The Principles of Logic

The Principles of Logic, by F.H. Bradley (Oxford University Press, [1881] 1958)

 

p. 2/29

[fact] u/l: For fact read thing throughout.

 

p. 3/27-30

[Thus every flower exists and has its own qualities, but not all have a meaning. Some signify nothing, while others stand generally for the kind which they represent, while others again go on to remind us of hope or love.] ‘Some signify nothing’ u/l: This is never utter entirely true, though certainly not everything is a symbol.

 

p. 6/19

[… the actual idea at each moment …] and

 

p. 6/24

[… that psychical event which is in ceaseless flux …] ‘ceaseless flux’ u/l: This is too quickly said. You speak earlier of a moment; what is that?

 

p. 7/18-19

of idea and sensation, [Fleeting and self-destructive as is their very endurance, wholly delusive their supposed individuality, …]: Why?

 

p. 10/28-30

[By the truth of a judgement we mean that its suggestion is more than an idea, that it is fact or in fact.]: Here, fact is not the same as thing.

 

p. 14/24

[An orange presents us with visual sensations, …]: This simply means that the orange is visible.

 

p. 15/1-5

[Let us suppose in the first place that the ‘idea’ maintains itself. Then no doubt, as one fact, it stands in mental relation with the fact of the sensation. The two phenomena coexist as a headache may coexist with a syllogism, but such psychical coherence is far from assertion.] ‘psychical coherence’ u/l: Sensation—i.e. feeling and perception—and images (or ideas) are not psychical in the same sense. Images are mental (= imaginary) simply on account of being images; sensations are mental since they are not material. There is imaginary matter (or material images) and real sensation. Omit the word ‘psychical’ in line 5. Also ‘mental’ in line 2.

 

p. 16/2-6

[… to merge the content of an image in a modified presentation, is but one step towards judgment, and it is a very long step beyond association. While conjunction or coherence of psychical phenomena is not only not judgement, but would not serve as its earliest basis and beginning.]: External. (Omit the word ‘psychical’.)

 

p. 16/26-32

[In an abnormal state such images, it is well known, may become hallucinations, and take their place in the room before our eyes as actual perceptions. But with an educated man they would be recognized as illusions, and would not be judged to be outwardly real, any more than the fainter and normal images are judged to be anywhere but in our own minds.]: This is rather begging the question; ‘an educated man’, here, is almost equivalent to ‘a right thinking man’—i.e. someone who agrees with Bradley.

 

p. 28/16-17

[It is identical, not because it is simply the same, but because it is the same amid diversity.] double noted.

 

p. 28/21-29

[… every judgment affirms either the identity which persists under difference, or the diversity which is true of one single subject. … We should then have to ask if, in the end, every possible relation does not involve a something in which it exists, as well as something between which it exists, and it might be difficult to reconcile the claims of these propositions.] noted.

 

p. 29/32-34

[That the thing as it is, and as it appears in perception, are not the same thing, is, we all are aware, a very late afterthought.]: But still not late enough.

 

p. 29/37-30/2

[That a fact should be, and should yet be an appearance, should be true of, and belong to, something not itself; or again, should be illusion, should exist and yet be false, because its content is an adjective neither of itself nor of any other substantive—these distinctions are impossible for an early intelligence.] ‘an early intelligence’ u/l: And also for a very late intelligence. Abstract thought is not the highest manifestation of human activity. See Kierkegaard, CUP, p. 267.

 

p. 33/9

[… exists but in our heads.] u/l: The expression is a fiction—nothing exists in our heads but our brains (or sometimes a headache).

 

p. 33/36-38

[But judgment is the act which, while it recognizes the idea as appearance, nevertheless goes on to predicate it.] ‘as appearance’ u/l: i.e. as imaginary.

 

p. 35/1-2

[… nothing ever is associated without in the process being shorn of particularity.]: In the context of judgement this is approximately true.

 

p. 43/3-6

[Wherever we predicate, we predicate about something which exists beyond the judgment, and which … is real, either inside our heads or outside them.] ‘inside … them’ u/l: i.e. either real reality or real imagination.

 

p. 45/19-20

[The individual is so far from being merely particular that, in contrast with its own internal diversity, it is a true universal.] ‘in contrast … diversity’ u/l

 

p. 45/22-23

[We are accustomed to speak of, and believe in, realities which exist in more than one moment of time or portion of space.] ‘moment’ and ‘portion’ u/l: If these are homogeneous, then a ‘moment’ is not the same as an ‘instant’, which corresponds to a ‘point’.

 

p. 45/fn.

[If space and time are continuous … we can at once proceed to the conclusion, no mere particular exists. Every phenomenon will exist in more times or spaces than one; and against that diversity will be itself one universal.]: But space and time are not continuous in a simple sense. Continuity is an ambiguous notion. See pp. 52-3.

 

p. 47/3-5

[If we think these puzzles too technical or sought out, let us take more obvious ones. Have the past and the future we talk of so freely any real existence?]: Is this more obvious?

 

p. 51/10-13

[Are we to hold that the real … is identical with the merely momentary appearance?]: Which momentary appearance?

 

p. 51/30-38

[‘The present is real’; this seems indubitable. And are we to say that the momentary appearance is therefore real? This indeed would be mistaken. If we take the real as that which is confined to a single ‘here’ or a single ‘now’ … we shall have questions on our hands we shall fail to dispose of. For … we are threatened with the loss of every proposition which extends beyond the single instant.]: But a single ‘here’ or ‘now’ in the sense of a point or an instant is a fantasy. This is tilting at windmills.

 

p. 52/19-22

[… we fall into a hopeless dilemma. This moment which we take either has no duration, and in that case it turns out no time at all; or, if it has duration, it is a part of time, and is found to have transition in itself.]: Good!

 

p. 52/28-29

[… the now and the here must have some extension. For no part of space or time is a final element.]: Yes.

 

p. 52/fn.

