wholly, or Uves again which more or less 
 
xvr ON MY REAL WORLD 467 
 
 may influence and even appear within one another, with 
 strange recognitions not due to mere fancy. And there may 
 be other spheres with other inhabitants beyond our counting, 
 between whom and us there may be gulfs bridged perhaps 
 at times and perhaps never. Our ' real world ' is, we have 
 seen, a construction indispensable but limited. As to what 
 other regions there are beyond it, we have literally no idea. 
 But neither it nor any other finite scheme could anywhere 
 in its own right be truly real. 
 
 These considerations bear specially on the question as to 
 what we call Death. Our ' real ' bodies are seen to weaken 
 and to be corrupted ; and, answering to the decay and 
 dissolution of these bodies, we partly experience, and in 
 part go on to infer further, a perishing and decease of 
 ourselves. Now, on the assumption that our real world is 
 the sole reality, such an inference, we must agree, has con- 
 siderable force, though obviously it falls very far short of 
 proof. On the other hand, if that assumption is untenable 
 and unsound, the strength of any argument drawn to the 
 destiny of my mind from the fate of my body is seriousty 
 reduced. For how great a part of my mental Ufe are we to 
 set down as connected or conjoined, solely or principally, 
 with the growth and change of my ' real ' body ? We must 
 I think, admit that we are unable to answer this inquiry. 
 And, when we leave the observed facts of organic growth 
 and retrogression in our ' real ' world, facts which, I beheve, 
 are far from being as yet understood, is there any valid 
 argument at all for senility and death ? Everything finite 
 is, I agree, subject in principle to chance and change and to 
 dissolution of its self. But from this it does not follow that 
 finite beings are unable to endure, as themselves, for an 
 indefinite time. And in the end the argument that we are 
 finished when our bodies have decayed, seems to possess 
 but a small degree of logical evidence. Death may be an 
 overmastering impression, but it is certainly no necessary 
 truth, and the poet was perhaps not wrong when he called 
 
468 ON MY REAL WORLD chap 
 
 it ' a mockery '.^ On the other side, to rush from this result 
 to the affirmation of what we call personal immortaUty 
 would be hasty indeed. 
 
 I am assuming here that we do not know how and why, 
 and in the end how far, we have a world of perception and 
 action common to ourselves and other finite beings. The 
 presence within us all of the same living Universe is obviously 
 by itself no explanation in detail, and for myself I cannot 
 think that any such explanation is possible. I must not, 
 however, here attempt to justify the general position which 
 I have defended elsewhere.^ 
 
 The main outcome of what has gone before may now be 
 stated briefly. Our real world of fact may, for anything 
 we know, be one of the least pieces of reahty, and there may 
 be an indefinite number of other real worlds superior to our 
 own. On the other hand our world is the one place in 
 which we are able to live and work. And we can live there 
 in no way except by making our construction of facts in 
 space and time, and by treating this construction as the one 
 sphere in which our life is actual. Cultiver notre jardin is 
 the beginning, and it is in a sense the end, of wisdom. No 
 other place but here, no other time but now, no other world 
 but this world of our own, can be our concern. 
 
 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 where or when such existence is taken to have its 
 place. The differences of past and future, of dream and 
 
 ' The reference is to Shelley's Sensitive Plant. I do not know whether 
 this in my case is a mark of senility, but I find myself now taking more 
 and more as literal fact what I used in my youth to admire and love as 
 poetry. 
 
 ' See my Appearance. This present essay may be taken as a com- 
 mentary on some of the doctrines advanced in that volume. 
 
XVI ON MY REAL WORLD 469 
 
 waking, of ' on earth ' or elsewhere, are one and all im- 
 material. Our life has value only because and so far as it 
 realizes 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. And yet these 
 eternal values owe their existence to finite wills, and it is 
 therefore only each in our own world that we can come to 
 possess them. We must till our garden awake and in no 
 dream to gain the fruits and flowers for which alone it is 
 worth while to live, and which, if anywhere there are better, 
 at least to us are everything. If this is not Heaven, it at 
 least comes nearer to the reality of the Blessed Vision than 
 does any stupid Utopia or flaring New Jerusalem adored by 
 the visionary. The fault of the visionary is his endeavour 
 to find, now or in the past or future, as an existing place 
 that Heaven which is no place, while he neglects those 
 finite conditions by which alone Goodness and Beauty can 
 in any place be realized. 
 
 ' For love and beauty and delight ', it is no matter where 
 they have shown themselves, ' there is no death nor change ' ; 
 and this conclusion is true. These things do not die, since the 
 Paradise in which they bloom is immortal. That Paradise 
 is no special region nor any given particular spot in time 
 and space. It is here, it is everywhere where any finite 
 being is lifted into that higher life which alone is waking 
 reality. 
 
