Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/88

74 GEORGE GALLOWAY: it out " consistently in all its bearings, we establish its claim to truth. And individual reals cannot be " thought out " without yielding up their reality to the absolute. That there is an element of truth in this contention we do not deny, and we will return to the point presently. But if you reduce individuals to mere appearance and turn their identity into a fiction, in the ostensible interests of rational explanation you are ignoring facts which require to be explained. If like Parmenides you say that the one only is and the many are not, you have still to account for the illusion of ' not-being '. Suppose for the moment that thought did compel us to merge all individuals in the one perfect individual or absolute, I do not see how on this supposition we are to explain the appearance of individuality within the whole. For it can hardly be maintained that the illusion is due to the abstract method of ordinary thought which concentrates attention on one aspect of reality and neglects the rest. On this assump- tion the term might be applied or rejected according as the point of view changed. Yet there are centres of experience which claim to have a reality of their own from whatever standpoint they are regarded. And one cannot understand how, if the theory of reality we are considering be true, such a claim could ever come to be made. But, it may be urged, the rights of logical thought are supreme, and to deny these rights is to pave the way to a scepticism of the worst kind. And certainly if thought and reality are not ultimately con- sistent, philosophical discussion must be fruitless. Still it does not seem to me that the demands of coherent thinking forbid us to attribute reality to individuals which are not themselves absolute. If you assume that the individual is simply its relations, then it may consistently be deprived of any being for itself in the ultimate system : but the validity of the conclusion is spoiled by the inadequacy of the premises. The self which thinks, and so relates itself to other objects and objects to one another in the relational form of conscious- ness, is not the whole self. And though we are bound to accept the relational system as a valid interpretation by thought of what is given in experience, we are not entitled to say that the whole self of experience is exhausted by this interpretation. Thought presupposes experience, and in some form experience must have preceded the genesis in time of intellectual activity. It is just because experience is richer than thought that a self, or individual centre of experi- ence, is, in Prof. Ward's phrase, a fundamentum relationis. A few further observations on this point may be made. Mr. Bradley has justly remarked that the subject in a judg-