FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   177   178   179   180  
181   182   183   184   185   186   187   188   189   190   191   192   193   194   195   196   197   198   199   200   201   202   203   204   205   >>   >|  
tail his arguments to prove the nonexistence of a genuinely external world, but they will be ready to admit that his doctrine is an inspiring one in the view that it takes of the world and of man. With this I wish to contrast the doctrine of another idealist, Mr. Bradley, whose work, "Appearance and Reality," has been much discussed in the last few years, in order that the reader may see how widely different forms of idealism may differ from each other, and how absurd it is to praise or blame a man's philosophy merely on the ground that it is idealistic. Mr. Bradley holds that those aspects of our experience which we are accustomed to regard as real--qualities of things, the relations between things, the things themselves, space, time, motion, causation, activity, the self--turn out when carefully examined to be self-contradictory and absurd. They are not real; they are unrealities, mere appearances. But these appearances exist, and, hence, must belong to reality. This reality must be sentient, for "there is no being or fact outside of that which is commonly called psychical existence." Now, what is this reality with which appearances--the whole world of things which seem to be given in our experience--are contrasted? Mr. Bradley calls it the Absolute, and indicates that it is what other men recognize as the Deity. How shall we conceive it? We are told that we are to conceive it as consisting of the contents of finite minds, or "centers of experience," subjected to "an all-pervasive transfusion with a reblending of all material." In the Absolute, finite things are "transmuted" and lose "their individual natures." What does this mean in plain language? It means that there are many finite minds of a higher and of a lower order, "centers of experience," and that the contents of these are unreal appearances. There is not a God or Absolute outside of and distinct from these, but rather one that in some sense _is their reality_. This mass of unrealities transfused and transmuted so that no one of them retains its individual nature is the Absolute. That is to say, time must become indistinguishable from space, space from motion, motion from the self, the self from the qualities of things, etc., before they are fit to become constituents of the Absolute and to be regarded as real. As the reader has seen, this Absolute has nothing in common with the God in which Berkeley believed, and in which the plain
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   156   157   158   159   160   161   162   163   164   165   166   167   168   169   170   171   172   173   174   175   176   177   178   179   180  
181   182   183   184   185   186   187   188   189   190   191   192   193   194   195   196   197   198   199   200   201   202   203   204   205   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

Absolute

 
things
 

appearances

 
reality
 
experience
 

Bradley

 

finite

 

motion

 
reader
 
individual

contents
 

absurd

 

centers

 

unrealities

 

doctrine

 

transmuted

 

conceive

 

qualities

 
subjected
 
pervasive

contrasted

 

recognize

 

consisting

 

language

 

nature

 

indistinguishable

 
retains
 
transfused
 

common

 
Berkeley

believed

 
constituents
 

regarded

 
natures
 
reblending
 

material

 
distinct
 

unreal

 

higher

 
transfusion

discussed

 

Reality

 

Appearance

 

idealism

 

differ

 

widely

 
idealist
 

genuinely

 

external

 

nonexistence