CONCLUDING REMARKS 
 
 I MAY be asked how the parts of this volume are con- 
 nected, and it will be well perhaps to add a few words in 
 answer to the question. The above chapters have a unity, 
 I should say, as being all illustrations of one main thesis. 
 They are applications of what I take to be the true view as 
 to ultimate Reality. And I seek throughout to show that 
 doctrines opposed to that view are based on one-sidedness 
 and on vicious abstraction. Everywhere on behalf of 
 the real Absolute I have been warning the reader against 
 that false absolutism which in philosophy is to me another 
 name for error. And it is an error which results in a two- 
 fold mistake. It takes some distinction within the whole 
 and asserts it as being real by itself and unconditionally; 
 and then from this misconceived ground it goes on to deny 
 or to belittle other complementary aspects of the same 
 whole. But, as against such absolutism, the very soul of 
 the Absolute which I defend is its insistence and emphasis 
 on an all-pervasive relativism. Everything is justified as 
 being real in its own sphere and degree, but not so as to 
 entitle it to invade other spheres, and, whether positively 
 or negatively, to usurp other powers. The absolute right 
 owned by every side of life is, in other words, conditional 
 on its service, and on its acceptance of limited value and 
 reality. And it is the true Absolute alone that gives its 
 due to every interest just because it refuses to everything 
 more than its own due. Justice in the name of the Whole 
 to each aspect of the world according to its special place 
 and proper rank— Reality everywhere through self-restric- 
 
CONCLUDING REMARKS 471 
 
 on in claim and in denial — this may be said to be the 
 rinciple which unites these Essays. And this principle 
 tiroughout conflicts with what we have condemned as the 
 ice of abstractionism and absolutism. 
 My opponents for the most part, it seems to me, have 
 ailed here to understand. Where the absolute reality of 
 ome feature of the whole is rejected, they too often inter- 
 net this as the denial that such a feature exists. And 
 low, for instance (they object) can an Absolute which 
 mplies that there is no such thing as change, be better than 
 I vain idol ? But to me, as to every one else, the world is 
 throughout full of change, and as to this, I suppose, there 
 is no question. The question is how change stands to that 
 which changes or shows change, and what, and how far 
 subordinate, is the place and rank which belongs in the 
 Universe to this its aspect of change. You cannot get rid 
 of this question unless you will set up the abstraction of 
 change as real by itself, or as even perhaps the main or only 
 reality of things. On the other side, if you denounce the 
 Absolute for admitting change, in the vulgar sense, as 
 something more than an illusion, you have to show where 
 else than in the real Universe this mere illusion falls, and 
 how apart from such appearance your Real or Reals can be 
 more than an abstract ' preparation ' from the living unity. 
 And so again it is with the becoming and the endless 
 incompletion of the world. To deny that this side of things 
 is fact would in my view be absurd. But on the other 
 hand to accept this side of things as real in itself and un- 
 conditionally, and to proclaim it as being in its own character 
 the last word about the Universe, to me seems no less 
 ridiculous. And as to my rejecting (to take another in- 
 stance) personality and will, surely nothing has been further 
 from my mind. Far from denying these facts I should even 
 be forward to urge their eminent reality, if only you would 
 not seek to deny or degrade what will not fairly fall under 
 
472 CONCLUDING REMARKS 
 
 them, if only you would cease to assume that there cannot 
 be an3rthing more inclusive, more concrete and real. In 
 this volume I have urged that what matters and what is 
 ultimately good is the Whole, and that there is no aspect of 
 life which, abstracted and set utterly by itself, can retain 
 goodness. And on the other side I have insisted (if I may 
 repeat this) upon the absolute, the unassailable right of 
 every aspect of life to its own place, function and liberty. 
 Even the separation of play and earnest, I have pointed 
 out, has but relative worth. And the attempt to lower 
 science and art to the rank of mere instruments springs, 
 I urge, once more from this propensity to mistake some 
 perverted distinction for a separate Power, and to sentence 
 whatever is excluded from this to unreality or mere sub- 
 servience. The supposed gulf between sheer errors and 
 utter truths is, again, created (I have urged) by the same 
 vice of abstractionism. A truth so true that it has no 
 other side, and an error so false that it contains no truth, 
 I have condemned as idols. They are to me no better than 
 the truths which are never at all born in time, or again the 
 truths whose life does not pass beyond that which is made 
 and unmade by chance and change. And, just as there is 
 no utter error, so again in the end there can be no mere 
 ideas. Every idea, no matter how imaginary, qualifies by 
 its content the Universe, and thus is real ; and ideas float 
 never absolutely but always in relation to some limited 
 ground. But these many spheres, owned all by the Reality, 
 are one and all in the end abstractions, differing in con- 
 creteness and worth, but in no case self-existent. My 
 so-called ' real world ' of solid fact, like the airy realms of 
 dream and imagination, is but a single subordinate appear- 
 ance of the Universe. The independent standing, whether 
 of a physical Nature or of a past which pre-exists for history, 
 once again is not ultimate. These facts are ideal con- 
 structions most legitimate and necessary, and yet their 
 
CONCLUDING REMARKS 473 
 
 separate life begins and ends with a selection and sundering 
 made in the undivided Whole. 
 