[If time consists of discrete parts, it is hard to see how the fact of succession can possibly be explained, unless time be taken between these parts of time. And that would lead to untenable conclusions. But it is the fact of change which shows that time is continuous. The rate of change, the number of events in every part of time, may, so far as we know, be increased indefinitly; and this means that in every part of time more than one event may take place. If the parts be discrete, then not only will motion imply that a thing is in several places in one time (and this is a fact), but also (which is absurd) that throughout all these places no time elapses, that they are strictly contemporaneous. I should be glad to enter into the discussion at length, but the subject cannot properly be treated by logic.]: Except for the assumption of time as an absolute medium this note is right. The fact of change shows that time is continuous in that it is not made up of instants of time with spaces in between, but it does not show that it is uniform. At any level there are units of time separated by instantaneous changes.

‘But it is the fact of change … the number of events in every part of time’ further noted: You cannot speak of ‘parts’ in continuous time.

 

p. 53/7-9

[‘Now’, in this sense, stands for ‘simultaneous with’; it signifies not existence but bare position in the series of time.] ‘the series of time’ u/l

 

p. 53/12-15

[The real is that with which I come into immediate contact, and the content of any part of time, any section of the continuous flow of change, is present to me if I directly encounter it.] ‘continuous flow of change’ u/l: Provided the expressions ‘the continuous flow of change’ and ‘the series of time’ are eventually to be abandoned, all this is admirable. It rather seems as if Bradley accepts a priori the idea of time as a ‘continuous flow of changes’ (i.e. as a flux), and when finds that, so conceived, it is incompatible with reality (see p. 57). Can he not take the final step and see that the nature of time most be discovered from consideration of the nature of reality?

 

p. 53/24-33

[(i) Two events in time are now to one another, if both are given simultaneously in my series. (ii) Since the real appears in the series of time, the effort to find it both present and existing within that series, creates the fiction of the atomic now. (iii) If the real can never exist in time, but only appear there, then that part of the series in which it touches me is my present. (iv) And this suggests the reflection that presence is really the negation of time …]: It is the negation of an absolute time (‘continuous flow of change’), but once the idea of absolute time is abandoned it will be found that presence and time do not clash. We speak correctly of ‘the present time’.

 

p. 54/19-23

[If we would but observe it, should see it itself to be a fluid sequence whose parts offer no resistance to division, and which is both now, and itself without and made up of nows.]: Quite so: in fact an impossible notion.

 

p. 54/32-40

[If it really is necessary to have some image, perhaps the following may save us from worse. Let us fancy ourselves in total darkness hung over a stream and looking down on it. The stream has no banks, and its consent is covered one filled continuously with floating things. Right under our faces is a bright illuminated spot on the water, which ceaselessly widens and narrows its area, and shows us what passes away on the current. And this spot that is light is our now, our present.]: This is ruined by the retention of the notion of flux.

 

p. 54/40-55/4

[We may go still further and anticipate a little. We have not only an illuminated place, and the rest of the stream in total darkness. There is a paler light which, both up and down stream, is shed on what comes before and after out now. And this paler light is the offspring of the present.]: Yes, but …

 

p. 55/10-12

[In this image we shall mark two things, if we are wise. It is possible, in the first place, that the light of the present may come from behind us, …]: ?

 

p. 62/20-22

[… synthetic judgments are possible only by being connected with what is given at this very instant.] ‘at this very instant’ u/l: ‘at present’, not ‘at this point-instant’.

 

p. 62/30-40

[Let the past and future be as real as you please, but by what device shall I come in contact with them, and refer to them my ideas, unless I advance directly to the given, and to them indirectly? It is possible, I am aware, to assert that past realities are directly presented, and possible also (for all I know) to say the same of the future, and of all the space I am not in contact with, and of all the qualities that I do not perceive. In this way, no doubt, we dispose of the difficulty, and indeed may make a very simple matter of any kind of problem, if indeed any problems any longer will exist.]: But we cannot possibly even mention the word ‘time’ unless we do in some way have experience of past (as ‘no more’) and future (as ‘not yet’). Bradley has overlooked this.

 

p. 64/35-39

[… it is only the ‘this’ which is real, and ideas will suffice so far as ‘thisness’, but can never give ‘this.’ It is perhaps a hard saying and announces difficulties we shall need both courage and patience to contend with.]: Yes.

 

p. 64/40-65/3

[… psychical events, … —every possible phenomenon that can be present—both is ‘this’ and has ‘thisness.’] ‘physical events’ u/l: i.e. experiences. But if ideas, too, are ‘this’ they transcend their presentation no less than the real, and there is regress to infinity (see note 13).

 

p. 65/11-12

[… how far it holds of the actual fact, and how far only of the mere appearance …] u/l: There is no difference.

 

p. 66/11-16

[In every judgment, where we analyse the given, and where as the subject we place the term ‘this,’ it is not an idea which is really the subject. In using ‘this’ we do use an idea, and that idea is and must be universal; but what we mean, and fail to express, is one reference to the object which is given as unique.]: Yes.

 

p. 66/24-28

[… we have in addition another idea. We have the idea of immediate contact with the presented reality; and it is that idea which is signified by ‘this,’ and which qualifies the idea which stands as the subject of our analytic judgment.]: Phassa.

 

p. 67/9-13

[… presence, though it does not fall within the content, though we can hardly call it a quality of the appearance, yet is recognized as the same amid a change of content, is separable from it, and makes a difference to it.] ‘though … appearance’ u/l: Consciousness is negative as regards essence. It is an ‘absolute universal’, unlike the others, which are ‘relative universal’.

 

p. 67/25-31

[The idea of ‘this’ has a striking difference. Distinguished as an aspect of presented reality, when we call it up we take any perception or feeling that is given and, attending to the aspect of presence within it, recognize that as the meaning of our term. We contemplate it ideally, without any reference to the content of that which is actually before us.]: Quite. This is reflexion as opposed to reflection.

