Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/279

JOSIAH BOYCE, The World and the Individual. '2>f> Bradley on the one hand, and Hegel's practice on the other. (Hegel's theory might not impossibly be found in the middle with Dr. Royce.) The result not to be either limited to humanity nor alien to it is brought out with great clearness. The last lecture is entitled Individuality and Freedom. That Individuality does not suffer in such a system is plain. The whole aim of knowledge, it tells us, is to find the individual. And the close unity of the whole, so far from destroying the individuality of the parts, is essential to it. With regard to freedom, the author points out that causal determination can never be the last word about anything individual. " When we have assumed, as we have now done, that every moment of every finite consciousness has some unique character, and when we have asserted, as we have also done, that in our rational life our momentary will and its finite expression belong to this very unique aspect of our finite life, we have indeed found, in our finite will, an aspect which no causation could even by any possibility explain. For whatever else causality may be, it implies the explanation of facts by their general character, and by their connexion with other facts. What- ever is unique, is as such not causally explicable. The individual as such is never the mere result of law. In consequence, the causal explanation of an object never defines the individual and unique characters as such, but always its general characters. Consequently, // the will and the expression of that will in any moment of our finite life possess characters, namely, precisely those individual and uniquely significant characters which no causal ex- pLination can predetermine, then such acts of will, as significant expressions of purpose in our life, constitute precisely what ethical common sense has always meant by free acts" 'p. 467). This view is one of great importance. It may be doubted whether " ethical common sense " would accept a life as free which was " a stage or case of the expression of the divine purpose at a given point of time " (p. 464). But then it might also be doubted if it has a coherent conception of freedom at all. The lectures are followed by a Supplementary Essay on The One, The Many, and the Infinite, which is mainly a criticism of Mr. Bradley. Dr. Royce admits that Mr. Bradley "has shown that every effort to bring to unity the manifoldness of our world involves us in what he himself often calls an ' infinite process ' ' (p. 474). But does this involve that all our efforts must be con- sidered to have failed, and that the way in which the manifold is really unified is, for us, a mystery? Is a real infinite process an impossibility ? At any rate, we come across such processes in mathematics, where they " lie at the basis of highly and very positively signifi- cant researches " (p. 499). And, outside the reach of mathematics, there are important cases where "a single purpose, definable as One, demands for its realisation a multitude of particulars which could not be a limited multitude without involving the direct defeat