 On the one side the creations of the intellect everwhere 
 are real. The substantiated terms and relations, into which 
 analysis breaks up the continuity of the given, are no mere 
 errors or simple instruments. They cannot fall somewhere 
 outside or fail positively to qualify the Universe. And the 
 idea that by discarding these figments of the understanding 
 we are to gain reality, is a mistake now long since refuted ; 
 for it is only through such distinction and dissection that 
 it is possible to reach knowledge progressively more living 
 and individual. On the other side these constructions, 
 however inclusive, are not independent truths. They are 
 real only so far as subordinate and as relative to individual 
 totality. And even in life it is only when I forget higher 
 experience that I can anywhere accept for all purposes as 
 final the partial and abstracted products whether of science 
 or of a presumptuous ' common sense '. 
 
 On the one hand it is the entire Reality alone which 
 matters. On the other hand every single thing, so far as it 
 matters, is so far real, real in its own place and degree, and 
 according as more or less it contains and carries out the 
 in-dwelling character of the concrete Whole. But there is 
 nothing anywhere in the world which, taken barely in its 
 own right and unconditionally, has importance and is real. 
 And one main work of philosophy is to show that, where 
 there is isolation and abstraction, there is everywhere, so 
 far as this abstraction forgets itself, unreality and error. 
 
INDEX 
 
 A, An, 286. 
 
 Abnormal States, 46, 436 note, 
 
 462 foil. 
 Absolute, The (cf. Criterion), 
 
 218, 246 foil., 250, 258, 272, 
 
 348 foil., 412, 413, 428. 
 and relative truths, 438, 
 
 470 foil. 
 Absolutism, 145, 152, 217, 342 
 
 note, 443-4, 470 foil. 
 Abstraction, 100, 110, 135 note, 
 
 151-2, 156, 200, 247, 290, 291, 
 
 308, 316 note, 397, 407, 435, 
 
 437, 470 foil. 
 Abstractionism, 143 note, 470 
 
 foil. 
 Act, Action, 137, 138, 325-7, 
 
 341-2. 
 Activity : 
 
 — practical and non-practical, 
 loi foil., 137 foil. ; cf. Theory. 
 
 Actual, see Possible. 
 
 All, 286. 
 
 Analysis, 176, 270, 296, 299 foil. 
 
 And (cf. Relations), 157, 183 
 
 note, 200, 226, 228, 230-1, 259, 
 
 270, 283, 290. 
 Animal mind, 356-7. 
 Any, 286. 
 Anything, 296. 
 Appearance, Chap. IX, 250 foil., 
 
 272-3, 412-13. 
 Apperception, 301. 
 Association, 357, 361. 
 Associationism, 195, 198. 
 Attention, 161 foil. 
 
 — state of, 401. 
 
 Beauty, 7-8, 88, 105, 333, 339, 
 
 341, 347 note, 469. 
 Being ('what' and 'that'), 285-6, 
 
 313- 
 Belief (cf. Faith), 80 note, 376-7, 
 
 382. 
 Between, 306, 326-8. 
 
 Change, 150, 152, 250, 269 note, 
 
 337. 4". 471- 
 
 — and knowledge, 336 foil. 
 
 Change, none to be assumed 
 without a reason, 163, 167. 
 Cf. Identity. 
 
 Class, 254 note, 283 foil., 297. 
 
 Coherence, see System. 
 
 Coinherence (cf. Feeling), 177, 
 183, 270, 324. 
 
 Collection, 284. 
 
 Common Sense, 258, 268, 443-4, 
 
 473- 
 
 Condition, Conditional, 227 foil., 
 232, 252 foil., 259 foil., 265-6, 
 269-70, 272-3, 279, 281, 290, 
 329 foil., 363, 366-7, 378-80, 
 383. 
 
 Conjunction, see And. 
 
 Consciousness : 
 
 — and Experience, 150, 192-201. 
 
 — and relation, 196, 417-18. 
 
 — in narrow sense, 174. 
 
 — inconsistency of, 192 foil.. 
 
 195-6. 
 
 Consent, 377. 
 
 Consistency (cf. Coherence, 
 Truth), 123-4, 132-3. 268, 318, 
 430-2, 435-8, 445. 
 
 Construction (cf. Abstraction), 
 204, 206, 209, 292, 332, Chap, 
 XII, 386, 411-12, 418-19. 
 
 Continuity (cf. Inference, Judge- 
 ment, Identity), 197, 284. 
 
 Continuum, original, 151-2, 156-7, 
 
 Contradiction and Contrary, 41, 
 Chap.VIII, 226-9, 269-72, 302. 
 
 Correlation, 199, 247. 
 
 Criterion, 66, 69, 89, 94, 114, 
 122, 129, 138-40, 157, 161, 
 171, 177-81, 190, 202 foil., 
 222 foil., 225, 235-6, 242 foil., 
 261, 278, 311, 316-17, 319-20, 
 321-3, 329, 344-5. 348, 372-5. 
 381, 386, 406, 414, 420, 470 
 foil. 
 
