Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/241

ON THE NATURE OF THE NOTION OF EXTERNALITY. 225 that of which nothing can be said a chaos of unrelated, and therefore unmeaning, individua." 1 But esse is intelligi is not an inference from the absurdity of this conclusion : it is the absurd conclusion itself, stated the other way round. (6) "Anything, in no sense felt or perceived, becomes to me quite unmeaning. And as I cannot try to think of it without realising either that I am not thinking at all, or that I am thinking of it against my will as being experienced, I am driven to the conclusion that for me experience is the same as reality. The fact that falls elsewhere seems, in my mind, to be a mere word and a failure, or else an attempt at self-contradiction. It is a vicious abstraction whose exist- ence is meaningless nonsense, and is therefore not possible. . . . You cannot find fact unless in unity with sentience, and one cannot in the end be divided from the other, either actually or in idea. But to be utterly indivisible from feeling or perception, to be an integral element in a whole which is experienced, this surely is itself to be experience. Being and reality are, in brief, one thing with sentience ; they can neither be opposed to, nor even in the end distinguished from, it." : But since sentience is a chaos, how are we to reconcile this with the following? "Reality is one in this sense, that it has a positive nature exclusive of discord, a nature which must hold throughout everything that is to be real. Its diversity can be diverse only so far as not to clash, and what seems otherwise anywhere cannot be real. ... Or again we may put it so : the real is individual. It is one in the sense that its positive character embraces all differences in an inclusive harmony." 3 I suppose we shall be told that the needful reconciliation is "somehow" effected in "our Absolute ". But consider : " you can scarcely propose to be quite passive when presented with statements about reality. You can hardly take the position of admitting any and every nonsense to be truth, truth absolute and entire, at least so far as you know. For, if you think at all so as to discrimi- nate between truth and falsehood, you will find that you cannot accept open self-contradiction." * (c) " Objects, things, and events a world of experience exist for us, and can exist for us, only in so far as our sensitive impressions are determined and related to each other according to universal principles. Objectivity and universality are equivalents of each other, and to say that an 1 Hume's Treatise, ed. Green and Grose, vol. i., p. 132. 2 Bradley's Appearance and Reality, pp. 145-146. 3 Op. cit., p. 140. 4 Op. cit., p. 136. 15