 

p. 68/3-29

[… the presented instance of reality is unique. By discrimination we are able to fix that uniqueness in the shape of an idea. We thereupon try to make it the idea of something else. But, for the idea to be true of something else, that something else must be present and unique. We have then either two unique presentations, or one must disappear. If the first enc goes, the idea goes with it. If the last one goes, there is now no fact for the idea to be referred to. In either case there can be no judgment. The idea, we see, is not the true idea of anything other than its own reality. It is a sign which, if we judge, can signify nothing except itself. To be least alone then when most alone, and to enjoy the delights of solitude together, are phrases which have a very good sense; but, taken in their bare and literal meaning, they would exemplify the contradiction we have here before us.

Between the fact and the idea of the ‘this’ in judgment, there can be no practical difference. The idea of this would be falsely used, unless what it marks were actually presented. But in that case we should be trying to use a sign, when we have before us the fact which is signified. We can use the idea so far as to recognize the fact before us as a fact which is ‘this;’ but such a use does not go beyond the given. It affirms of the subject a predicate without which the subject disappears. … the addition of the idea adds nothing to the subject.]: All this argument is excellent. It seems that ‘absolute universals’ cannot be abstractions—see NoD mano (b). There is no particular content to abstract from—it is already ‘in brackets’. Or again, one cannot even attempt to think existence in isolation from existence.

 

p. 69/fn.

[‘This’ is not the only idea which can never be true as a symbol. I will not ask to what extent ‘this’ means ‘for me,’ but what has been said of ‘this’ will held in the main of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine.’ But there are difficulties here which we can not discuss. We may remark in passing that, for the purposes of metaphysics, it would be necessary to find all those ideas whose content appears not able to be used as the adjective of something else.]: Very good.

 

p. 71/8-10

[The mere perpetual disappearance in time of the given appearance is itself the negation of its claim to self-existence.] ‘Perpetual disappearance in time’ u/l: An invariant does not ‘perpetually disappear in time’. This ‘time’ is an unjustified assumption.

 

p. 71/13-15

on reality [Living by relation to what it excludes, it transcends its limit to join another element, and invites that element within its own boundaries.]: But this is failure to see that there are different levels of generality.

 

p. 71/18-19

[There is no solid point of either time or space.] u/l: All right—than abandon the myth!

 

p. 71/24-26

[The real can not be identical with the content that appears in presentation. It for ever transcends it, and give us a title to make search elsewhere.]: On the contrary, it is.

 

p. 71/36-37

[A completed series in time or space can not possibly exist.]: It can, if it accelerates.

 

p. 71/bottom

: Cf. Kierkegaards Postscript pp. 102-3 and 299-302. See also NoD, FS II, §§4&5.

 

p. 73/25-29

[There are cases where the subject or, if we please, the Ego seems divided in two. When one self is present the other is absent, and the memories of either self are distinct. Their pasts and futures do not ever touch. The explanation that is offered, and which seems sufficient, will illustrate our theme. It is because the present selves are different that the past and future selves are foreign. It is because one system of ideas has not got a point of connection with the other system, or has rather some point which excludes the connection, that the one can never be used to extend ideally a present which belongs to the other.]: In mathematical terms, two lines of behaviour in an absolute or state-determined system cannot start from the same point; two such lines, in other words, cannot intersect.

 

p. 74/23-24

[If a fact or event is what is felt or perceived, then a fact that is past is simple nonsense …]: But then so is the present one, if by ‘present’ we mean a ‘point-instant’.

 

p. 75/10-17

[Synthetic judgments thus cease to be merely adjectival …. They are … directly related to perception. But their ideas are never referred as adjectives to the presentation itself. They are attributed to the reality, which both shows itself there, and extends itself beyond.]: Fortunately, this removes all necessity for ‘present’ perception. If everything is ‘as if’ there is nothing to worry about.

 

p. 86/7-9

[A supposal is, in short, an ideal experiment. It is the application of a content to the real, with a view to see what the consequence is …]: This marks clearly the discursive nature of abstraction, of which the syllogism is, the most pronounced example.

 

p. 93/17-18

[In transcending what is given by actual perception, we without any doubt make use of an inference.] ‘we … inference’ u/l: Only if we judge.

 

p. 93/20-21

[By itself this synthesis is merely universal, and is therefore hypothetical.] ‘therefore’ u/l: No, not ‘therefore’. It is hypothetical in that it is a judgement, but universals are not necessarily a part of judgements. (As adjectives, of course, they are part of judgements.)

 

p. 93/27-31

[… judgments which assert within what is given in present perception … seem categorical because they content themselves with the analysis of the given, and predicate of the real nothing but a content that is directly presented.] ‘directly presented’ u/l: In a point-instant?

 

p. 93/31-36

[… the elements of these judgments must actually exist. … I am sure that nothing else is attributed. I am sure that I do not make any inference, and that I do not generalize. And how than can my assertion fail to be true?]: I am not so sure.

 

p. 94/5-8

[The fact, which is given us, is the total complex of qualities and relations which appear to sense. But what we assert of this given fact is, and can be, nothing but an ideal content.] ‘an ideal content’ u/l: which is necessarily a discursive generalization.

 

p 95/12-16

[Such naive assurance of the outward reality of all mental distinctions, such touching confidence in the crudest identity of thought and existence, is worthy of the school which so loudly appeals to the name of Experience.]: All right, but an idea is still a discursive generalization.

 

p. 95/23-27

[… thought in the end is the measure of things, yet at least this is false, that the divisions we make within a whole all answer to elements whose existence does not depend on the rest.]: No—all knowledge is ultimately intuitive.

 

p. 95/38-39

[The whole that is given us is a continuous mass of perception and feeling …] ‘continuous mass’ u/l: An ‘organized complex’ would be better.

 

p. 97/3-8

[In the religious consciousness God and Man are elements that are given to us in connection. But, reflecting on experience, we make distinctions, and proceed as above to harden these results of analysis into units. We thus have God as an unit on one side, and Man as an unit on the other: and then we are puzzled about their relation.]: Quite.

