Reading Notes: December 15th, 2021

“Absolute idealism lays it down as fundamental that there is but one order of reality—an order which presents everywhere a twofold aspect, that of subject and object. Its essential character is to be “experience”; and it may be viewed alternatively as objects experienced or as the experience of a subject. The two aspects are inseparable. The subject is nothing without an object: if we endeavor to conceive it, our idea is reached in virtue of an unreal and illegitimate abstraction. For the subject in experience is simply a term of a relation: and we cannot have one term of a relation without the other. Similarly, there can be no objects without an experiencing subject: for they too are what they are as related. As to the nature of this reality we should err if we said that it is purely mental. Such a statement would imply a distinction between the order of being and the order of knowing. Knowing and being are one. We must accept reality, in which both these aspects are present, as ultimate, when we have proved and purged it by the dialectic reason. It is idle to attempt to refer it to any order other than itself. Indeed, the very name idealism may mislead, insofar as it is taken to suggest some such theory as Berkeley’s, according to which our experience, being limited to ideas alone, is not in contact with the real.”  (Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, 492-493) 

“Moreover, reality is one. It is inconceivable that the world of experience should present ultimate differences. The fact that all parts of reality fall within experience shows that they are interrelated: and things which are related to each other constitute of necessity a single system—a unity. This unity should be conceived after the analogy of a living organism. Where unity is less than this, it is not a veritable unity, but presupposes independent and separate entities brought into artificial connection by an external agent. Yet in regard of reality the idea of an external agent, such for instance as God, is out of the question. For the unity which forms the real order must itself include that ultimate reality which is the source of the manifold of experience, and which we term the Absolute or God. For the Absolute is not unrelated to the manifold; but, as we have just said, is its source. It is the One which the mind postulates as the explanation of the many. And again, the principle which gives unity to a manifold must of necessity be of it and not outside it.” (Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, 493) 

“This conclusion that reality is a single organism inclusive of the Absolute which is its ultimate Ground, is also established by an argument of different character. As soon as we philosophize on the data of experience, we find ourselves involved in insoluble contradictions. Those fundamental notions which meet us upon the very threshold of philosophical enquiry—unity, multiplicity, identity, diversity, cause and effect, time and space, etc., etc.—are seen to lead up to contradictory conclusions. We are driven to the conviction that our knowledge is of appearances only, and that human reason is debarred from knowing reality as it is. Yet on the other hand we are no less convinced that our knowledge is true. It is the very presupposition of our enquiry that our minds are capable of truth: and without this belief it would be idle to reason at all. The only means of reconciling these opposite convictions is to admit that ultimate truth can only be attained when the knowledge of the whole is reached. It is here as with the knowledge of an organ of a body. If we consider it apart from the whole organism of which it is a member, our conclusions, however carefully formed, are incomplete and erroneous. Only when we know it in relation to the whole of which it is part, do we arrive at the real truth regarding it. The same holds good of reality.” (Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, 493-494) 

“Our best knowledge is provisional and partial: it is a stepping-stone only, and will require revision as we gain further and further experience. It is not truth, but truth mingled with error. For what is truth? The old explanation that truth lies in correspondence of the notion with the reality is meaningless. If, as has been argued, there are not two orders—knowing and being—but only one, there can be no question of correspondence. Truth lies in the coherence of knowledge. When knowledge reaches its final term, and all its parts are integrated into a consistent whole, then we shall have truth in the full sense of the term. At present we can do no more than, at each successive advance into the real, bring into a coherent system the data which we possess. It is truth now—provisionally so. But a higher truth lies behind it—the truth of the Absolute. And we must anticipate that little by little our truth will be sublimated by approaching nearer and nearer to this ideal of entire and final truth—an ideal never to be fully attained.” (Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, 494-495) 

“This explanation must not lead us to suppose that there is an Absolute Mind whose experience constitutes reality, so that we attain to truth in so far as we grow to share His experience, while our knowledge falls short of truth in so far as it is different from it. We have no ground for asserting the existence of any self-consciousness other than human. We are not set over against the Absolute: we are ourselves the Absolute as self-conscious. The experience which is reality becomes self-conscious experience in us. Hence minds should not be regarded as substances: they are “adjectival” to reality, which is the only veritable substance. The status of independent and self-contained units which we are disposed to attribute to ourselves, is not really ours. Our independence is but relative: and we are not complete units. Indeed, it would be more in accordance with fact to speak of Mind than to employ the plural and speak of minds. The latter mode of expression inevitably suggests the false idea of independent agents.” (Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, 495-496) 

“Nor again must we conceive that there is an objective reality prior to the activity of our minds and independent of it. This would involve the supposition of an experiencing subject other than conscious. Reality is what it is for our experience, and beyond our human experience it is not. Knowledge and reality advance pari passu. As our knowledge goes forward along some hitherto untrodden path, so does reality widen its area. Nor do we thus open the door to any arbitrary action on the part of thought. The advance takes place along definite lines. It is an evolution of reality in accordance with its inner nature.” (Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, 496) 

