Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/22

8 BERNARD BOSANQUET : have had in mind. We may try to conceive an intelligent being who has learned all that a sunset or even a toothache can teach him, and in that case we feel a difficulty in com- prehending how they can any longer seem experiences from which, as his other, his self has anything to gain. But a person, however well you know him, is still an independent source of response, and it may be argued that here, and here only, you find the true other of a self. I feel a difficulty about this speculation which may rest on misapprehension, but which I will indicate in a few words, because it stands in the way of our first conclusion. What we must have for any theory of Reality and especially for Negativity to work in, is the content of life, pains, conflicts, sacrifice, satisfaction. Now there is a difficulty, is there not ? in getting these contents out of a universe of persons, except by presupposing, in the outside or other of every person, what might as well have been presupposed as the outside or other of the persons commonly recognised as such. It is things, is it not ? which set the problems of life for persons ; and if you turn all things into persons, the differences which make life interesting are gone, except in as far as for prac- tical purposes you turn the persons back again into things, i.e. your food, or your own body, or the place in which you were born. In making the outside adequate to the highest claims, you have turned it into an inside, and so, while professing to meet the problem of the outside in the highest degree, you have, it almost appears to me, really abandoned it altogether. If the instruments and attributes of my life are turned into other persons, I, surely, am reduced to emptiness and deprived even of my character, for my char- acter is not, without external activity. This criticism may be mistaken, but it may pass as affirming that we must perceive as actual the distinctions which give life its content. 4. It is time to indicate the conclusion, an old conclusion, to which I have nothing to add, except by pleading that its point is lost if it is not conceived in its whole depth of paradox. I will try to express it through antitheses to current opinions, which will bring out the reasons for which it seems to me worth caring about ; and these are also the character- istics which define its peculiarity. a. It is a mistake to treat the finite world, or pain, or evil, as an illusion. In answer to the question whether they are real or are not real, I see nothing for it but to repeat what Hegel says of Space and Time, " Everything is real, so long as you do not take it for more than it is ". Finiteness, pain,