So again with the mystical element in our result. In holding that all genuine individuality, finite or infinite,[[237]] involves a type of immediate felt unity which transcends reduction to the relational categories of thought and will, we may fairly be said to have reached a conclusion which, in a sense, is mystical. But our result is not Mysticism, if by Mysticism is meant a doctrine which seeks ultimate Reality in mere unanalysed immediate feeling as such. The results of intellectual and volitional construction have not been treated by us as illusory and as a sort of intellectual and moral mistake. On the other hand, we urged that the ultimate unity of the real must transcend, and not merely fall short of, the rational scheme of thought and will. And we consequently insisted that our result, so far as it is a mystical one, can only be justified by following out the constructions of the logical intellect and the ethical will to their final consequence, and showing that each of them itself demands completion in an individual Reality which includes and transcends both. To quote the admirable words of Dr. McTaggart: “A Mysticism which ignored the claims of the understanding would no doubt be doomed. None ever went about to break logic, but in the end logic broke him. But there is a Mysticism which starts from the standpoint of the understanding, and only departs from it in so far as that standpoint shows itself not to be ultimate, but to postulate something beyond itself. To transcend the lower is not to ignore it.” And it is only in this sense that philosophy is justified in asserting “above all knowledge and volition one all-embracing unity, which is only not true, only not good, because all truth and all goodness are but shadows of its absolute perfection.”[[238]]
§ 3. The reader who has persevered to the conclusion of this volume may perhaps, on laying it down, experience a certain feeling of dissatisfaction. Our investigations, it might be complained, have added nothing to our stock of scientific information about the contents of the world, and have supplied no fresh practical incentives towards the strenuous pursuit of an elevated moral or religious ideal. I must at once admit the justice of this hypothetical criticism, and dispute its relevancy. Quite apart from the defects due to personal shortcomings and confusions, it is inherent in the nature of metaphysical study that it can make no positive addition to our information, and can of itself supply no motives for practical endeavour. And the student who turns to our science as a substitute for empirical Physics or Psychology, or for practical morality, is bound to go away disappointed. The reason of this we have already had occasion to see. Metaphysics has to presuppose the general principles of the various sciences and the general forms of practical experience as the materials upon which it works. Its object as a study is not to add to or to modify these materials, but to afford some coherent and systematic satisfaction for the intellectual curiosity which we all feel at times as to the general nature of the whole to which these various materials belong, and the relative truth and clearness with which that general nature is expressed in the different departments of experience. Its aim is the organisation, not the enlargement of knowledge. Hence for the student whose interests lie more in the enlargement of human knowledge by the discovery of new facts and laws, than in its organisation into a coherent whole, Metaphysics is probably undesirable, or desirable only as a protection against the intrusion of unrecognised and uncriticised metaphysical assumptions into the domain of empirical service. And similarly for the practical man whose interests in life are predominantly ethical, the main, if not the sole, value of metaphysical study lies in its critical function of exposing false metaphysical assumptions, which, if acted upon, might impair the vigour of spontaneous moral effort.
But for those in whom the speculative desire to form some coherent conception of the scheme of things to which we belong as a whole is strong, Metaphysics has a higher importance. In such minds the impulse to reflect on the nature of existence as a whole, if debarred from systematic and thorough gratification, is certain to find its outlet in unsystematic and uncriticised imaginative construction. Metaphysics they will certainly have, and if not conscious and coherent, then unconscious and incoherent Metaphysics. The soul that is not at rest in itself without some “sight of that immortal sea which brought it hither,” if hindered from beholding the object of its quest through the clear glass of rational reflection, will none the less seek to discern it amid the distorting hazes and mists of superstition. It is in such seekers after the Infinite that Metaphysics has its natural and proper followers, and for them the study is its own justification and its own reward. If a work like the present should prove of any help to such students, whether by offering positive suggestions which they can accept, or by assisting them to know definitely why they reject its conclusions, it will perhaps have achieved as much as its writer could reasonably expect.
Consult further:—F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. 27; J. E. McTaggart, Studies m Hegelian Cosmology, chap. 9.
[235]. I use the epithet in its familiar Platonic sense. The “pure” pleasure is that which is not dependent, in whole or in part, for its pleasantness upon a previous ἔνδεια, or actual experience of craving or desire. I do not mean, as Plato possibly did, that a “mixed” pleasure, preceded by such ἔνδεια, is a contrast-effect without positive quality of its own.
[236]. Compare the argument of Appearance and Reality, chap. 26, pp. 469-485 (1st ed.), and the famous scholium to Prop. 17 of part 1 of Spinoza’s Ethics, where it is contended that “if intellect and volition belong to the eternal essence of God, each of these attributes must at least be understood in a different sense from the current.”
[237]. I say “finite or infinite” advisedly. The mystic’s condemnation of the relational scheme as inadequate to express the full nature of the real, holds good just as much in application to actual finite experience as in application to the ultimate whole. We may say not only of “God,” but of human persons, that they are much more than the “union of thought and will” as such. And in personal human love, no less than in the saint’s “beatific vision” or the philosopher’s “intellectual love of God,” we have a type of experience which may for some psychological purposes be analysed into a combination of ideational and volitional processes, but emphatically does not, in its concrete existence, consist of a synthesis of actual ideas and actual volitions. See ante, p. 152.
[238]. Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, p. 292.