Thought demands a reason and ground for diversity. It can neither pass from A to B without a reason, nor accept as final the fact that, external to thought’s process, A and B are found conjoined. If thought finds a diversity, it demands that this be “brought to unity” (p. 562). And so, if the mere fact of the conjunction of A and B appears, then thought must “either make or accept an arrangement which to it is wanton and without reason, — or, having no reason for anything else, attempt, against reason, to identify them simply” (p. 563). Nor can one meet this difficulty by merely asserting that there are certain ultimate complexes, given in experience, such that in them unity and variety are presented as obviously conjoined, while thought is to explain the “detail of the world” in terms of these fundamental complexes. No such “bare conjunction” is or possibly can be given; for when we find any kind of unity in diversity, that is, when we find diversities conjoined, we always also find a “background” (p. 564) which is a “condition of the conjunction’s existence” so that “the conjunction is not bare, but dependent,” and is presented to the intellect as “a connection, the bond of which is at present unknown.” “The intellect, therefore, while rejecting whatever is alien to itself, if offered as Absolute, can accept the inconsistent if taken as subject to conditions.”
Meanwhile, the “mere conjunction,” if taken as such, is “for thought contradictory” (p. 565). For as soon as thought makes the conjunction its object, thought must “hold in unity” the elements of the conjunction. But finding these elements diverse, thought “can of itself supply no internal bond by which to hold them together, nor has it any internal diversity by which to maintain them apart.” If one replies that the elements are offered to thought “together and in conjunction,” Mr. Bradley retorts that the question is “how thought can think what is offered.” If thought were itself possessed of conjoining principles, of “a ‘together,’ a ‘between,’ and an ‘all at once,’” as its own internal principle, it could use them to explain the conjunction offered. But, as a fact (p. 566), “Thought cannot accept tautology, and yet demands unity in
