Reading Notes: May 5th, 2022

“Absolute Idealism is the doctrine that reality is ideal or spiritual, and that there are not many such independent realities, but there is only one all-inclusive reality, which, being dependent on nothing else (there being nothing outside it), can be said to be independent, irrelative, or absolute.” (Datta, The Chief Currents of Contemporary Philosophy, 28) 

“Appearance and Reality is divided into two books, called, respectively, Appearance, and Reality. The first, occupying less than a quarter of the volume, argues in detail that the proper distinction between appearance and reality cannot be found by drawing a line between primary and secondary qualities, nor between substance and its attributes; nor can reality, as distinct from appearance, be identified with space and time, or motion, or causation, or activity; nor can it be discovered in the self as the subject of experience; and the book closes with a short and stinging attack on phenomenalism and a criticism of the idea of things in themselves. The thread connecting these miscellaneous topics is a polemic against the theory that the world can be cut in two so that one the one side of the division fall appearances, on the other reality….My suggestion is that Bradley’s Appearance is in the first instance a polemic against Mansel. It is from Mansel that Bradley borrows the antithesis of Appearance and Reality; it is against the project of dividing the one from the other that his book is directed ” (Collingwood, The Metaphysics of F.H. Bradley, 7-8)  

“Now one of the first things which strike us when we come to think about our own experience, which is evidently the only one to which we have direct access, is that it involves two factors, namely the “I”, or subject, who perceives, wills, imagines, etc., and the things which are perceived, willed, imagined, etc., which make up what is usually called the object of experience.” (Richardson, The Supremacy of Spirit, 14)  

“The cardinal tenet of the theory, however, on which most Neo-realists are agreed, is that sense-data exist quite independently of being perceived; this patch of red (for example) at which I am now looking will (they would say) continue to exist altogether independently of me when I am no longer looking at it. The external world consists of a great number of particulars, such as patches of colour, scraps of sound, etc., to which the name of “sensibilia” is given, capable of being perceived (in which case they become sense-data), but not necessarily perceived. The presentation of a sensible to a percipient subject is an incident which does not affect the being or the nature of the sensible in the slightest….To the present writer, the fundamental proposition of Neo-realism, viz. that sensibilia exist independently of being perceived, appears quite untenable….[It] may be pointed out that, although it is convenient, for purposes of thought, to isolate a sense-datum from the mind that perceives it, it is not actually separable in this way; just as, although in thought we separate the shape and size of a body and discover true propositions about the one which do not involve the other, actually they are inseparable. Sensation is, in fact, an act or process of the mind in which the particular sense-datum perceived constitutes the particular form which the process is taking. Doubtless this form is partly determined by entities external to, and independent of, the perceiving mind, but evidently cannot itself be separated from the process of which it is the form, so that it is partly dependent for its being on the mind. It is thus part of the very essence of sense-data to be perceived, so that we cannot assume the existence of entities (viz. sensibilia) essentially akin to sense-data with the exception that they are not necessarily perceived.” (Richardson, The Supremacy of Spirit, 39-41) 

“Sense-data belong to the realm of appearance. This does not mean that they are not real, for they are real appearances. But an appearance is not only an appearance of something—it must also be an appearance to someone. Hence, sense-data must depend in part for their being on being perceived. Moreover, there are other difficulties in the Neo-realist theory. It fails to give a satisfactory account of imagination or of error, nor is its system of separate independent sensibilia adequate to explain the gradual growth of the individual sense-experience, which consists essentially in the moulding of a unified whole, and is not a thing of shreds and patches.” (Richardson, The Supremacy of Spirit, 41)

“It is only as possibly presented in consciousness, actual or imagined, that we can attach any meaning to the object-world that, regarded from another standpoint, appears so much wider than the self that is included in it. For that self-knows as well as is known, and is subject as much as it is object. Although an object in knowledge it is yet devoid of meaning if, by our abstractions, we seek to exclude from the fashioning of the actual, the mind that knows. To be seems to involve and mean some form of knowledge, whatever beyond this may be involved. If we could conceive an object of experience, actual or imagined, which meant nothing at all, it could not be anything for us.” (Haldane, Human Experience: A Study of its Structure, 34-35)