“The distinction between reality and the discursive movement of the intellect appears to me to be for us a distinction within the intellectual world.” (Bosanquet, Knowledge and Reality, 19) 

“We always refer to an “I” in our experience, and therefore to a subject not less than to an object, and subject and object are neither properly separable nor mutually exclusive facts. The subject is the expression of experience in its quality of being foundational, as it is in the judgments we make and refer back to the self which judges. Our experience regarded on its subject side, as the experience of self, is approached through the instrumentality of conceptions which are appropriate only to a stage in reflection different from that at which the object-world is treated as self-subsisting. We can, and in daily life for many purposes do, think of the self as a thing, a body clothed with an infinity of properties and relationships, in fine as if it were a substance in space and time resembling other substances But it is not the less, when we follow out more fully what its nature implies, subject as much as it is object, and the more we abstract from the characteristics with which its objective form invests it, the more nearly does it present itself for reflection as a center, not itself situated somewhere in space and time, but to which space and time are referred; as the “here” and “now” in distinction from the “there” and “then.” But these expressions stand, not for points in an absolute framework of space and time, but for universals with the identity of conception that characterises universals whoever may express them. The characteristic of the center is therefore a reference back to thought, and this takes us straight to the focal point in knowledge, that activity of the self….The conception of subject, if followed out, becomes more than a mere point or focus of reference for activities or events in space and time. Space and time are for it; they require the implication of a subject reflecting for which they are conceived as its own facts before we can attach meaning to the words.”(Haldane, The Reign of Relativity, 197-198) 

“We saw that the principles of degrees implies the view that knowledge is foundational in the sense of being all-comprehending, the first as well as the last within mind itself. It must therefore be that in which exists self-developed the entire hierarchy of degrees, within mind and within the reality which has no existence apart from it. We also saw that not only has the universe no meaning apart from such foundational mind, but that even the distinction between subject and object is mind’s own creation and falls within it….We may thus speak of such foundational knowledge as the absolute of which we are in search…” (Haldane, The Reign of Relativity, 387) 

“Mind is foundational to reality in all its forms. Not a mind, for to speak of a mind is to treat knowledge as a mere instrument, as a particular thing, as something which might properly be interpreted through the conception of substance. But that conception and every other form of the actual and the ideal, alike fall within knowledge. Its distinctions are those that itself it makes. Subject and object, conception and feeling, thinking and willing, these all arise as of separate characters only in virtue of differences which the activity that is of the essence of reflection establishes. Outside knowledge, interpreted in this larger significance, we cannot get….The distinctions which we make between the mediate and the immediate contents of our consciousness, the fashion in which by abstraction we define and separate out our standpoints and the conceptions that belong to them, the contrasts we establish between the relative and what we take to be absolute, are all of them the outcome of the purposes we pursue in arranging our results in forms which by reason of our finitude we seek in order to give them distinctness. Abstraction as the outcome of concentration on particular ends is everywhere present. Now it is just this kind of distinction and division that must be regarded as no longer final in knowledge as foundational to reality. That such distinctions and divisions must be assumed as in a degree preserved in even knowledge at this level, the knowledge which is both last and first, and has all its purposes as part of and within it own nature, seems clear. For they are the creations and outcome of that knowledge, although their emphasis is due to the finite forms it gives itself.” (Haldane, The Reign of Relativity, 394-395) 

“Within [mind] all abstractions fall, for out of the activity of mind they all proceed. It is therefore the most concrete in the hierarchy, for nothing even appears to fall outside it, except in virtue of some distortion. It is no instrument that can be taken up or laid down, or subjected to outside scrutiny. For the taking up and the laying down, and the very scrutiny and the testing of the truth thereby, are its own act and assume its validity. It must therefore study itself, not from without but from within, in its awareness of its own working, in its consciousness of itself.” (Haldane, The Reign of Relativity, 397-398) 

“Find any piece of existence, take up anything that anyone could possibly call a fact, or could in any sense assert to have being, and then judge if it does not consist in sentient experience. Try to discover any sense in which you can still continue to speak of it, when all perception and feeling have been removed; or point out any fragment of its matter, any aspect of its being, which is not derived from and is not still relative to this source. When the experiment is made strictly, I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced. Anything, in no sense felt or perceived, becomes to me quite unmeaning. And as I cannot try to think of it without realising either that I am not thinking at all, or that I am thinking of it against my will as being experienced, I am driven to the conclusion that for me experience is the same as reality. The fact that falls elsewhere seems, in my mind, to be a mere word and a failure, or else an attempt at self-contradiction. It is a vicious abstraction whose existence is meaningless nonsense, and is therefore not possible.” (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 145) 

