§ 8. The definition of infinite and finite individuality completes the general outline of our conception of Reality as a whole, and its relation to its constituent elements. Recapitulating that doctrine, we may now say that the real is a single all-embracing whole of experience or psychical matter of fact, determined entirely from within by a principle of internal structure, and therefore completely individual. Because the matter of the system is in all its parts experience, the principle of its structure must be teleological in character.[[71]] That is, the system must be the embodiment, in a harmonious unity of conscious feeling, of a consistent interest or mental attitude. As such we may call it the realisation indifferently of a purpose or idea, and we may speak of the absolute experience as the completed expression of an absolute knowledge or an absolute will.
But if we do so, we must bear in mind that there can be here no question of a thought which works upon and reconstructs into systematic harmony a body of data originally supplied to it in a relatively unintelligible and disconnected form from some foreign source, or of a volition which gradually translates into reality an end or purpose originally present to it as an unrealised idea. The processes of thought and volition can clearly have no place in an experience for which the what and the that are never disjoined; as we shall by and by see more fully, they involve existence in time, and existence in time can belong only to the finite and imperfect. Hence it is best, in the interest of intellectual clarity and candour, to avoid the use of such expressions as knowledge and will in speaking of the absolute experience; at best they are in large part metaphorical, and at worst potent weapons of intellectual dishonesty.[[72]] The constituents of the system, again, are lesser experience systems of the same general type, in each of which the nature of the whole manifests itself, though to different degrees. They are thus all finite individuals of varying degrees of individuality. The more comprehensive and the more internally unified by an immanent principle of teleological structure such a system, the more fully individual it is, and the more adequately does it reveal the structure of the all-pervading whole. This is the intellectual justification for our instinctive belief that what is for our human experience highest and best is ultimately in the constitution of the universe most completely real.
Consult further:—F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. 24, “Degrees of Truth and Reality”; Plato, Republic, vi. 509 ff., with the commentary in R. L. Nettleship’s Lectures on Plato’s Republic, or Bosanquet’s Companion to the Republic.
[66]. Not the sum of them, because the systematic whole of Reality is not a sum but a single experience. To identify it with the sum of its appearances would be the same error which occurs in Ethics as the identification of happiness (a qualitative whole) with the sum of pleasures (a quantitative collection).
[67]. The reader will find it instructive to observe how Prof. Sidgwick unconsciously assumes that the distinction between Reality and Appearance means a distinction between two more or less independent “worlds” or “things” (Philosophy: its Scope and Relations, Lectures 1 and 4), and thus deprives his own criticism of the antithesis of all validity as against a view like our own.
[68]. So, again, a velocity which is already infinitesimal may receive an acceleration which is infinitesimal in relation to the velocity itself. The reader’s own studies will no doubt furnish him with numerous other illustrations of the same kind.
[69]. See for illustrations of the impossibility of carrying out a single principle in our actual judgments of particular cases, Mr. Bradley’s already quoted article in Mind for July 1902.
[70]. For a fuller exposition of the conception of infinity here adopted I may refer the reader to the famous essay of Dedekind, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen, especially pp. 17-20. The English reader will find an account of Dedekind’s work, with an acute discussion of its metaphysical significance, in Royce, The World and the Individual, First Series, Supplementary Essay. It does not seem necessary for the purpose of this chapter to specify the points in which I find myself unable to follow Professor Royce in his use of the theory. See infra, chap. 4, § 10.
[71]. It would not be hard to show that in the end all systematic structure is teleological. For all such structure in the last resort is a form of order, and depends on the possibility of saying “here this is first, that is second.” And wherever we predicate order we are asserting the embodiment in detail of some dominant purpose.