Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/368

354 F. C. S. SCHILLER : ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES. entirely reasonable thing to do in the case supposed. If the pursuit of knowledge really aggravated, instead of relieving, the burden of life, it would be irrational. If every step we took beyond ' appearances ' were but an augmentation of the disharmony in our experience, there would be no gain in taking it. The alleged knowledge would be worse than useless, and we should fare better without it. We should have to train ourselves therefore to make the most of appear- ances, to make no effort to get behind them. And natural selection would see to it that those did not survive who remained addicted to a futile and noxious pursuit. This then would be the worst that could happen ; the frivolity and thoughtlessness of the day-fly might pay better than the deadly earnest of the sage. But the day-fly would ipso facto have become incapable of assenting to the extravagances of ultra-pessimism. From the worst possibility let us turn to the best. The best that has been mentioned is that by Faith and daring we should find an experience that would conduct us to the fortu- nate thought of an ultimate reality capable of completely harmonising our experience. And a merely intellectualist philosophy would have no reason, I presume, to ask for more than this. But just as before we conceived the principle of non-contradiction to be a form of the wider principle of harmony, so now we can hardly rest content with a reality which is merely conceived as the ground of complete satis- faction. For so long as it remains a mere conception, it must remain doubtful whether it could be realised in actual fact. To remove this doubt, therefore, our ultimate reality would have actually to establish the perfect harmony. By this achievement alone, i.e. by returning to our immediate experience and transmuting it into a form in which doubt would have become impossible, would it finally put an end to every doubt of its own ultimateness. But by this same achievement it would have dissolved our original problem. The antithesis of "appearance" and "reality" would have vanished. Ultimate reality having become immediate ex- perience the two would coincide, and we should have entered into the fruition of their union. Beyond this point even the most speculative of philosophers can hardly be required to advance. 1 I must conclude there- fore with a couple of apologies, one to my readers for having taken them from a familiar into so unfamiliar a country, another to Mr. Bradley for attempting a ' trans valuation ' of his pet antithesis. Compare however my article "On the Conception of 'Ei/epyeta 'AKivrjvias " in MIND, N.S., No. 36.