[359] As another instance of Dr. Bosanquet’s unintentional unfairness to his opponents, I would note his positive injustice to Theism as such. What many of us think of (however imperfectly) and believe in as God is invariably to him “a theistic Demiurge in his blankness and isolation.” I do not believe in such an abstract Demiurge any more than I believe in the separate, isolated self that he conjures up to his mind when he thinks of personality. The problem of the twentieth century may well be what Dr. Ward has signalised as the relation of God to the “Absolute” of the Hegelian metaphysicians, but this suggestion simply means to me the discovery on the part of philosophers of terms and concepts more adequate to the Supreme Being than either the Absolute, or the external deity rejected by Dr. Bosanquet.
[360] Stéphane Mallarmé, according to Nordau in Degeneration, p. 103.
[361] And the general reader must remember that the “whole” is always (with all due respect to his high dialectic ability and his high temper of mind and his scholarship) a kind of ignis fatuus in Dr. Bosanquet’s book, a kind of shadow thrown by the lamps and the tools of his own choosing in his Quixotic search. The “whole” is the “perfected individuality” of the individual who sets out to find truth in this great world of ours with all its real possibilities of gain and loss. It is the completion of the “system” of truth to which the truth-seeker would fain reduce the entire universe, that becomes for him (for the time being) the mere “subject-matter” of his thought. It is, that is to say, in both cases, a purely formal conception—an abstraction, although to Dr. Bosanquet it is the reality implied in the very existence and activity of the individual thinker. But the latter is the case to him only because he looks upon man as existing to think instead of as thinking to exist.
[362] That is to say, for the scholar and the lover of Dante and Dante’s world.
[363] For he was not merely a “mind,” reflecting “Italy” and “minds” and “experiences.”
[364] And that, we might add, is still kept alive by some of our humanists and educators of to-day as the ideal for both primary and secondary education.
[365] This is a thing that the beginner is taught in lectures introductory to the study of the philosophy of Kant—in regard to Kant’s relation to the barren, dogmatic formalism of Wolff—a one-sided interpreter of the philosophy of Leibniz. I am quite aware that Dr. Bosanquet does not merely use the Principle of Non-Contradiction in the aggressive, or polemical, manner of Mr. Bradley in Appearance and Reality. The principle of positive coherence at which he aims, begins, to some extent, where Mr. Bradley stopped. But it is still the idea of consistency or inconsistency, with certain presuppositions of his own, that rules his thinking; it determines, from the very outset of his Lectures, what he accepts and what he rejects.
[366] See [p. 152] and [p. 156], note 2.
[367] I use this word “must” in a logical as well as in an ethical sense, seeing that all judgment implies a belief in the reality of a world of persons independent of the mere fact of “judgment” as a piece of mental process.