only in so far as it is meanwhile constituted by and through them. And this is why, with all my indebtedness to Mr. Bradley’s discussions of the Absolute, I am unable to view the categories of self-consciousness as “mere appearance,” or to regard them as “lost,” or “absorbed” or “transformed” into something unspeakably other than they are, as soon as one passes to the absolute point of view.
The Absolute, then, in the only logically possible sense of the term, is through and through pervaded by self-consciousness. That is, the Absolute Unity is the unity of a variety of mutually interrelated and interpenetrating conscious functions, which, while contrasted, essentially refer to one another, and are fulfilled each in and through the others, so that they may well be called, by virtue of the contrast, conscious Selves, each being conscious that the other Selves, his Divine fellows, are in essence but himself fulfilled and wholly expressed. Thus, and thus only, can the Absolute be conscious of himself. To be sure, it would be vain to reduce this unity in variety to that bare “identity of Subject and Object” in terms of which an older and highly abstract theory was accustomed to define the sort of self-consciousness that Herbart, in a famous discussion, so easily reduced to absurdity, and that Fichte viewed as the goal of an endless process, or, in other words, as an impossibility. Concrete self-consciousness involves contrasts. But my present thesis is, that such contrasts are not inconsistent with the unity of even an Absolute Consciousness.
