therefore its comparative rationality. More particularly, we may remark here that such a theory would meet with a difficulty precisely analogous to that which conflicts with Hegel’s theory, except that in this case the stumbling-block would lie, not in the existence of some irrationality in the universe, but in the existence of some rationality. To explain away the latter would be as impossible as we have found it to be to explain away the former. Yet it is at least as impossible to conceive how the fundamentally irrational should manifest itself as rationality, as it is to conceive the converse process. We shall gain nothing, then, by deserting Hegel for such a theory as this.
It might seem as if a dualistic theory would be well adapted to the chequered condition of the actual world. But as soon as we try to construct such a theory, difficulties arise. The two principles, of rationality and irrationality, to which the universe is referred, will have to be absolutely separate and independent. For if there were any common unity to which they should be referred, it would be that unity and not its two manifestations which would be the ultimate explanation of the universe, and our theory, having become monistic, resolves itself into one of the others, according to the attitude of this single principle towards reason, whether favourable, hostile, or indifferent.
We must then refer the universe to two independent and opposed forces. Nor will it make any important difference if we make the second force to be, not irrationality, but some blind force not in itself hostile to reason. For in order to account for the thwarted rationality which meets us everywhere in the universe, we shall have to suppose that the result of the force is, as a fact, opposed to reason, even if opposition to reason is not its essential nature.
In the first place, can there be really two independent powers in the universe? Surely not. As Mr. Bradley remarks (Appearance and Reality, p. 141), “Plurality must contradict independence. If the beings are not in relation, they cannot be many; but if they are in relation they cease forthwith to be absolute. For, on the one hand, plurality has no meaning, unless the units are somehow taken together. If you abolish and remove all relations, there seems no sense left in which you can speak of plurality. But, on the other hand, relations destroy the real’s self-dependence. For it is impossible to treat relations as adjectives, falling simply inside the many beings. And it is impossible to take them as falling outside somewhere in a sort of unreal void, which makes no difference to anything.