 

p. 99/13-22

[The difficulty is insuperable. … No possible mind could represent to itself the completed series of space and time; since, for that to happen, the infinite process must hate come to an end, and be realized in a finite result. And this can not be. It is not merely inconceivable psychologically; it is metaphysically impossible.]: It is insuperable because it rests on false assumptions about the nature of time.

 

p. 99/39-100/5

[… the statement … rests in the end … upon a ‘because,’ which, although unknown, is none the less real. … But even this claim it is impossible to admit.]: This is Bradley’s Idealism. To correct this read Sartre L’Être et le Néant, pp. 11-14.

 

p. 117/12-16

[But in negative judgment … we do not say what there is in A which makes B incompatible. We often, if asked, should be unable to point out and to distinguish this latent hindrance; and in certain cases no effort we could make would enable us to do this.] last phrase noted: This seems incredible.

 

p. 121/30-122/1

[We must not, if we can help it, introduce into logic the problems of the ‘dialectical’ view. It may be, after all, that everything is just so far as it is not, and again is not just so far as it is. Everything is determined by all negation; for it is what it is as a member of the whole, and its relation to all other members is negative, Each element in the whole, itself the whole ideally while actually finite, transcends itself by mere self-assertion, and by mere self-emphasis brings forth the other that characterizes and negates it. If everything thus has its discrepant in itself, then everything in a sense must be its own discrepancy. Negation is not only one side of reality, but in the end it is either side we please.]: This is very good, provided the ‘whole’ is understood as any whole, not as ‘The Whole’—see p. 650.

 

p. 122/20-23

[What denial tells us is merely this, that, when we bring the discrepant up, it is rejected. Whether what repels it is entirely independent, or whether it has itself produced or solicited what it excludes, is quite irrelevant.]: Actuelly, the latter: but only to a certain extent.

 

p. 122/28-34

[The dialectical method, in its unmodified form, may be untenable. It has, however, made a serious attempt to deal with the relation of thought to reality. We can hardly say that of those eminent writers who are sure that logic is the counterpart of things, and have never so much es asked themselves the question, if the difference and identity, with which logic operates, are existing relations between actual phenomena.] ‘We can … of things’ noted: Hegel presumably.

 

p. 123/9-25

[The contradictory idea, if we take it in a merely negative form, must be banished from logic. If Not-A were solely the negation of A, it would he on assertion without a quality; and would be a denial without anything positive to serve as its ground. A something that is only not something else … is a mere nonentity which can can not be real. … It is impossible for anything to be only Not-A. … It is less than nothing, for nothing itself is not wholly negative. Nothing at least is empty thought, and that means at least my thinking emptily. Nothing means nothing else but failure. And failure is impossible unless something fails; but Not-A would be impersonal failure itself.]: It is everything other than A.

 

p. 126/n.3

[… The beginning of negation is the exclusion of an ideal change in the object—this exclusion not being retained by the mind, though action is thereby prevented. By ‘action’ (I should add) is not meant necessarily action which is ‘practical.’]: Action is intention, yes. Manokamma.

 

p. 130/17-33

[‘Man, woman, and child,’ have a common basis in ‘human being.’ … ‘In England and America,’ ‘alive or dead,’ commit us to the statements ‘somewhere not elsewhere’ and ‘organized being.’ And so, if we call a man ‘bad or good,’ we say at least he is a moral agent. There is no exception to the truth of this rule. Even existence and non-existence have so much in common that, in any sense in which we can use them, they imply some kind of contact with my mind. We have seen that there is no pure negation. So, in every disjunction and as the ground of it, there must be the assertion of a common quality, the sphere within which the disjunction is affirmed.]: Very good.

‘Even existence and non-existence … contact with my mind’ double noted: This is why everything exists either in reality or in imagination, either presently or absently.

 

p. 136/30-38

[‘A is b or c’ may be expressed by (i) If A is b it is not c, and if A is c it is not b, (ii) If A is not b then it is c, and if A is not c then it must be b. … The second pair are based on the assumption that, because we do not find a predicate of A which excludes b or c, therefore there is none.] ‘because … none’ noted: Bradley’s hesitation here is justified. In NoD (FS) we start from a simple disjunction between o and x and then show that this implies a fourfold disjunction—a thing A, in other words, is necessarily one present and three absents. In practice this is seen in the three dimensions of space, which require four points (o, x, y, z) to fix them.

 

p. 137/18-138-40

[Disjunction means ‘or,’ and, viewed psychologically, ‘or’ stands for Choice. Hence it may be useful to consider here how choice arises. Where something is desired, where there are various ways of realizing this end, and where I find that I can not have all of these as a whole and at once—and where, by this negation, action has been suspended—the result may be choice. And, in choosing, I accept one way while rejecting the rest. … And obviously the ‘or’ thus contained in choice is exclusive; and any other view as to ‘or’ would, here at least, conflict with plain fact. … What is true here is that when, and so far as, in choice or otherwise, you identify yourself with one possibility, the residue tends to be regarded or at least treated, so far, as not even possible. It is taken for our purpose, we may say, in the lump and as all one, and so, we may add, is taken but as one only. … In a complete and perfect system, where all conditions were filled in, the real Universe would have all its determinations at once, all as connected and each as qualifying the others and the whole. And here negation would disappear except as one aspect of positive and complementary distinction. But for us this ultimate stage of the intellect remains an ideal, in the sense that it can not in detail and everywhere be attained completely.] bottom of p. 137: This is admirable (except for ‘Universe’ on the next page).

