The next question (so far as our partial purposes are concerned) that
Dr. Bosanquet asks is, “What help do we get from the notion of a
‘mind’ which ‘purposes’ or ‘desires’ things in appreciating the work
of factors in the universe, or of the universe as [_ex-hypothesi_]
self-directing and self-experiencing whole?” The answer is spread
over several chapters, and is practically this, that although there
is undoubtedly a “teleology” in the universe (in the shape of the
“conjunctions and results of the co-operation of men,” or of “the
harmony of geological and biological evolution”), and although “minds
such as ours play a part in the work of direction, we cannot judge of
this work in question in any human manner.” The real test of teleology
or value is “wholeness,” “completeness,” “individuality” [the topic
of the book], and it is made quite clear that it is the “Absolute”
who is “real” and “individual” _and not we_. We are, indeed, in our
lives “_carried to the Absolute without a break_,”[330] and our
nature “_is only in process of being communicated to us_.”[331] “We
should not think of ourselves after the pattern of separate things
or personalities in the legal sense, nor even as selves in the sense
of isolation and exclusion of others.” “Individuality” being this
“logical self-completeness,” there can be only one “Individual,” and
this one Individual is the one criterion of “value,” or “reality,”
or “existence,” “importance” and “_reality_ [!]” being sides of
the one “characteristic” [_i.e._ “thinkableness” as a whole]. Dr.
Bosanquet confesses in his seventh chapter that this idea of his of
“individuality,” or “reality,” is essentially the Greek idea that it
is only the “whole nature” of things that gives them their reality or
value.
We are then assured, towards the close of this remarkable book, that
“freedom” (the one thing that we mortals value as the greatest of all
“goods”) is “_the inherent effort of mind considered as a [!] world_,
and that the ”Absolute“ [the ”universal” of logic, Plato’s “Idea”] is
the “high-water mark of our effort,” and that each “self” is “more
like _a rising and a falling tide_ than an isolated pillar with a
fixed circumference.” The great fact of the book, the fact upon which
its accomplished author rests when he talks in his Preface of his
belief, “that in the main the work [of philosophy] has been done,” is
the daily “transmutation of experience according to the level of the
mind’s energy and self-completeness,” the continued and the continuous
“self-interpretation [of ‘experience’] through the fundamental
principle of individuality.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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