[349] I must say that apart from any questions in detail about this rejection of teleology by Dr. Bosanquet, there is something inexplicable about it to me. He cannot retain his own great notion of “wholeness” without the idea of “end,” because “wholeness” is a demand of thought that is guided by some idea of purpose or end.
[351] Italics mine.
[352] P. 225.
[354] Having already given instances of this abstractionism in the case of such things as the “self” and the “universal” and “spirit,” it will suffice to point out here in addition (1) its tendency to talk of “experience” and “experiences” as if there could be such things apart from the prior real existence of the experients or the experiencing persons with whom we are acquainted in our daily life, and (2) its tendency to talk of getting at “the heart of actual life and love” in a “system” which leaves no place for the real existence of either gods or men who live and love. And then I trust that it may not be regarded as an impertinence to allege as another puzzling piece of abstractionism on the part of Dr. Bosanquet, that he has allowed himself to speak and think in his book as if his theory of the “concrete universal” were practically a new thing in the thought of our time—apart altogether, that is to say, from the important work in this same direction of other Neo-Hegelian writers, and apart, too, from the unique work of Hegel in the same connexion.
[355] See below, p. 230.
[356] This is revealed in the main in its exposition of the world as the logical system of a single complete individual experience—a tendency that students of philosophy know to exist in Neo-Hegelianism generally from Green to Bradley. I admit that this tendency is literally a different thing from solipsism in the ordinary sense, as the inability of a particular finite person to prove to himself that any person or thing exists except himself. It is still, however, it seems to me, possible to regard as solipsistic the tendency to set forth the universe as the experience, or the thought, of a single experient or a single thinker, even although the impersonalism of Dr. Bosanquet’s logical “whole” conflicts somewhat with the individuality of his Absolute.
[357] Cf. p. 160.
[358] The well-known inability of Mr. Bradley, for example, to be content with the reality of any portion or any phase of reality that falls short of what he regards as absolute reality, and with the merely relative meaning that he attaches to any category of the “finite.” Also the well-known Neo-Hegelian tendency to make an opponent forge the weapon by which he is to be dislodged from any particular point of view. In the case of Dr. Bosanquet this tendency takes the form of making out any one who holds to a belief in the real existence of finite conscious persons to hold the absurd position of believing in “an impervious and isolated self,” a thing, of course, that no one who knows anything about biology or ethics, or social psychology, really does.