 

p. 141/5-19

[The principle of Identity is often stated in the form of a tautology, ‘A is A.’ If this really means that no difference exists on the two sides of the judgments, we may dismiss it at once. It is no judgment at all. As Hegel tells us, it sins against the very form of judgment; for, while professing to say something, it really says nothing. It does not even assert identity. For identity without difference is nothing at all. It takes two to make the same, and the least we can have is some change of event in a self-same thing, or the return to that thing from some suggested difference. For, otherwise, to say ‘It is the same as itself’ would be quite unmeaning. We could not even have the appearance of judgment in ‘A is A,’ if we had not at least the difference of position in the different A’s; and we can not have the reality of judgment, unless some difference actually enters into the content of what we assert.] ‘For identity … suggested difference’: Yes.

after ‘what we assert’: But the fact remains that one comes across assertions that ‘A is not A’ that make ‘A is A’ synthetic. E.g. Sartre, L’Être et le Néant, p. 33.

 

p. 145/10-12

[… if anything is individual it is self-same throughout, and in all diversity must maintain its character.]: Of course.

 

p. 146/24-26

[We might remark that no thing excludes any other so long as they are able to remain side by side, that incompatibility begins when you occupy the same area …]: Two things are discrepant simply by being two. They are not both ‘this’.

 

p. 146/bottom

: ‘A is not both b and not-b’ means ‘A is not both b and c or d or e.’ (See p. 136.)

 

p. 147/6-8

[And this does not mean that if a miracle in psychology were brought about, and the mind did judge both affirmatively and negatively, both judgments might be true.]: It is a common enough miracle.

 

p. 147/12-16

[In the nature of things (this is what it all comes to) there are certain elements which either can not be conjoined at all, or can not be conjoined in some special way; and the nature of things must be respected by logic.]: For can read are.

 

p. 147/27-33

[But in the present instance the law of Contradiction has had the misfortune to be flatly denied from a certain theory of the nature of things.]: Hegel! See Kierkegaard, Postscript, p. 270 foll.

 

p. 152/22-32

[Disjunction asserts an area of incompatibles. Affirmation or denial of b is here the area within which A falls. The evidence that it does not fall outside and that all the discrepants are completely given, may be called my impotence to find any other.]: This needs correction in view of the fact that disjunction is, ‘A is b or c or d or e’ (see p. 136). Thus ‘A is b or not-b’ means ‘A either is b or it is c or d or e. All the discrepants are completely given.

 

p. 152/bottom

: The three principles may be taken as:—

1. A is A—A is still A whether it is b or c or d or e.

2. A is not both b and not-b—A is not both b and c or d or e.

1. A is either b or not-b—A is either b or c or d or e.

2.  

p. 153/28-30

[‘Is motion continuous? Yes or no.’ I decline to answer until you tell me if; by saying Yes, I am taken to deny that it is also discrete.]: The point is that continuity is a self-contradictory notion. (A = B, B  C; A ≠C, whence A is not-A.) If you contradict a self-contradictory notion you get one that is no less self-contradictory. But see NoD, paṭiccasamuppāda (c).

 

p. 155/1-4

[… if Things-in-themselves are taken as such to have existence, then that is not proved by our Excluded Middle, but is a sheer assumption on which we base it and which it presupposes.]: The three principles are not judgements at all, since they are not abstract. They are about the ‘this’. Bradley, I think, has not seen this.

 

p. 158/12-14

[But to hold that what contradicts the real must be real, is a logical mistake which I cannot venture to attribute to Prof. Jevons.]: God end the devil? But what is the real?

 

p. 165/n.12

[… the principle of Excluded Middle … presupposes a disjoined world of incompatibles, and its truth is but relative and limited to Reality taken in the character of such a world. … If we accept the view that no truth is quite true and no error merely false … we must admit that Excluded Middle, however necessary and important, is not true absolutely.]: ?

 

p. 166/n.12

[… the principle that every idea is attributed to Reality … has no special connection with Excluded Middle. And the same thing holds again of the corollary that, where all possibles but one are excluded, the one left is actually real.] noted.

 

p. 166/n.17

[‘False alternative.’ … must mean that Excluded Middle has been assumed to hold outside its own limited sphere, and that hence it does not hold everywhere. … But I agree that it is certainly possible, and sometimes easy, to object wrongly to the legitimate and necessary use of Excluded Middle.]: But surely we cannot exclude self-contradictory notions from the sphere of these principles.

 

p. 173/20-21

[Are universals always more abstract than particulars?]: Agreed. They are not. Abstraction is irrelevant to the question of universals. In the preceding sections the discussion was about adjectivals, which are abstractions; here it is about universals.

 

p. 187/10

[But the universal is nothing whatever but an adjective.] u/l: See p. 173.

 

p. 187/24-30

[The true particular … has no continuance, and in space it can not occupy extension. … Such a particular is of course not to be verified in experience.] ‘Such … experience’ u/l: Quite!

 

p. 188/1-2

[The abstract universal and the abstract particular are what does not exist.]: as such.

 

p. 188/2-22

[The concrete particular and the concrete universal both have reality, and they are different names for the individual.

What is real is the individual; and this individual, though one and the same, has internal differences. You may hence regard it in two opposite ways. So far as it is one against other individuals, it is particular. So far as it is the same throughout its diversity, it is universal. They are two distinctions we are making within it.]: Yes.

 

p. 190/9-13

[An individual which is finite or relative turns out in the end to be no individual; individual and infinite are inseparable characters.]: This is right, so no individual is finite. The ‘this’ is the absolute individual.

 

p. 191/3-5

[Nothing will fall outside the subject, and the predication will be categorical.]: God, or the universe, no doubt.

 

p. 193/12-13

[In the end all truth, if really true, is true of the ultimate non-phenomenal fact.]: Indeed?

 

p. 195/n.27

[the Universe itself] u/l: And what is that, pray?

[… everything conceivable has existence in some sense.] noted.

 

p. 205/11-13

[We have now discussed the meanings of ‘possible’ and ‘necessary,’ so far as to see that both are forms of the hypothetical.] bottom of the page: Necessity comes into being in the act of abstraction. It exists as such—i.e. as an abstraction exists. But an abstraction, which depends on image, can have no counterpart in reality (i.e. as opposed to imagination).

 

p. 206/9

[Facts for logic must be facts that are and that never must be.]: This is right.

