experience, where, through a process of thinking, or a type of mediated consciousness, we men seem to have won any sort of explicit synthesis and harmony of the One and the Many, is sternly rejected by Mr. Bradley, as furnishing no satisfactory guide to the final knowledge of the way in which, in the Absolute, unity and manifoldness are united. The critics have, accordingly, been sometimes disposed to accuse Mr. Bradley of seeking, in his Absolute, for bare identity without diversity; and sometimes tempted, on the other hand, to ask, complainingly, what sort of harmony would satisfy him, and why he supposes that any harmony of the One and the Many is attainable at all, even for the Absolute, when he himself rejects, as mere appearance, every proffered means, whereby harmony is to be defined.
In answer, Mr. Bradley has been led, in his second edition, to discuss, in an appendix, the problem of “Contradiction and the Contrary,” with special reference to its bearing upon the matter here at issue. The relation of the theory of the contrary to the problem of the relation of unity and diversity appears in the fundamental thesis of the discussion in question.[1] This thesis is as follows (p. 562): “A thing cannot, without an internal distinction, be (or do) two different things; and differences cannot belong to the same thing, in the same point, unless in that point there is diversity. The appearance of such union may be fact, but is for thought a contradiction.” In expounding this statement of the principle of contradiction, Mr. Bradley first explains that the thesis “does not demand mere sameness,” which to thought “would be nothing.” A mere tautology “is not a truth in any way, in any sense, or at all.” The Law of Contradiction, then, does not forbid diversity. If it did, “it would forbid thinking altogether.” But the difficulty of the situation arises from the fact that, “Thought cannot do without differences; but, on the other hand, it cannot make them. And, as it cannot make them, so it cannot receive them from the outside, and ready-made.”