 — feeling as, see Feeling. 
 
 — feeling not always the, 179, 
 420. 
 
 Darwinism, 321-2. 
 
 Data, merely given, 108-9, 
 
INDEX 
 
 475 
 
 Chap. VI, 199-201, 204, 261-2, 
 290, 292, 314. 
 
 Death, 467. 
 
 Degree, 258, 273, 329, 342, 431, 
 470 foil. 
 
 Description, 177. 
 
 Designation (cf. This), 207, 230, 
 233. 
 
 Development, 394. 
 
 Dialectic, 225. 
 
 Difference, see Identity, Rela- 
 tions. 
 
 — and Contradiction, 228. 
 
 — rests on quality, 263 foil. 
 Discourse, universe of, 394 note. 
 Discrimination, 184, 300-1. 
 Dispositions, 170, 355 foil. 
 Diversity, 283, 289-90. Cf. 
 
 Difference. 
 Doubt (cf. Faith, Scepticism), 
 
 17-8, 391. 
 Dream and reality, 30, 46-8, 
 
 461 foil. 
 Duality, Law of, 307. 
 Duration {see Time, Judgement), 
 
 410. 
 
 Emotional whole, 167, 197, 304. 
 
 Cf . Feeling, Immediate, Unity. 
 
 Empiricism, 135, 147, 149 foil., 
 
 341- 
 End, see Good. 
 
 — chief, 86, 141. 
 
 Error, 112, 204, 208, 233, 
 Chap. IX and Note I, 342, 383, 
 470. 
 
 — absolute and relative, 252 
 foil., 258-9, 276. 
 
 — and inference, 368, 405. 
 
 — and psychical duration, 405. 
 Every, 286. 
 
 Evolution, 394. Cf. Darwinism, 
 
 Progress, Series. 
 Existence, 338. 
 Experience : 
 
 — and consciousness, 150, 174-5, 
 192-201 . 
 
 — and reality, 149, 153. Cf. 
 Reality. 
 
 — immediate, see Immediate. 
 
 — personal, 209, 216-7. 
 
 — present, what, 150, 152. Cf. 
 Time. , 
 
 Experiment, 289, 291, 295, 303, 
 
 311, 314, 316, 380. 
 Explanation, 177. 
 
 Fact, Facts. 
 
 — matter of, 261-2, 330, 378-80. 
 Cf. And, and Condition. 
 
 — mere, see Data. 
 
 — true so far as they work, 2 10. 
 Faith, 7, 8, Chap. II, 130, 344, 
 
 351, 446-7. 
 
 — how far practical, 21-4. Cf. 
 Practice. 
 
 Feeling (cf. Immediate, Finite 
 Centre), 157, 174 foil., 194 
 foil., 227, 234 foil., 270, 292, 
 406, 417-20. 
 
 — and reality, see Reality. 
 
 — as criterion. Chap. VI, 179, 
 Chap. VIII, 225, 236. 
 
 — can be made an object, Chap. 
 VI, 166. 
 
 — diversity in, 174. 
 
 — how far infallible, 206. Cf . 
 Designation. 
 
 — how far transcended, 175-6, 
 190, 231. 
 
 Finite Centre (cf. Feeling, Self, 
 Soul), 173, 189-90, 246-8, 
 272, 327. 349-51. Chap. XIV, 
 410-16, 418, 420-1. 
 
 Form and Matter, 315, 351. 
 
 Freedom, 131-2. 
 
 Genetic View, 72-3. 
 God, 106, 133. 
 
 — and Absolute, Chap. XV. 
 
 — as finite, 82, 124. 
 
 — as perfect, 428 foil. 
 
 — as personal, 432 foil., 449 foil. 
 Good, Chap. I, 338, 472-3. 
 
 — as criterion (cf . Criterion) , 
 Chap. I, 319-20. 
 
 — as Reality, 5, 64, 89, 179, 
 
 347- 
 
 — how far supreme (cf . Instru- 
 mentalism). Chap. I, 243, 
 
 472-3- 
 
 — meaning of, 2, 89, 94, 179. 
 
 — not merely practical, 7, 84 
 foil., 105, 128, 141, 319-20, 
 
 346- 
 
 — not merely social, 9, 104. 
 
 — victorious in end, 432, 438, 
 
 459- 
 Ground, 312-4, 333-4. Cf. How. 
 
 Hedonism, 4-5, 318. 
 How (cf. Judgement), 227, 229, 
 256-7, 273, 312, 315, 333-4- 
 
476 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Humanity, Humanism, 64, 67-8, 
 73, 81, 98-9, 124-5, 129-30, 
 142-4, 243, 319, 321, 335-6, 
 340- 
 
 Ideal, Ideality, 28-9, 174, 190 
 note, 195, 197, 232, 251, 301, 
 312-14, 343-4. 411. 425- 
 
 Ideas, what, 28-9, 153, 231, 251, 
 298, 301, 343-4- 
 
 — and events. See Truth and 
 Time. 
 