 

p. 206/24-25

[When the possible becomes real it ceases at once to be a mere possibility.] u/l: Yes.

 

p. 206/29-30

[… the possible … can not exist outside the domain of human doubt and human ignorance.]: Inadequate.

 

p. 206/31-33

[We have seen that to say ‘S — P is possible,’ means, ‘S — P would follow under certain conditions, some at least of which are not known to be present.’]: But the conditions not known to be present are simply presence.

 

p. 210/9-10

[Apart from the judgment the real is mere fact and has no potentiality …] u/l: Not so. The abstract is given.

 

p. 211/30-31

[But now what is this real or, I should say, these reals …] u/l: You should say ‘are these reals’.

 

p. 211/35-36

[Are they real things, as distinct from sensations, or, if not, what are they?]: What is this distinction? What is a ‘sensation’?

 

p. 214/6-11

[… the mental presence of the real …]: Why mental? This simply means the real as present in experience.

 

p. 214/15-17

[… the base of our assertion that X is not rejected by the real, is the assumption that the real differs in no point from the real as at this moment it is present.]: Why is this an assumption? The real is what is present.

 

p. 214/23-24

[… what we have in our minds is co-extensive with reality.]: If this simply means ‘What is present is … reality’, then it is correct.

 

p. 214/25-28

[What the real does not exclude is not possible, it is actual and necessary. And if we shrink from this assertion, ought we to maintain that X is even possible?]: We do not shrink from it, but we refer to p. 240/2-3.

 

p. 228/18-19

[An infinite series is of course not possible. It is self-contradictory; it could not be real.]: This assumes that it does not accelerate.

 

p. 228/37-39

[Outside mathematics an infinite number is an idea that attempts to solder elements which are absolutely discrepant.]: Yes.

 

p. 230/24-25

[Now take the whole series. That series, before I throw it, is as certain and fixed as though I had thrown it already.]: Is it?

 

p. 238/n.19

[The possible, as the partly grounded, is negative of a limited known reality, in the sense that not all of the possible is there. A fact falls beyond and is actual only in another world.]: Certainly—it is the absent of ‘this’.

[… alternative possibilities (r¹, r², r³) are all possible, though they can not all at once simply qualify our limited reality. Thus the possible and the actual may or may not exclude one another.] ‘they can not … reality’ u/l: This seems to be a mistake.

 

p. 240/n.31

[… a vicious identification of the real, as it is, with the real as we find it now mentally present …]: But what is the real ‘as it is’?

 

p. 243/16-18

[I do not indeed know, after my first Book, if at this stage I have any actual reader …]: Yes, you still have me.

 

p. 254/14

[… naked positions in space or time …] u/l: There are no such things.

 

p. 272/n.1

[We have, first, the knowledge that everything falls within and qualifies one individual Universe.]: No.

[We next, in any particular case, have to do also with some subordinate individual whole.] ‘next’ c/o: Yes.

 

p. 286/21-22

[Likeness and sameness should never be confused, for the former refers properly to a general impression.]: Quite.

 

p. 287/5-6

[… I am waiting, and have been waiting for years, to be told what is meant by an ‘exact likeness.’]: Very good!

 

p. 288/35-36

[… if we say that inference rests on the principle that what seems the same is the same …] after ‘the same is’: so far

after ‘the same is the same’: Yes.

 

p. 288/36-40

[… the same is the same, and can not be made different by any diversity, and that so long as an ideal content is identical no change of content can destroy its unity. The assumption in this principle may be decried as monstrous …] ‘The assumption … monstrous’ u/l: Only if it is not seen that experience is an absolute system. Far from being monstrous, it is necessary.

 

p. 289/fn.

[Not only, for instance, must spaces related be more than a mere relation in space, but they must also have a difference in quality.]: This takes space as featureless, which it is not. But if it were this would be correct.

[It is not possible to contemplate points in relation unless you distinguish them by a qualitative reference to the right or left or upper or lower sides of your body … It may be objected that in certain cases the difference of quality is only one aspect of the whole relation. … The ultimate connection of quality and relation is a most difficult problem.] last sentence noted: Only because of the false assumption noted above.

 

p. 290/1-2

[… the content of the given has always two sides, sensible qualities and relations …]: Cittasaṅkhāra and cetanā.

 

p. 290/5-6

[I do not say that these two elements are metaphysically irreducible …]: They are.

 

p. 293/8-10

[It sounds terrible to say that Identity is an ideal synthesis of differences, and that this identity is real fact.]: This is the quite unnecessary distinction that constitutes ‘Idealism’.

 

p. 293/13

[… the change that is past is no fact of sense.] u/l: On what ground?

 

p. 294/6-9

[It is frivolous to say that identity may be real, where existence is continuous and is not broken in the series of time, but is not real anywhere else] ‘is not … time’ u/l: This is a contradiction.

 

p. 297/n.2

[On the ultimate difficulty as to Identity …]: There is none.

 

p. 297/n.4

[… Immediate Experience or Feeling must not be called ‘given.’]: This is a mistake due to B’s wrong notions about time. Sartre is right to say that a thing’s significance is given with the thing (in his booklet on Camus’ L’Étranger).

[ultimate whole] u/l: What is this?

 

p. 297/n.5

[What is true of B once is true of B always under the same conditions.]: This is a contradiction. If it were true it would mean that a difference in time (once/always) is not a difference in conditions. But difference in time is change even if only of orientation (at any level), so either once = always or conditions are different.

[We have to assume a concrete whole containing still further conditions such as to modify these terms and to unite them in something higher. But in this whole, we must remember, conditions and terms cease in the end, as such, to exist.]: This is Bradley’s deism.

 

p. 298/n.9

[If you keep to change as perceived, then within that perception you have identity in diversity, and you have ideality …] ‘and you have ideality’ u/l: Only if you are an Idealist.

