V
The first duty of radical empiricism, taking given conjunctions at their face-value, is to class some of them as more intimate and some as more external. When two terms are similar, their very natures enter into the relation. Being what they are, no matter where or when, the likeness never can be denied, if asserted. It continues predicable as long as the terms continue. Other relations, the where and the when, for example, seem adventitious. The sheet of paper may be 'off' or 'on' the table, for example; and in either case the relation involves only the outside of its terms. Having an outside, both of them, they contribute by it to the relation. It is external: the term's inner nature is irrelevant to it. Any
[Footnote 1: Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in his Man and the Cosmos; by L.T. Hobhouse, in chapter xii (the Validity of Judgment) of his Theory of Knowledge; and by F.C.S. Schiller, in his Humanism, Essay XI. Other fatal reviews (in my opinion) are Hodder's, in the Psychological Review, vol. i, 307; Stout's, in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1901-02, p. 1; and MacLennan's, in the Journal of Philosophy, etc., vol. i, 403.]
book, any table, may fall into the relation, which is created pro hac vice, not by their existence, but by their casual situation. It is just because so many of the conjunctions of experience seem so external that a philosophy of pure experience must tend to pluralism in its ontology. So far as things have space-relations, for example, we are free to imagine them with different origins even. If they could get to be, and get into space at all, then they may have done so separately. Once there, however, they are additives to one another, and, with no prejudice to their natures, all sorts of space-relations may supervene between them. The question of how things could come to be, anyhow, is wholly different from the question what their relations, once the being accomplished, may consist in.
Mr. Bradley now affirms that such external relations as the space-relations which we here talk of must hold of entirely different subjects from those of which the absence of such relations might a moment previously have been plausibly asserted. Not only is the situation different when the book is on the table, but the book itself is different as a book, from what it was when it was off the table. He admits that 'such external relations
[Footnote 1: Once more, don't slip from logical into physical situations. Of course, if the table be wet, it will moisten the book, or if it be slight enough and the book heavy enough, the book will break it down. But such collateral phenomena are not the point at issue. The point is whether the successive relations 'on' and 'not-on' can rationally (not physically) hold of the same constant terms, abstractly taken. Professor A.E. Taylor drops from logical into material considerations when he instances color-contrast as a proof that A, 'as contra-distinguished from B, is not the same thing as mere A not in any way affected' (Elements of Metaphysics, 1903, p. 145). Note the substitution, for 'related,' of the word 'affected,' which begs the whole question.]
seem possible and even existing…. That you do not alter what you compare or rearrange in space seems to common sense quite obvious, and that on the other side there are as obvious difficulties does not occur to common sense at all. And I will begin by pointing out these difficulties…. There is a relation in the result, and this relation, we hear, is to make no difference in its terms. But, if so, to what does it make a difference? [doesn't it make a difference to us onlookers, at least?] and what is the meaning and sense of qualifying the terms by it? [Surely the meaning is to tell the truth about their relative position.[1] If, in short, it is external to the terms, how can it possibly be true of them? [Is it the 'intimacy' suggested by the little word 'of,' here, which I have underscored, that is the root of Mr. Bradley's trouble?]…. If the terms from their inner nature do not enter into the relation, then, so far as they are concerned, they seem related for no reason at all…. Things are spatially related, first in one way, and then become related in another way, and yet in no way themselves
[Footnote 1: But 'is there any sense,' asks Mr. Bradley, peevishly, on p. 579, 'and if so, what sense, in truth that is only outside and "about" things?' Surely such a question may be left unanswered.]
are altered; for the relations, it is said, are but external. But I reply that, if so, I cannot understand the leaving by the terms of one set of relations and their adoption of another fresh set. The process and its result to the terms, if they contribute nothing to it [surely they contribute to it all there is 'of' it!] seem irrational throughout. [If 'irrational' here means simply 'non-rational,' or non-deducible from the essence of either term singly, it is no reproach; if it means 'contradicting' such essence, Mr. Bradley should show wherein and how.] But, if they contribute anything, they must surely be affected internally. [Why so, if they contribute only their surface? In such relations as 'on,' 'a foot away,' 'between,' 'next,' etc., only surfaces are in question.] … If the terms contribute anything whatever, then the terms are affected [inwardly altered?] by the arrangement…. That for working purposes we treat, and do well to treat, some relations as external merely, I do not deny, and that of course is not the question at issue here. That question is … whether in the end and in principle a mere external relation [i.e., a relation which can change without forcing its terms to change their nature simultaneously] is possible and forced on us by the facts.'[1]
Mr. Bradley next reverts to the antinomies of space, which, according to him, prove it to be unreal, although it appears as so prolific a medium of external relations;
[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, 2d edition, pp. 575-576.]
and he then concludes that 'Irrationality and externality cannot be the last truth about things. Somewhere there must be a reason why this and that appear together. And this reason and reality must reside in the whole from which terms and relations are abstractions, a whole in which their internal connexion must lie, and out of which from the background appear those fresh results which never could have come from the premises' (p. 577). And he adds that 'Where the whole is different, the terms that qualify and contribute to it must so far be different…. They are altered so far only [how far? farther than externally, yet not through and through?], but still they are altered…. I must insist that in each case the terms are qualified by their whole [qualified how?—do their external relations, situations, dates, etc., changed as these are in the new whole, fail to qualify them 'far' enough?], and that in the second case there is a whole which differs both logically and psychologically from the first whole; and I urge that in contributing to the change the terms so far are altered' (p. 579).
Not merely the relations, then, but the terms are altered: und zwar 'so far.' But just how far is the whole problem; and 'through-and-through' would seem (in spite of Mr. Bradley's somewhat undecided utterances[1])
[Footnote 1: I say 'undecided,' because, apart from the 'so far,' which sounds terribly half-hearted, there are passages in these very pages in which Mr. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Read, for example, what he says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its 'character' unchanged, though, in its change of place, its 'existence' gets altered; or what he says, on p. 579, of the possibility that an abstract quality A, B, or C, in a thing, 'may throughout remain unchanged' although the thing be altered; or his admission that in red-hairedness, both as analyzed out of a man and when given with the rest of him, there may be 'no change' (p. 580). Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an ignoratio elenchi? It is impossible to admit it to be such. The entire elenchus and inquest is just as to whether parts which you can abstract from existing wholes can also contribute to other wholes without changing their inner nature. If they can thus mould various wholes into new gestalt-qualitäten, then it follows that the same elements are logically able to exist in different wholes [whether physically able would depend on additional hypotheses]; that partial changes are thinkable, and through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity; that monism is only an hypothesis; and that an additively constituted universe is a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All the theses of radical empiricism, in short, follow.]
to be the full bradleyan answer. The 'whole' which he here treats as primary and determinative of each part's manner of 'contributing,' simply must, when it alters, alter in its entirety. There must be total conflux of its parts, each into and through each other. The 'must' appears here as a Machtspruch, as an ipse dixit of Mr. Bradley's absolutistically tempered 'understanding,' for he candidly confesses that how the parts do differ as they contribute to different wholes, is unknown to him (p. 578).
Although I have every wish to comprehend the authority by which Mr. Bradley's understanding speaks, his words leave me wholly unconverted. 'External relations' stand with their withers all unwrung, and remain, for aught he proves to the contrary, not only practically workable, but also perfectly intelligible factors of reality.