Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/20

6 BERNARD BOSANQUET : characteristic that deepens and does not fade, as the other characteristics of Keality grow more complete. Negativity is not all Reality, but the completer the Reality the deeper the Negativity. How then is Negativity experienced ? and if it only means the distinctness necessary to identification, is not a term con- nected with the idea of negation too violent and exaggerated to use for it? Now no doubt Solutions of contradiction, Completeness, Satisfaction, are possible at many levels of life, and compatible with very easy and effortless experiences. But it is here suggested that in a true typical satisfaction there is always a certain exaltation which depends essentially on the fact that in satisfaction the self goes out into the other, and, though or because it becomes enriched, is beyond its normal barriers, and in a word, to put the whole paradox brutally, is undergoing an experience technically, and in its fundamental nature, homogeneous with self-sacrifice. How can this be construed of anything but a finite being ? Obvi- ously not by help of such words as have just been used, presupposing limits and a temporal modification in the self. But there is a point of some interest which may at least serve to bring out the distinction of principle between taking Negation as, like Contradiction, an incident of Finiteness, and taking it as fundamental in Reality. 3. It has already been implied that the current view of experience, influential even among philosophers, confuses Contradiction and Negativity. The principle that an element of Reality can be completed only through what is not itself is confused with the imperfection of adjustment in finite beings or contents which so far hinders such completion from taking place. And thus it comes to be held that Nega- tion, like Contradiction, is a vanishing quantity, and that in a complete experience it would disappear. The point of interest which was just now referred to as emphasising the distinction of principle is the extreme difficulty of avoiding this confusion. When we endeavour to insist upon the nature of self-consciousness, as self and other in one, by instances and analyses drawn from actual experience, we constantly find ourselves appealing to characteristics which depend upon ignorance and imperfection. The ideal which we have in mind is the self in the other, but in actual ex- perience we have little more than the self and the other. Nettleship observes upon this in the biography of Green. Now the crux in the distinction of principle arises at this point, because of the apparent fact that it is the discrepancy of self and other that for us gives interest to the realisation