 — all real, 269, 275-6. 
 
 — all used existentially, 42, 153, 
 425-6. Cf. Ideas, floating. 
 
 — floating or mere. Chap. Ill, 
 
 135. 333. 343. 376-7. 425- 
 
 — self-transcendent, 153-5. 
 
 Identity {cf. Inference, Judge- 
 ment, Truth, Series), 39, 232, 
 240-1, 264 note, 283, 295, 
 362-4, 366-9, 379, 411. 
 
 — Law of, 163 note, 407. 
 
 — personal, 195, 217, 421, 453 
 foil. 
 
 Imaginary. Cf. Memory, Real. 
 
 — and play, see Play. 
 
 — and real, how they differ, 42-9. 
 
 — and real worlds, 46 foil., 
 214-16, 461 foil. 
 
 — what, 34, 46 foil., 362 foil., 
 
 377- 
 Imagination (mere) ,214-5, 363-5, 
 
 367. 369. 371-2. 378-9- 
 Immediacy, higher, 227 note, 
 
 231, 256, 275. 
 Immediate : 
 
 — Experience(cf. Feeling), 15 1-3, 
 156-7, Chap. VI and Appendix, 
 199-201, 270-1, 324, 328, 410 
 
 foil., 417-8, 426. 
 
 -as non-relational, 176. 
 
 as stage of mind, 173-5, 
 
 194 foil. 
 
 idea of, 1 89, 
 
 of tlie-«rediated, 177. 
 
 — jaaity (of. Unity), 227, 230, 
 
 256, 278, 313-5- 
 Immortality, 438 foil., 451 foil., 
 
 467-8. 
 Imperative, 36. 
 Implication, 228 note, 254, 259, 
 
 282, 289, 314. 
 Impossible (how thinkable), 302. 
 Incompatible [see Contradiction), 
 
 41 note. 
 
 Individual, 303. 
 
 — and Universe, 121, 218, 243, 
 249. 327. 413-20. 
 
 — knowable, 422-5. 
 
 — limits of, 422 foil. 
 
 — ■ not real as such, 218, 434-7. 
 
 Individualism, 84, 435 foil. 
 
 Individuality, 264 note. 
 
 Inexplicable, 114, 118, 177, 189- 
 90, 203, 209, 239, 246, 249, 
 272, 278, 316, 324, 331, 344, 
 350, 410, 412, 418, 433, 468. 
 
 Infallible, see Judgement. 
 
 Inference (cf. Judgement, Mem- 
 ory), 362 foil., 365-70- 
 
 — identity in, 366-8, 379, 405. 
 Cf. Series, Judgement. 
 
 Infinity, 284. 
 
 Inherence (cf. Unity), 256, 264. 
 270, 324. 
 
 Instance, 283, 297-9, 
 
 Instrumentalism, 66, 68, 71-2, 
 99-100, III, 127 foil., 131 note, 
 134-5. 267, 319-20, 346-8. 
 
 Intellectualism, 120, 135. 
 
 Intelligence, 221. 
 
 — and will, 97-8. Cf . Will, Truth. 
 Interrogative, 36. 
 Introspection, 166 foil. 
 Irrelevant{cf. Subjective), 328-3 1, 
 
 341, 397 foil., 424. 
 
 Judgement (cf. Inference, Truth), 
 32, 293, 315, 325 foil., 329 foil. 
 
 — abstraction in, 397. 
 
 — and copying, 109. 
 
 — and its act (cf. Act), 325-6, 
 
 405- 
 
 — and mediation, 146, 154 foil., 
 
 315. 333- 
 
 — duration of, 389, 403. 
 
 — explicit and implicit, 32-3. 
 
 — how far self-contained, 325 
 foil., 331 foil.. Chap. XIII. 
 
 — ■ hypothetical, 37-40. 
 
 — identity in (cf . Continuity, 
 Inference), 389 foil., 396 foil., 
 403. 405- 
 
 — infallible, 273, Chap. XIII. 
 
 — interest of, 397-8. 
 
 — is conditional, 228 foil. Cf. 
 Conditional. 
 
 — its psychical aspect (cf . Truth), 
 388 foil., 403 foil. 
 
 — particular, not infallible. Chap. 
 VI. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Judgement, present, 382. 
 
 — real subject in (cf. Reality), 
 Chap. Ill, 41 note, 253 foil., 
 329 note, 393-4, 399. 
 
 — selective, 32, 329 foil., 331-3. 
 
 — unity of, 390 foil., 403. 
 
 Knowledge (cf. Experience, 
 Truth, Reality) : 
 
 — alters its object, 336 foil., 
 424. 
 
 — and reality, 8, 13-14, no foil., 
 153 foil., 316, 424-5. 
 
