[339] “Mind has nothing of its own but the active form of totality, everything positive it draws from Nature.”
[340] This again is an abstraction, and how on earth can it be said that “mind” and conscious life “reflect” merely certain abstractions (or creations) of their own? They have invented such terms as “content” for certain purposes, and their own being and nature is therefore more than these terms. Mind is not a “content”; it makes all other things “contents” for itself.
[341] It has even there, according to Dr. Bosanquet, only its purely theoretic function of working after its own perfection in the way of attaining to a logical “universal.” “The peculiarity of mind for us, is to be a world of experience working itself out towards harmony and completeness.” This is simply not true.
[342] “Finite consciousness, whether animal or human, did not make its body.”
[343] “Thus there is nothing in mind which the physical counterpart cannot represent.” (Italics mine.)
[344] “What we call the individual, then, is not a fixed essence, but a living world of content representing a certain range of externality.” P. 289.
[345] “The system of the universe, as was said in an earlier Lecture, might be described as a representative system. Nature, or externality[!] lives in the lives of conscious beings. (Italics mine.)
[346] “Spirit is a light, a focus, a significance[!] which can only be by contact with a ‘nature’ an external world.”
[347] “For, on the other hand, it has been urged and we feel, that it is thought which constructs and sustains the fabric of experience, and that it is thought-determinations which invest even sense-experience with its value and its meaning. . . . The ultimate tendency of thought, we have seen, is not to generalise, but to constitute a world,” p. 55. Again, “the true office of thought, we begin to see, is to build up, to inspire with meaning, to intensify, to vivify. The object which thought, in the true sense, has worked upon, is not a relic of decaying sense, but is a living world, analogous to a perception of the beautiful, in which every thought-determination adds fresh point and deeper bearing to every element of the whole,” p. 58. And on p. 178 he says that he sees no objection to an idealist recognising the “use made of” “laws” and “dispositions” in recent psychology. [How one wishes that Dr. Bosanquet had really worked into his philosophy the idea that every mental “element” is in a sense a “disposition” to activity!] Some of these statements of Dr. Bosanquet’s have almost a pragmatist ring about them, a suggestion of a living and dynamic (rather than a merely intellectualistic) conception of thought. They may therefore be associated by the reader with the concessions to Pragmatism by other rationalists of which we spoke in an early chapter (see [p. 74]).
[348] See [Chapter III.] p. 90.