“This argument is unanswerable, and yet it proves nothing…For Mr. Bradley requires us to “find,” “take up,” “assert,” that is, to possess as experience, what, at the same time, must not be experience. It is impossible to do so; but that tells us nothing as to the nature of experience….That we cannot go beyond experience, that “we can conceive only the experienced,” does not…throw any light whatsoever upon its constitution. Neither does the fact that “nothing remains when all perception and feeling are removed” prove that nothing exists except perception and feeling. It is an old fallacy, exposed by Mr. Bradley himself, to conclude that because the removal of one element in a whole destroys the whole, therefore that one element is the whole….Neither of these arguments proves that “reality is experience”; or that it consists, on both its subjective and objective aspects, of feelings, thought, or volitions. They show that the object is relative to the subject, and that subject and object are indiscerptible elements of experience; but not that they are so indistinguishably one that knowledge knows knowledge, feeling feels feelings, volition wills volitions.” (Jones, The Working Faith of the Social Reformer, 559-560) 

“If we take all reality, for the sake of convenience, as limited to three individuals, A, B, and C, and suppose them to be conscious, then the whole will be reproduced in each of them. A will, as conscious, be aware of himself, of B, and of C, and of the unity which joins them in a system. And thus the unity is within each individual. At the same time, the unity is not in the individuals as isolated. For the whole point of saying that the unity is for A, is that it exists both out of him and in him….All the meaning we gave to the expression that A was for B was that the content of the one was also the content of the other. If A and B are different, this means something. But if A and B are identical, then it would only mean that a thing’s content was its content…a useless tautology.” (McTaggart, Hegel’s Treatment of the Categories of the Idea, 150- 153) 

“Lotze, also, holds the view that the differentiations of the Absolute cannot be conceived except as conscious beings. His reason, indeed, for this conclusion is that only conscious beings could give the necessary combination of unity with change [cf. Mikrokosmus, §96]…” (McTaggart, Hegel’s Treatment of the Categories of the Idea, 158) 

“Reality is a differentiated unity, in which the unity has no meaning but the differentiations, and the differentiations have no meaning but the unity. The differentiations are individuals for each of whom the unity exists, and whose whole nature consists in the fact that the unity is for them, as the whole nature of the unity consists in the fact that it is for the individuals. And, finally, in this harmony between the unity and the individuals neither side is subordinated to the other, but the harmony is an immediate and ultimate fact.” (McTaggart, Hegel’s Treatment of the Categories of the Idea, 170) 

“Experience can be analyzed into two abstract, and therefore imperfect, moments—the immediate centers of differentiation and the relations which unite and mediate them….The view of the dialectic…accepts both elements as real, but asserts that neither has any separate reality, because each is only a moment of the true reality. Reality consists of immediate centers which are mediated by relations. The imperfection of language compels us to state this proposition in a form which suggests that the immediacy and the mediator are different realities which only influence one another externally. But this is not the case. They are only two sides of the same reality. And thus we are entitled to say that the whole nature of the centers is to be found in their relations. But we are none the less entitled to say that the whole nature of the relations is to be found in the centers.” (McTaggart, Hegel’s Treatment of the Categories of the Idea, 174) 

“That A’s nature should consist in recognizing B’s nature, would present no difficulties, if B had an independent nature of its own. But if B’s nature consisted merely in recognizing A’s nature, it is not very easy to see how either of them can have any nature at all. Nor is the matter improved by the increase of the number of individuals….If the nature of everything consists simply in reflecting others, what is there to be reflected?” (McTaggart, Hegel’s Treatment of the Categories of the Idea, 175) 

“A mere isolated reaction or occurrence in consciousness. It would be a mere instant of feeling; and though we may suppose a hundred such instants, each is alone and blindly self-centered. Sentient life, if we keep the unifying vehicle of consciousness out of view, would be a mere series of pulses, each pulse being unaware of the others. In Kant’s words, perceptions without conceptions are blind. The spark of fire which runs along the line of sensations and sets them in a blaze; the string which gathers the single beads into a necklace; the glass which collects the beams of sentient life into one focus,—is what we call intellect. Synthetic unity is the one function of thought—the one architectonic idea which lays sense-brick to sense-brick, and builds the house of knowledge.” (Wallace, Kant, 165) 

“Between the perceptions as such, there is no connexion; they are distinct and independent existences. They only get a connexion through our feeling; we feel a “determination” of our thought to pass from one to another. The one impression has no power to produce the other; the one thing does not cause the other. “We never have any impression that contains any power or efficacy,” Hence the power and necessity we attribute to the so-called causal agent and to the connexion are an illegitimate transference from our feeling, and a mistranslation of our incapacity to resist the force of habitual association into a real bond between the two impressions themselves, The necessity is in the mind—as a habit-caused compulsion—not in the objects.” (Wallace, Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel’s Philosophy, 95) 

“The general Significance of the world, and the definite sense of its particulars, is something of which we are conscious within our perceiving, representing, thinking, valuing life, and therefore something “constituted” in some subjective genesis….We have to recognize that Relativity to Consciousness is not only an actual quality of our world, but, from eidetic necessity, the quality of every conceivable world. We may, in a free fancy, vary our actual world, and transmute it to any other which we can imagine, but we are obliged with the world to vary ourselves also, and ourselves we cannot vary except within the limits prescribed to us by the nature of Subjectivity. Change worlds as we may, each must ever be a world such as we could experience, prove upon the evidence of our theories, and inhabit with our practice.” (Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology, 189-190)