 — must know itself, 317. 
 
 — perfect, what, 229. 
 
 — proper (opp. feeling), 19. 
 
 — truthandrealitynotseparable, 
 no foil., 148. 
 
 Life, 6 foil., 51, 
 
 472. 
 Love, 10 note. 
 
 63, 106, 235, 
 
 'Magnitude of ', 282, 287. 
 Many, the (cf. And, Pluralism), 
 given 311, not given 199-201, 
 
 315- 
 Mathematics, 233 note, 266, 277, 
 
 280 foil. 
 Matter and Form, 315, 351. 
 Mediation, see How. 
 Memory, 203, 212, 332, Chaps. 
 
 XII, XIII. 
 
 — abnormal, 359, 463. Cf. 
 Abnormal. 
 
 — ambiguity of, 353, 360, 384. 
 
 — and imagination, 362 foil., 
 369, 371-2. 378-9- 
 
 — and inference, 362 foil., 365, 
 372, 378-9, 388. 
 
 — and observation, 380. 
 
 — and self, 416, 453 foil. 
 
 — fallible. Chaps. XII and XIII, 
 370 foil., 386-7, 407. 
 
 — not primary, 360, 372, 374, 
 
 ,,407- 
 
 Metaphysics, 267, 433, 444-7- 
 Monism, see Pluralism. 
 Morality, see Practice, Religion. 
 
 — how far supreme, 1 1 , 88, 123-4, 
 441. 
 
 Nature, 350-1. 
 
 Necessity, 362-3, 366 foil., 379- 
 Negation (cf. Contradiction), 
 40-1, 279, 286-7, 296-8. 
 
 477 
 36 
 
 Negation, and privation, 
 
 note, 47, 258 note, 276. 
 Nothing, 41 note, 286-7. 
 Now and Here, see This. 
 Number, 277, 280. 
 
 Object, 416. 
 
 — and subject, see Immediate 
 Experience, Feeling, Subject. 
 
 — contradiction in, 224-6. 
 Observation, 205, 212, 290, 
 
 380. 
 Occupation, 264, 282, 287, 306. 
 One and Many, 284. See Class, 
 
 Pluralism. 
 Only, 315, 323-4- 
 
 Pain, 222. 
 
 Personal experience, see Experi- 
 ence, Subjective. 
 
 Personality, 433, 449. See God, 
 Identity, Truth. 
 
 • — necessary, 119, 121, 471. 
 
 Philosophy, 9, 10, 106, 220, 
 234 foil, 238. 
 
 — admits no data as absolute 
 (cf. Data), 372, 374 note, 
 381, 386. 
 
 — and doubt, 17-8. Cf. Doubt, 
 Scepticism. 
 
 — and faith, 8, 15, 26-7, 446-7. 
 
 — and religion, &c., 10 foil., 
 13, 444 foil. 
 
 — limits of, 13. 
 
 — rests on an assumption, 15-16, 
 
 235- 
 
 — supreme in its own field, 10 
 foil. 
 
 Play, nature of. Chap. III. 
 
 — and earnest. Chap. III. 
 
 — and make-believe, 57-63. 
 
 — control in, 51, 58-62. 
 Pleasure, 5. 
 
 — as criterion, 5. 
 
 — as the Good, 5. 
 
 Pluralism (cf. Many, And, Rela- 
 tions), 131, 151, 199-201, 237, 
 241 note, 255, 259, 281, 289, 
 
 291. 315- 
 Possible, 274-5, 284, 289, 291. 
 
 — wrongly identified with actual, 
 23, 70-1, 137-8, 147, 150, 156, 
 
 334- 
 Practical and non-practical ac- 
 tivity, 75-6, loi foil., i28foll., 
 136 foil. 
 
478 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Practice, 6-7, 21-3, 75-6, 83 
 foil., 99 foil., loi foil., 124, 
 127 foil., 135 foil., 145, 214 
 note, 266 note, 445-6. 
 
 Practice, ambiguity of, 66, 69, 70, 
 72, 128 foil., 135 foil., 214 note. 
 
 — and belief, 21 foil., 70. 
 
 — and philosophy, 10 foil. 
 
 — and truth, see Pragmatism, 
 Truth. 
 
 — as end, 52, 85-6, 135 note. 
 
 — inconsistent, 6-7, 124. 
 
 — taken as = active, 22. 
 Pragmatism, 21, 66-74, i-^S. 127 
 
 foil., 145, 347. 
 
 — a wider, 66-7, 132-3, 445-6. 
 Privation, see Negation. 
 Progress, 125-6, 155, 321, 344, 
 
 439 note. 
 Psychical Event, 140, 326. Cf. 
 
 Truth. 
 Psychology, 415. 
 
 Qualification, 324. 
 Question, see Interrogative. 
 
 Real, Reality. Cf. Absolute, 
 Experience, Ideal, Truth. 
 
 — and construction, see Con- 
 struction. 
 
 — and experience, 246-7, 316. 
 
