Reading Notes: June 22nd, 2022

“Externality cannot be an intrinsic property of anything….A definition of spatial magnitude, again, since geometrical space is infinitely divisible, reduces itself to a definition of spatial equality. For, given this last, we can always divide two unequal magnitudes into a number of equal parts, and count the number of such parts in each….Now, two spatial magnitudes, unless they are whole and part, are necessarily external to one another, and cannot, therefore, as they stand, be directly compared. For ” (Russell, The A Priori in Geometry, 99) 

“You may name them as you please, if you do not prefer to ignore them altogether; you may call them the ghosts of the delusions of the vulgar, shamelessly walking in the daylight and shrouded in the phrases of a mystical jargon; but you cannot get rid of one simple fact, that they represent what to the unphilosophical mind is reality palpable as the noonday sun, and that your philosophy is impotent to explain them.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 33) 

“On this important point it is simply impossible to state the vulgar belief too strongly. If I am not now the same man, the identical self that I was ; if the acts that I did are not the acts of the one and individual I which exists at this moment, then I cannot deserve to be punished for that which myself has not done. For imputation it is required that the acts, which were mine, now also are mine; and this is possible only on the supposition that the will, which is now, is the will which was then, so that the contents of the will, which were then, are the contents of the self-same will which is now existing. On this point again, repetitions are wearisome, and words are wasted; without personal identity responsibility is sheer nonsense ; and to the psychology of our Determinists personal identity (with identity in general) is a word without a vestige of meaning.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 33) 

“I am far from denying that the I or the self is no more than “collective,” than a collection of sensations, and ideas, and emotions, and volitions, swept together with one another and after one another by “the laws of association”; though I confess that to a mind, which is but little “inductive,” and which cannot view the world wholly a posteriori, these things are very difficult even to picture, and altogether impossible in any way to understand. We can bring before the mind certain atoms in space; we can call them feelings, or ideas, or what we will; and we can say that we mean by the mind a given collection of these pictured atoms; and so far, we do well enough. But then comes our first trouble. We have imaged to ourselves a collection of points in space, and that means we see the collection itself, as covering a given area, with other spaces and collections outside of it. Are we to say that the mind is in space? “Oh, no!” we shall be told; “for that is to talk about things in themselves: our knowledge is relative, which means that we must confine ourselves to our given collection; the question is unanswerable, because unintelligible.” And so, by talking ourselves about “things in themselves”, we change, so to speak, a subject of conversation which was beginning to be slightly improper, and continue, as before, to picture the mind as a collection in space of material points; or if time be spoken of, we have but, as it were, to give a turn to our kaleidoscope. And so far, still, we are doing pretty well.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 34) 

“But still we must not be too confident. We forgot for the moment that the units of the collection are, each one separately, a state of the collection (they are “states of mind,” and the mind is “collective”), and we can see well enough that in a bag of marbles or a bunch of grapes, the states of the marbles affects the state of the bag, and the state of the grapes is the state of the bunch; but it is very hard to see why each marble is to be called a state of the bag of marbles, and each grape a state of the bunch of grapes, unless we suppose an “entity” inside the bag irresolvable into marbles, or an “entity” in the grapes of the bunch irresolvable into grapes. And that, as we know, has been exploded long ago. We feel that there are, and must be, some questions it is useless to ask; and if we use self-control, and abstain from asking them, we still, as before, can see things very well.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 34-35) 

“But here, unfortunately, our troubles are not over: this collection is aware of itself; it talks about itself as if it were simple. And this is impossible to picture at all; and we here (I speak for myself, so far as I have tried) are reduced to despair; for we want to keep the collection steadily before us, and yet, as often as we have to imagine it aware of itself, our picture is at once in confusion, and we do not know what we have before us at all: all we are sure of is that it is not a collection, while we know all the time that it really is so; and we must comfort ourselves, I suppose, by saying that, so long as we remain “scientific,” such difficulties as these must not be made too much of. But when we hear collections affirming that they really are not collections, and saying that what is many is really at the same time one, and that what is complex is really at the same time simple, and that what is different is nonetheless identical; and declaring that all this is contained in that which they call themselves, and which they say it is impossible for them to doubt of, because existence, for them, implies the thinking so—then we know with whom we have to do. These collections are trying to be “entities” and “things in themselves” or perhaps even the Absolute; and that is the only reason they have for saying these things, which cannot be true, because, if they were, what we say would be false. This matter Hume—whom we have our reasons for not talking about, but keep, as it were, in reserve—has settled, and settled forever. Such beliefs are nothing but fictions of the mind, and the mind itself is a fiction of the mind.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 34-35) 

“Let us take an illustration. We have all seen onions on a rope. Now each of these onions is not any other onion—it may be taken by itself, as a separate individual; and yet each of these onions is a state of the rope of onions. And further, this rope of onions is aware of itself—it talks about itself and generally comports itself as if it were inseparable, and, no doubt, it really is what it calls self-conscious. But here is the beginning of delusion; for, talking about “self,” we (i.e. the onions) falls into the belief that there is something there under the onions and the rope, and one looking we see there is nothing of the kind. But on looking we see even more than this; for the rope of the onions is a rope of straw, and that is, being interpreted, no rope at all, but the fiction of a rope. The onions keep together because of the laws of association of onions; and because of these laws it is, that the mutual juxtaposition of the onions engenders in them the belief in a rope, and that the consequent foolish ideas of a self, which we see in all their foolishness, when we perceive, first, that there is nothing but a rope, and then that the rope is nothing at all. The only thing which after all is hard to see is this, that we ourselves who apprehend the illusion, are ourselves the illusion which is apprehended by us; and perhaps, on the theory of “relativity,” in order to know a fiction you yourself must be the fiction you know; but it all is hard to understand, especially to a mind which is little “analytical” and, I begin to fear, not at all “inductive.” [Footnote: Mr. Bain collects that the mind is a collection. Has he ever thought who collects Mr. Bain?].” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 35-36) 

