[354] Having already given instances of this abstractionism in the
case of such things as the “self” and the “universal” and “spirit,” it
will suffice to point out here in addition (1) its tendency to talk of
“experience” and “experiences” _as if there could be such things apart
from the prior real existence of the experients or the experiencing
persons_ with whom we are acquainted in our daily life, and (2) its
tendency to talk of getting at “the heart of actual life and love” in a
“system” which leaves no place for the real existence of either gods or
men who live and love. And then I trust that it may not be regarded as
an impertinence to allege as another puzzling piece of abstractionism
on the part of Dr. Bosanquet, that he has allowed himself to speak and
think in his book as if his theory of the “concrete universal” were
practically a new thing in the thought of our time--apart altogether,
that is to say, from the important work in this same direction of other
Neo-Hegelian writers, and apart, too, from the unique work of Hegel in
the same connexion.
[355] See below, p. 230.
[356] This is revealed in the main in its exposition of the world
as the logical system of a single complete individual experience--a
tendency that students of philosophy know to exist in Neo-Hegelianism
generally from Green to Bradley. I admit that this tendency is
literally a different thing from solipsism in the ordinary sense, as
the inability of a particular finite person to prove to himself that
any person or thing exists except himself. It is still, however, it
seems to me, possible to regard as solipsistic the tendency to set
forth the universe as the experience, or the thought, of a single
experient or a single thinker, even although the impersonalism of Dr.
Bosanquet’s logical “whole” conflicts somewhat with the individuality
of his Absolute.
[357] Cf. p. 160.
[358] The well-known inability of Mr. Bradley, for example, to be
content with the reality of any portion or any phase of reality that
falls short of what he regards as absolute reality, and with the merely
relative meaning that he attaches to any category of the “finite.”
Also the well-known Neo-Hegelian tendency to make an opponent forge
the weapon by which he is to be dislodged from any particular point
of view. In the case of Dr. Bosanquet this tendency takes the form
of making out any one who holds to a belief in the real existence of
finite conscious persons to hold the absurd position of believing in
“an impervious and isolated self,” a thing, of course, that no one who
knows anything about biology or ethics, or social psychology, really
does.
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