ment. Mr Bradley seems to make it into an argument; his final reason for obliterating all distinction between the so-called 'categorical' and 'hypothetical' Judgments, or between what we have called individual and true universal Judgments—or, rather, his final reason for assigning to the former a minimum of truth as compared with the latter-is that in the individual Judgment of sense on the one hand we never take the full extent of the subject as presented in sense, and on the other we pass beyond the simple presentation of sense. We isolate certain elements or aspects from their environment in the perceptive complex.

Before considering the consequences of the abstractness of thought in the first sense of the two indicated. above, let us dwell on those of its abstractness in the second sense, for this applies to every kind of judgment and to thought in general. All thought is 'abstract' in the sense that it is true of reality only under a condition; this must ever be so as long as we fall short of omniscience, and it applies to the ultimate implication (of reality as a Harmony) in the hypothetical and disjunctive Judgments as well as to every other. Mr Bradley states the matter as clearly as could be wished in his later work: "All our judgments, to become true must become conditional: the predicate, that is, does not hold but by the help of something else. . Judgments are conditional in this sense, that what they affirm is incomplete. cannot be attributed to reality as such, and before its necessary complement is added." At the close of the chapter in the Logic to which I have referred,2 he seems also to fall back on this general ground of the inevitable incompleteness of human knowledge.

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1 Appearance and Reality, p. 361.

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2 Bk. i. ch. ii. pt. 2.

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Any portion of knowledge begins to be 'certain' only in so far as we begin to see its organic connection with other knowledges: it is uncertain' in so far as we are unable so to connect it, for we do not know what transformation or development of it may be necessary in order that it may enter into this universal relation. No Judgment can ascribe to real existence its elements as they appear in the content. of the Judgment. Every Judgment is therefore 'conditional,' 'hypothetical,' uncertain' if we must use such terms-inasmuch as we do not know how far it must be transformed in order to be developed into the whole truth. It will be evident that this is only to say that our knowledge as a whole and in every detail is partial and fragmentary in the extreme. But it is not therefore false: 'incomplete' is not the same as untrue.' There is nothing in the nature of any kind of Judgment to prevent its being true as far as it goes; but every Judgment, every rational constituent of knowledge, is held subject to a revision which may have to be so thorough as to effect its complete transformation.

It might seem as if this argument could be turned against the individual Judgment: must we not conclude that this form of Judgment, from its nature, must contain far less of truth than the universal or 'hypothetical' and disjunctive forms, because it is further removed than the latter from the comprehension of reality as a universal system? Such a conclusion would be untenable. Our whole inquiry has shown that the essence of the individual Judgment is to refer to a centralised system (or a group of systems) within the universal system; and this reference is the essence of our conception of indi

viduality. The individual Judgment may even come nearer to a full representation of the individual system, quâ individual with its own focal unity, than the universal does to a full representation of the universal system quâ universal. In this case it will contain more truth than the universal. On the other hand, since the individual is not self-contained or isolated from the universal, it follows that knowledge of the latter is originally related to knowledge of the former; and a complete knowledge of the Universe, such as would be possessed by an absolute and infinite Intelligence, would be equivalent to a complete knowledge of the individual.1 When we thus consider the ultimate truth of assertions-in the strictest sense of the term 'ultimate '-then we fully grant that the categorical Judgment in its individual form disappears; the distinction of individual and universal has to be broken through. But I do not understand the state of mind which claims to be able to place itself at such an absolute or ultimate point of view: and even from such a point of view there is no ground for assuming that the distinction of individual and universal would disappear. We have seen that the two kinds of Judgment are equally necessary for the organisation of knowledge: the one 'goes as far as the other to this end, and both, we may be sure, fall short of ultimate truth by a distance indefinitely great.

Mr Bradley's special attack upon the individual Judgment is a conclusion from the 'abstractness' of thought, not as compared with the Universe as a whole but as compared with what is given to me or to you in Sense. With regard to this, we must first

1 Cf. what was said above (ch. iii. pt. i. § 3) on the modifying effect which all Judgments must ultimately exercise on one another.

point out that truth cannot reside in sense or sentience, as such; the latter cannot be true, nor can it be false, and for the same reason,-it bears witness to nothing beyond itself. If we endeavour to abstract from thought and get back to pure sentience, we approach a state of consciousness which is a mere fact of diffused vagueness. Strictly speaking, there can be no sense-knowledge; but there is a sense-being, as it were, upon which conceptions (the vehicle of thought-knowledge) in some sense depend, for unquestionably they are occasioned by it. There is an aπeiроv or undifferentiated mass, and the continuous process of conception and Judgment consists in finding points of distinction and relation within this indefinite material. We cannot say that reality is manifested or revealed in and through this aπepov until Thought has begun to work upon it. Indeed, from the metaphysical point of view, to regard reality as revealed in what ex hypothesi is a mere continuum, would lead us straight to "the pit of undifferentiated Substance out of which Hegel dug Philosophy." There is nothing positive, nothing definite, in the sensuous mass by comparison with which thought could be declared inadequate; to convict thought of inadequacy on this score is simply to convict it of being thought. We must therefore conclude that Mr Bradley's view is untenable; but the divergent view which we indicated just now is not yet made sufficiently clear. The individual Judgment refers to a finite central unity within the general system which is implied in such functions of thought as Hypothesis and Disjunction. It refers to an objectively real individuality. But it is only possible on the basis of a datum of sense present to the judging mind, and we

have said that it is possible because it finds points of distinction and relation within this datum, which otherwise would contain no discriminated differences. It depends on sense, which only exists as present here and now to some percipient mind; and yet it is true in an objective reference which must transcend the sphere of sense. This is our difficulty.

§ 6. Manifestly this problem of the relation of thought, as such, to sentience is only another side of the problem, What is the relation of the sphere of sentience to the sphere of objective reality? There are two views as to this, and both are explicitly stated by Green.1 When following out the one line of thought, he expresses himself in this way: "When we come to say what nature is for our Reason, we cannot get beyond the mere formal conditions of there being a nature at all." "For Reason, nature is a system of becoming which rests on unchangeable conditions." "Is not the notion that an event in the way of sensation is something over and above its conditions, a mistake of ours, arising from the fact that we feel before we know what the reality of the feeling is, and hence continue to fancy that the feeling is something apart from its conditions? For the only sort of consciousness for which there is reality, the conceived conditions are the reality." When having the other line of thought in view, he says: "Undoubtedly there is something more than thought; feeling [sentience] is so." "The world before there was sentient life was not what it is to us as sentient; the world of conditions of feeling is not to intelligence.

1 The quotations which follow are from the Works, vol. ii. pp. 72-81, 181-191.