mentary fact can be called rational. And hereby we have
indeed found a sense in which the “endless fission” of Mr.
Bradley’s analysis expresses not mere Appearance but Being.
Here is a law not only of Thought but also of Reality. Here
is the true union of the One and the Many. Here is a
multiplicity that is not “absorbed” or “transmuted,” but retained
by the Absolute. And it is a multiplicity of Individual
facts that are still One in the Absolute.
Section IV. Infinity, Determinateness, and Individuality
Despite all the foregoing considerations, however, we have
still to face the objection that, even if these constructions be
regarded as self-evident products of Thought, they, nevertheless,
simply cannot be genuinely true of the final nature of
Reality and must somehow be fallacious. For, from Mr.
Bradley’s side, it would be maintained that however inevitable
the seeming of these endless processes, they become
self-contradictory precisely when you take them to be real and yet
endless. For who knows not the Aristotelian arguments, so
often repeated in later thought, against the actual Infinite?
Is not the complete Infinite the very type of a logical
“monster?” Is not the very conception a self-contradiction? If
thought, then, has to conceive Reality as infinite, so much the
worse, one may say, for thought. The Real, whatever its
appearance, cannot in itself be endless.
I. The Objections to the Actually Infinite
It is necessary to consider such arguments by themselves, for the moment, and apart from the foregoing considerations. Let us, then, briefly develope some of these often repeated reasons on account of which so many assert that Reality cannot be an infinite system at all.