“Reflection shows us that what we call freedom is both positive and negative. There are then two questions—What am I to be free to assert? What am I to be free from? And these are answered by the answer to one question—What is my true self?” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 52) 

“[Let] us try to show that what we do do, is, perfectly or imperfectly, to realize ourselves, and that we cannot possibly do anything else; that all we can realize is (accident apart) our ends, or the objects we desire; and that all we can desire is, in a word, self. This, we think, will be readily admitted by our main psychological party. What we wish to avoid is that it should be admitted in a form which makes it unmeaning. We do not want the reader to say, “Oh yes, of course, relativity of knowledge,—everything is a state of consciousness,” and so dismiss the question. If the reader believes that a steam-engine, after it is made, is nothing but a state of the mind of the person or persons who have made it, or who are looking at it, we do not hold what we feel tempted to call such a silly doctrine; and would point out to those who do hold it that, at all events, the engine is a very different state of mind, after it is made, to what it was before. [Footnote: We may remark that the ordinary “philosophical” person, who talks about “relativity,” really does not seem to know what he is saying. He will tell you that “all” (or “all we know and can know,”—there is no practical difference between that and “all”) is relative to consciousness—not giving you to understand that he means thereby any consciousness beside his own, and ready, I should imagine, with his grin at the notion of a mind which is anything more than the mind of this or that man; and then, it may be a few pages further on or further back, will talk to you of the state of the earth before man existed on it. But we wish to know what in the world it all means; and would suggest, as a method of clearing the matter, the two questions—(1) Is my consciousness something that goes and is beyond myself; and if so, in what sense? and (2) Had I a father? What do I mean by that, and how do I reconcile my assertion of it with my answer to question (1)?].” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 60-61) 

“Again, we do not want the reader to say, “Certainly, every object or end which I propose to myself is, as such, a mere state of my mind—it is a thought in my head, or a state of me; and so, when it becomes real, I become real”; because though it is very true that my thought, as my thought, cannot exist apart from me thinking it, and therefore my proposed end must, as such, be a state of me [Footnote: Let me remark in passing that it does not follow from this that it is nothing but a state of me, as this or that man]; yet this is not what we are driving at. All my ends are my thoughts, but all my thoughts are not my ends; and if what we meant by self-realization was, that I have in my head the idea of any future external event, then I should realize myself practically when I see that the engine is going to run off the line, and it does so. A desired object (as desired) is a thought, and my thought; but it is something more, and that something more is, in short, that it is desired by me. And we ought by right, before we go further, to exhibit a theory of desire; but, if we could do that, we could not stop to do it. However, we say with confidence that, in desire, what is desired must in call cases be self….For all objects or ends have been associated with our satisfaction, or (more correctly) have been felt in and as ourselves, or we have felt ourselves therein; and the only reason why they move us now is that, when they are presented to our minds as motives, we do now feel ourselves asserted or affirmed in them. The essence of desire for an object would thus be the feeling of our affirmation in the idea of something not ourself, felt against the feeling of ourself as, without the object, void and negated; and it is the tension of this relation which produces motion. If so, then nothing is desired except that which is identified with ourselves, and we can aim at nothing, except so far as we aim at ourselves in it.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 61-62) 

“[If] the reader will follow me, I think I can show him that the mere finitude of the mind is a more difficult thesis to support than its infinity….The mind is not finite, just because it knows it is finite. “The knowledge of the limit suppresses the limit.” It is a flagrant self-contradiction that the finite should know its own finitude; and it is not hard to make this plain. Finite means limited form the outside and by the outside. The finite is to know itself as this, or not as finite. If its knowledge ceases to fall wholly within itself, then so far it is not finite. It knows that it is limited from the outside and by the outside, and that means it knows the outside. But if so, then it is so far not finite. If its whole being fell within itself, then, in known itself, it could not know that there was anything outside itself. [Mind] does do the latter; hence, the former supposition is false….To the above simple argument I fear we may not have done justice. However that be, I know of no answer to it; and until we find one, we must say that it is not true that the mind is finite.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 69-70) 

“The finite was determined from the outside, so that everywhere to characterize and distinguish it was in fact to divide it. Wherever you defined anything you were at once carried beyond to something else and something else, and this because the negative, required for distinction, was an outside other. In the infinite you can distinguish without dividing; for this is a unity holding within itself subordinated factors which are negative of, and so distinguishable from, each other; while at the same time the whole is present in each, that each has its own being in its opposite, and depends on that relation for its own life. The negative is also its affirmation. Thus, the infinite has a distinction, and so a negation, in itself, but is distinct from and negated by nothing but itself. Far from being one something which is not another something, it is a whole in which both one and the other are mere elements. This whole is hence “relative” utterly and though and through, but the relation does not fall outside it; the relatives are moments in which it is the relation of itself to itself, and so is above the relation, and is absolute reality. The finite is relative to something else; the infinite is self-related. It is this sort of infinite which the mind is. The simplest symbol of it is the circle, the line which returns into itself, not the straight line produced indefinitely; and the readiest way to find it is to consider the satisfaction of desire. There we have myself and its opposite, and the return from the opposite, the finding in the other nothing but self.” (Bradley, Ethical Studies, 71)