 

[On the relation of Continuity to identity …]: ‘Continuity’ is a self-contradiction, as you yourself tacitly admit on p. 153. You do not openly admit it since you accept it as valid of time.

 

p. 299/15-16

[The psychological fact of ‘Association’ is of course unquestionable.]: It is, in spite of Sartre.

 

p. 304/23-305/23

[… The main Law of Reproduction may be laid down thus; Any part of a single state of mind tends, if reproduced, to re-instate the remainder; or Any element tends to reproduce those elements with which it has termed one state of mind. This may be called the law of Redintegration. For we may take this name from Sir W. Hamilton (Reid, p. 897), having found nothing else that we could well take.

… What is a single state of mind? Does it exclude succession? It certainly does not do so. It may be further defined as any psychical complex which is present together, presence signifying presentation, a certain direct relation to the mind which does not imply succession in time. …

This law of Redintegration, we must bear in mind, does not exclude any succession of events which comes as a whole before the mind; and it is not to be confined to perceptions and ideas.]: All this seems to be in order.

 

p. 305/31-32

[But Redintegration … never re-instates the particular fact.]: This would seem to depend on whether one considers the reproduced state as the same thing as the original or not.

 

p. 305/39-40

[… universals, which as such do not exist.] u/l: But at the foot of p. 45 you argue that particulars do not exist. You must make up your mind about existence.

 

p. 307/1-8

[The doctrine of Redintegration does not ask us to subscribe to the belief that what is past exists over again. … The fact of the presentation absolutely disappears. What is left behind is a mental result, into the ultimate metaphysical nature of which we do not here enquire.] ‘The fact … enquire’ noted: All that has happened is that the present has become absent. This is not so good. As the present can change, so can the absent.

 

p. 340/6-10

[And to those who are not prepared for metaphysical enquiry, who feel no call towards thankless hours of fruitless labour, who do not care to risk a waste of their lives on what the world for the most part regards as lunacy, and they themselves but half believe in …]: Good.

 

p. 341/18-342/7

[The psychologist is to confine himself within certain limits; he is not to cross over into metaphysics. But unfortunately if he is not a metaphysician he will not know what these limits are. And it is the same to some extent with all the sciences. The physicist, for instance, is constantly tempted to think that his ruling ideas are ultimate facts. And this temptation is fatal to the mere specialist. It is only, on the one hand, a general culture and largeness of mind, or else some education in metaphysics, which saves him from this error. And it is much worse in psychology. The subject brings with it a special temptation; …]: This is a pleasant paragraph.

 

p. 344/12-16

[Suppose we all are victimized by chance conjunction, are we not right to be so victimized?]: We are victimized by a chance conjunction in being born.

 

p. 345/23-25

[… visual sensations without extension are the merest hypothesis. Not only can this alleged fact not be observed, but there are very strong reasons for rejecting it wholly.]: It is to be rejected in practice since the eye is a muscular organ. But in principle it is not necessary to reject it. Sounds are much less tied to extension.

 

p. 346/n.4

[The doctrine that every mental state still survives and is active below the conscious level, was, and is, as a working hypothesis, not to be treated with contempt.]: But if they survive they are universals.

 

p. 347/n.19

[… the incoming stimulus.] u/l: This is a wholly objectionable expression: it belongs to physiology.

 

p. 351/9-14

[The facts, I should have thought, would have left little doubt that the result of experience is a connection of attributes, where the differences of their particular subjects are blurred—a confused universal, which may appear to the mind in a particular imagery, but is used without any regard to that.]: The images (which there must be) may well be confused (i.e. plural) but the universal is not confused.

 

p. 352/22-353/6

[I will conclude with an appeal to common experience. We all know very well that in our daily life we reason habitually from the results of past experience, although we may be wholly unable to give one single particular fact in support of our conclusion. We know again that there are persons, whose memory is so good that they recall past details in a way which to us is quite impossible, and who yet can not draw the conclusions which we draw, since they have never gone beyond the reproduction of these details. It is not the collection of particular facts, it is the general impression one gets from these facts which is really the sine qua non of reasoning; and it is that from which we really go to our result.

If you begin the discussion of a question, such as this, with a vicious disfunction, you can not go right. As a preliminary to discussion you have excluded the truth. From the alternative—either an explicit syllogism or an inference from particulars to particulars —you can hardly fail to get a false result. You may infer—The syllogism in extension is no argument, and therefore we go from particulars to particulars. You may infer—It is not possible to agree from particulars, and therefore we reason always in syllogisms, explicit and (if you like) also extensional. But to me it is nothing which conclusion you adopt. For both are errors, and both at bottom are one and the same error. They are twin branches from one root of inveterate prejudice and false assumption.]: A good observation.

 

p. 369/5-7

[… the group is taken as a region within which a universal connection holds throughout. Hence, and hence alone, we can use such expressions as ‘any’ and ‘one case with.’]: Yes.

 

p. 385/11-15

[Contradictory possibilities can co-exist as long as they remain mere possibilities, but the moment you affirm them as actual fact, they exclude one another.]: Yes.

 

p. 395/14-16

[It may be denied that, when water is hot to one hand and cold to the other, the mistake that exists is a fallacy of inference.]: But what is the mistake?

 

p. 428/23-29

[… every judgment is really an inference … But we can hardly add that, with so much, the inference is specified as disjunctive.] This is Husserl’s ‘Factual Necessity’: ‘It must be so because it is so.’

 

p. 444/8-10

[We might explain perhaps every phenomenon offered, on the view that reproduction is always logical.]: It is.

 

p. 445/32-35

[Yet somewhere we find a solution of continuity; somewhere the identity of the datum is lost; at some point we pass from the adjectival content attributed to our basis, and slide into on image which is not its predicate.]: On this solution of continuity see Sartre, L’Imaginaire, pp. 151-2.

 

p. 449/10-13

[We may, however, remark that even ‘uncontrolled’ fancy brings an object before us, and so far is ‘objective.’ And imagination, when ‘controlled’ in a certain way, becomes at once strictly logical and is itself the same as ‘thought.’]: Yes. For a detailed description see Sartre, L’Imaginaire (Image at Pensée).

