Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/543

EICHARD B. HALDANE, The Pathway to Reality. 529 dividual minds. This is at least intelligible, whatever may be thought, from a speculative or from a religious point of view, of the resulting Welt-anschauung. Prof. Eoyce again has attempted to clear up the relation between the individual self -consciousness and the universal in a way which, however mystical it may seem to those who tarry with Lotze in the outer court, cannot be accused either of suppressing and undervaluing individuality or of reducing the Absolute to a mere collection of individuals. I must respect- fully submit that Mr. Haldane has simply cut the problem altogether. If he has done anything to clear up the mysterious haze in which that relation was left by Green, it is only by heaping more abundant scorn upon the individual. Nothing, indeed, can exceed the airy contempt with which he speaks of the individual mind. 1 It is merely by an abstraction necessary, indeed, for purpose of social intercourse, but only possible from a low level of thought that "the mind can be regarded as one thing among many". After pointing to the kind of difficulties which Mr. Bradley has urged against the absolute reality of the Self, he declares "It is very difficult really to come to any other conclusion than that the word 'self is like the word 'cause/ one of those outcomes of half thought out standpoints which are useful in everyday life, but which will not bear the dry light of Science " (pp. 106-7). Without acquiescing in Mr. Bradley's view of the matter, I may point out that in Mr. Bradley the denial of absolute reality to the self is at least qualified by much more insistence upon the doctrine of " degrees " in reality than we find in the pages of Mr. Haldane. I doubt whether Mr. Bradley would ever allow himself to speak of the soul as " just an event or a series of events " (pp. 146-147), or would endorse the statement that " your Ego comes to disclose itself as a mere asymptotic regress towards a notional pure subject of knowledge a thinker without thoughts, an abstraction, nothing at all " (p. 154), or speak of it as a mere phrase of the ultimate reality; nor would he go the length of saying "There is only a single experience, that which is ours. Other human beings have neither the same experience, nor a different experience " (p. 295) ; nor would he treat the language which recognises a difference between individual subjects (and presumably individual wills) as a mere " simile " (p. 295). Of course every one who has read the Critique of Pure Reason will recognise the process by which the thinker gets himself into this position. The self considered merely phenomenally as a series of events in time is evidently just on a line with any other phenomena. And it is easy to show that the ' Ego ' when ab- stracted from the series is not a ' thing ' of which we can have knowledge. But Kant did not doubt that there was an individual - *It is true that Mr. Haldane talks about "the Individual" as the only Reality, but of course he means by this the One Reality of which all finite souls are but " aspects ". 34