 — and good, see Good. 
 
 — • and idea, 251 ; see Idea. 
 
 — and imaginary, see Imagina- 
 tion, Imaginary. 
 
 — and knowledge, see Know- 
 ledge. 
 
 — and time, see Time. 
 
 — and truth, see Truth. . 
 
 — and ' what ' and ' that ', 313. 
 
 — as experience, 246, 316. 
 
 — as stream of events, 153 foil. 
 
 — complete, idea of, 182 foil. 
 
 — degrees of, 448. Cf. Degree. 
 
 — does not depend on something 
 else, 227 note, 289-90. 
 
 — • is super-relational, 190, 238-9. 
 — • may be for only one person, 
 48 note, 335. 
 
 — must be felt, 190, 315-16. 
 
 — not any single aspect, 97-8, 
 472. 
 
 — -the one subject (cf. Judge- 
 ment), 32, 41 note, 153, 226, 
 253 foil, 333, 393. 
 
 — unity of all aspects, 75, 190. 
 
 Real world, my, 30, 46 foil., 
 48 note, 208, 216, 266, 356-7, 
 426 note. Chap. XVI. 
 
 Reflection, process of, 277-8. 
 
 Relational sphere, 156-7, 227, 
 269, 271. 
 
 Relations (cf. Unity, And) : 
 
 — and time, 309 note. 
 
 — as the Universe, 304-5. 
 
 — external (cf. And), 43-4, 151-2, 
 230 foil., 237, 241, 259, 290-1, 
 312, 326-7, 337. 
 
 — imply diversity, 283, 285, 289. 
 
 — internal, 238-40, 290, 312. 
 
 — multiple, 293, 303 foil. 
 
 — never merely between, 193. 
 
 — not given as such, 151, 193 
 foil., 200, 417, 
 
 — • rest on the non- or super- 
 relational, 176, 195 foil., 231 
 foil., 239, 304, 306, 313, 417. 
 
 — -without terms, 238, 291, 
 295 foil., 304. 
 
 Relativism, 142-4, 349 foil., 
 470 foil. 
 
 Religion, 7, 10 foil., 24, 54, 106, 
 Chap. XV, 438, 459. 
 
 — ambiguity of, 440. 
 
 — and morality, 441-2. 
 
 — inconsistent, 431-2. Cf. Con- 
 sistency. 
 
 — is not one-sided, 433-4. 
 
 — is practical, 428, 431 foil., 440. 
 Revelation, 85, 105-6, 141, 337, 
 
 457. 469- 
 
 Satisfaction, as criterion, 318 
 
 foil. Cf. Criterion. 
 Scepticism, 17, 74, 118 note, 132, 
 
 374. 381, 384. 388, 391, 445. 
 Self, 416-21. 
 
 — a construction, 247 foil., 418- 
 19. 
 
 — and finite centre, 173, 189-90. 
 Cf. Finite Centre, Feeling. 
 
 — and selves, 31, 178, 421. 
 
 — cannot all at once become 
 object, 166, 195. 
 
 — divided, 173. 
 
 — my real, 45. 
 
 — ■ not given or ultimate, 246-7, 
 
 326. 
 Self-consciousness, 175, 193 foil., 
 
 417-18, 427. 
 Selves, other, how known, 248, 
 
 418-19. 
 
INDEX 
 
 479 
 
 'Sense ' of a relation, 304, 308. 
 Sense-world, dependence on, 203, 
 
 209-10. 
 Series, 277 foil., 288, 295, 307-9, 
 
 355. 359. 361-3. 379, 394-6, 
 
 399- 
 Sign, symbol, 29 note. 
 Solipsism, 246 foil., 349, 420. 
 Some, 286. 
 
 Soul, 326, 415-16, 421. 
 Space, 280. 
 Spatial schemata, 280. 
 
 — figure, 307. 
 Spiritualism, 440. 
 
 Subject (cf. Consciousness, Ex- 
 perience) : 
 
 — and object, related, 195-6, 
 247, 279. 
 
 — and predicate, 239, 253 foil. 
 Cf. Judgement, Reality. 
 
 — is the Universe. Cf . Reality. 
 Subjective, the, 119 note, 243, 
 
 328, 349 foil. Cf. Irrelevant. 
 Subliminal, .172. 
 'Such. that', 282. 
 Supposition, 37-40. 
 System (cf. Criterion) : 
 
 — two aspects of, 114, Chaps. 
 VII and VIII, 227 note, 241. 
 
 Terms {see Relations) : 
 
 — not given as such, 151, 193 foil. 
 
 — not related to themselves, 
 285, 289, 305-6. 
 
 Testimony, 407. 
 Theory : 
 
 — and practice, Chap. IV, 127 
 foil., 131 note, 134 foil., 140. 
 
 — how far non-practical, 10 1 
 foil., 320, 344, 376. 
 
 — value of (cf . Instrumentalism) , 
 72, 127 foil., 134. 
 
