Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/166

152 F. H. BRADLEY: ing particular feature of the whole. And this feature, we have seen, as thus contrary to me is in a special sense alien and not-self. (vi.) I will pass on from this to emphasise two points of importance. In the first place both self and not-self must in volition have a concrete content, and both must be actually experienced in their own proper nature. We must have an experienced relation between two experienced terms, and, if it were not so, volition would not be ' a fact of experience '. If it were not so, an experience of activity or passivity, or of self and not-self, would become unintelligible, if at least we mean by such an experience the awareness of these things in their own proper characters. We should in each case be speaking of something about which by the conditions we could have no knowledge. And the reply that other men, though not the present writer, can distinguish between the fact of activity and the awareness of that fact, is to my mind irrelevant. For it would hardly follow that we may speak of activity and of will as existing there where by the con- ditions we could not possibly be aware of their existence. Such a knowledge, if maintained, seems at least to require some explanation. And it is surely misleading, I would add, to term activity a fact of experience, if it does not itself fall within that which is experienced. In will the terms and their relation and in short the whole process is experienced, but this process in all its aspects is not experienced in the same sense throughout, (a) The existence and the idea of its change, we have seen, are both objects. And the self is an object to itself so far as it is contained in the idea a point to which we shall presently have to return. And the self again, as itself carrying itself out into fact, must to a certain extent be perceived as an object. But however much these aspects of the whole conie before me as objects, they are none the less experienced also as elements felt within the ' now mine '. And (b) this experience of my total present is itself not an object, and it cannot in the end even for reflexion become an object throughout. And (c) the same result holds of my identification of myself with the idea. The felt oneness of my inner self with the idea of the change cannot become an object, unless we go beyond and unless we so far destroy will. It does not matter how much my self has passed beforehand into the content of the idea, and it does not matter how much my self perceives itself as carried out in the act. In the end my union with the idea must remain essentially a felt union, and, so far as by reflexion it be-