Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/55

THE ABSOLUTE AS UNKNOWABLE. 41 existence, I am perfectly aware that the quality which I am referring to reality is a definite quality, and that it must be so for the judgment to have meaning. Now I believe that this is our natural way of looking at the matter, and that, consequently, it has so much the advantage. It certainly does not fall in readily with our ordinary concep- tions to suppose that the external world, so far as known, is nothing but a mosaic of bits of human experience, and that it probably has no existence at all apart from such finite centres of feeling. 1 Commonly it is believed most emphatic- ally to have an existence independent of human sensibility. The only thing that would make a different theory acceptable would be the impossibility of justifying the common-sense view in any satisfactory way. I do not see why the con- ception of an ultimate consciousness distinct from ours, within which the outer world has its reality, is not a suffi- ciently respectable theory to deserve at least consideration. 2 It only remains, then, to ask wjiether we actually have a knowledge of any type of experience which overcomes the difficulties that Mr. Bradley finds in thought. And my thesis is that we have, in any conscious act of a non-discursive kind, a sufficient indication of the direction in which we are to look for this. Let us take a case where we are doing something in full consciousness of its meaning, but where the action is sufficiently habitual to do away with the need of our con- stantly having to form new judgments, or to think. In such an experience we have the elements of our activity present in their relations, without these relations being mere opaque facts ; we do not start from A and find B, of whose connexion no further account is to be given, but B is already implicitly present in the end of action, by reference to which each partial element has its place determined. In the experience of consciously performing an act in which the relations of the various steps that constitute the act, the means that make it possible, are actively realised, we have, indeed, the only way in which Mr. Bradley's demand is conceivably to 1 Ibid., p. 273. 2 Mr. Bradley mentions this in a foot-note (Appearance and Reality, p. 282) only to reject it with some contempt as hardly needing refutation. Of course if we follow him in his static conception of reality, there is some justification for this ; the mere reduplication of a fact does not explain much. If, however, every fact of experience has a functional value also and that for common sense is its obvious value then the independent existence of the world for God's consciousness need no more be meaningless than my knowledge is useless because my neighbour knows the same thing. I and my neighbour have different parts to play hi the world.