 This (Here, Now, and Mine, cf. 
 
 Designation), 206, 261, 264, 
 
 328. 
 Thisness, 297, 413-14. 
 Thought : 
 
 — andimagination. See Imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 — and reality, 275. See Idea, 
 Reality. 
 
 — not always abstract, 364. 
 Time: 
 
 — and relations, 309. 
 
 — and truth, 336, 340, 406-7. 
 Cf. Identity, Truth. 
 
 Time, fixed order of, 356-8. 
 
 — past and future, .146-8, 150, 
 153, 332, 354, 360 foil., 411, 
 426. 
 
 — present, 150, 153, 303, 332, 
 356, 382, 386, 410, 416. 
 
 — reality of , 148, 150, 250. 
 Together, see And. 
 Transcendence, 128, 130, 147-8, 
 
 153. 157. 160, 175-6, 189-90, 
 231, 239, 246 foil., 316, 325, 
 330 foil., 339-41. 356. 368-9, 
 380, 382, 413. 
 
 — -self-transcendence, universal 
 (cf. Ideality), 223 foil. 
 
 Truth, 8, 12, 223, 231 foil., 234, 
 251 foil., 273, 324 foil., 329, 
 
 334. 343-4. 351, 407- 
 — • abstract, 260, 407. 
 
 — always . incomplete, 11 4-16, 
 324, 330 foil., 430. 
 
 — and act, 341. Cf. Act. 
 
 — : and alteration of existence, 
 83-5, loi foil., 119 note, 
 138-40, 336-7. 
 
 — and consistency, 67 note. Cf . 
 Consistency. 
 
 — • and contradiction, 223 foil. 
 
 — and copying. Chap. V, 118 
 foil., 279, 344-6. 
 
 — • and desire and will, 69, 92, 
 
 120, 242-3. 
 — ^ and fact, 115, 119. Cf. Data. 
 
 — and feeling (cf. Feeling), 227, 
 231. 
 
 — and goodness, 130. See Good. 
 
 — and practice. Chap. IV, 83-5, 
 90 foil., loi foil., 123. 
 
 — and prevalence, 68, 99 note, 
 112, 140, 321-3- 
 
 — • and psychical event, 140, 146, 
 153 foil., 336, 342, 346, 388 foil., 
 403 foil. 
 
 — and reality, relation between ? 
 
 "7. 343- 
 
 — and sequence in time, 146. 
 
 — and working idea, 69, 71, 93, 
 95, iio-ii, 122-3, 129 foil., 
 137, 140, 145, 182, 188, 193, 
 210-11, 240, 267, 318, 431, 445. 
 
 — dualism of, 325, 330, 342. 
 
 — ^ eternal, 336, 340, 407. Cf. 
 Identity. 
 
 — ever new ? 335 foil. 
 
 — for one mind, 48 note, 335. 
 
 — how far made, 141, 338 foil. 
 
48o 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Truth, how far personal, 74, 1 19 
 note, 121. Cf. Irrelevant, Sub- 
 jective. 
 
 — idle, 69, 348-9. See Truth and 
 working idea. 
 
 — inconsistency of, 227, 251 foil., 
 255, 430. 
 
 — independent,see Instrumental- 
 ism. 
 
 — knowledge and reality insepar- 
 able, no foil., 130, 148, 331-2, 
 352, 425; 
 
 — none absolute, 116, 228 foil., 
 232, 273, 324, 430. 
 
 — objective, II 8--19. S«e Subjec- 
 tive. 
 
 — perfect, what, 252, 330, 380. 
 
 — unconditional, 329 foil. 
 
 Unconscious, 171 foil. 
 
 Understanding, see Knowledge, 
 Truth. 
 
 Uniqueness, 45, 47-8, 261 foil. 
 
 Unity, 195, 197, 200, 227, 231, 
 247-9, 256, 270, 281, 289 foil., 
 293. 300-1, 303-8, 511-16. 
 
 — of judgement, see Judgement. 
 
 Universal : 
 
 — • concrete, 297. 
 
 — consciousness of, 296 foil. 
 
 Validity, 109, no, 470 foil. 
 Value, 49, 64, 143. See Good, 
 
 — how far made, 141, 338 foil. 
 Verification, 69-70, 109, 121, 
 
 123, 147, 182, 190, 210 foil., 
 249, 344. 347-8. 
 
 Why, see Ground, How. 
 Will : 
 
 — and emotional expression, 80. 
 
 — and truth, see Truth. 
 
 — consciousness of, 159 ,188. 
 
 — ■ mine and higher, 419-20, 
 429 foil. 
 
 — nature and limits of, 79 foil., 
 96-8, 350-1. 
 
 — - not creative, 342. 
 
 — primacy of, 69, 96 foU., 471. 
 World : 
 
 — • my real, see Real. 
 
 — one common, 465, 468. 
 Worlds, my various, 31-2. 
 Worth, see Good. 
 
 Oxford : Horace Hart M.A. Printer to the University