 

p. 459/16-40

[But is it so too with Distinction? Take for instance, ‘A is not equal to B,’ and where is the third term? I answer, It is there, though we do not perceive it. For consider the case thus; A and B, it is certain, are still related, since they are taken as different; and their difference is not abstract but specific and definite. It is as quantities that we fail to find them identical. But, this being grasped, observe what follows. Just as the general perception of difference implies a mind which distinguishes, and which serves in some vague character as the base which supports that general relation—so it is with every special difference. What is true in general will prove true in particular. All objects of our thought in the first place must have some relation because, as our objects, they are all identical; and again every distinction of special qualities, such as sounds or colours, takes place on the basis of a special community. … A and B are perceived to be unequal, but inequality presupposes that both have quantity. In this they are the same, and it is because of this point that they can be seen as unequal. Thus identity in regard to the possession of quantity is here the third term that was required, and it is relation to this centre which interrelates the quantitative differences.]: Very good.

 

p. 462/23-26

[No change can be perceived unless by means of an ideal continuity.

This ideal identity is a necessary element in the perception of difference.] each ‘ideal’ u/l: Not only ideal!

 

p. 468/31-39

[The immediate experience of change and difference, or a succession of such mere feelings, would not by itself generate the relational perception which follows. But it leaves behind it what we may call a tendency in the mind to move hereafter, under certain conditions, in a certain way. … However, I once more agree, the detail of the process by which we pass from Feeling to relational consciousness is open to question. In any case mere ‘after-sensation’ … could not possibly by itself account for this passage.]: This is inadequate, but the final sentence is quite correct.

 

p. 471/28-29

[But in synthesis we find that … the whole is not given any longer, but is made.] altered to read: … not given as a datum any longer, but itself depends on the inference.

 

p. 472/6-14

[Thus it is analysis where your conclusion falls within the boundary of your original premise; but it is synthesis where the conclusion falls beyond each premise and transcends its limits. Analysis is the inward synthesis of a datum, in which its unseen internal elements become explicit. Synthesis is the analysis of a latent whole beyond the datum, in which the datum becomes explicit as a constituent element, bound by interrelation to one or more elements likewise constituent.] ‘Analysis is … likewise constituent’ noted, and the page as a whole marked: All that is good.

 

p. 476/29-32

[Let us imagine a judgement before any reproduction has taken place. Certainly no such judgment could exist, since judgment proper appears long after redintegration has been used, and is a consequence of that use …]: Yes.

 

p. 477/fn.

[When, for example, we argue that without a Permanent no change could be experienced, we should remember that on the other side it may be urged that, unless this Permanent were itself phenomenal, it could not be effective, and that the fact of there being something stable in phenomena seems deducible from no principle.]: This, of course, is right; but it is a mistake to suppose that there could be any principle antecedent to this factual necessity.

 

p. 478/7-9

[Assume, as we must, that our intellect … has no intelligible ground for many of the events which it is forced to register.] after ‘has’ is inserted: for itself.

 

p. 478/9-28

[Recognize the fact that more chance strength of stimulus, blind emphasis of sense, is the reason why our perception was thus and was not otherwise. Acknowledge, in the end, that whatever intellectual assimilation by affinity you may fairly suppose to have worked unconsciously—yet at last the effective condition of the judgment is found in more sensuous depression and relief; that it was by this that a part of the presentation was sunk, and the rest loft standing in a prominent conjunction.]: All first class.

 

p. 478/18-20

[But, I repeat, all this is nothing to the purpose; we here have got the sine qua non, but we have got nothing else.] altered to read: … but we have got, so far, no more.

 

p. 478/21-35

[The intellect in judgment may be guided and led by irrational suggestions, and yet that judgment after all may be an intellectual act. For the senuous emphasis which prompts and directs disappears in the result, and, however the mind has come to its judgment, after all it has judged. The selection and relation, which appears in the product, is not the mere blurring and accentuation of sense. It may have been influenced by it, and arisen from it, but its essence is now diverse. Bare difference is one thing and distinction is another; solicitation and tempting prominence are still not recognition; and we may be forced to notice, but after all we notice. Judgment is our act; and the separation and integration, which appear in its content, are the work of our own analysis and synthesis, compelled, if you will, but none the less active.] noted, and the first sentence double noted: Yes.

 

p. 479/7-9

[All judgment necessarily contains a relation; but every relation, beside its pair of related elements, presupposes an unity in which they subsist.]: Certainly.

 

p. 480/26

[The evolution of the mind …] u/l: The ‘evolution of the mind’ is absolutely inadmissible unless it is confined to one individual’s development from childhood

 

p. 481/35

[If we begin our enquiry from the physiological side …] u/l: This is quite illegitimate.

 

p. 482/35-39

[But it is intellectual in the sense that, when we come to reflect on its datum, we find marks of activities, which, if they had been conscious, and if they had not stopped at feeling, we must have called intellect.]: the usage in this work of the words feeling, sensation, perception and consciousness, is unintelligible.

 

p. 484/17-21

[No physiologist would believe that colours or sounds were the properties of those stimuli which act on the centres of vision or hearing. But, if so, by what process are we to remove the influence of the subject in knowledge?]: Physiologists are capable of believing all sorts of strange things. This is a bogus question.

 

p. 484/25-28

[We have seen that this demands a central identity, and where is the central identity here? But, without it, what becomes of the relation of the premises and of the ensuing result?]: So is this.

 

p. 484/38-39

[… reproduction implies a rudiment of judgment …]: No.

 

p. 485/8-13

[It will be objected no doubt that in abcd there perhaps may be no rudiment of judgment; that there may exist in this foundation no intellectual act, no unconscious selection, or notice, or preferential attention to b — d; and that in short there may be nothing but sensuous strength and prominence of b and d.]: Right.

 

p. 485/21-24

[And thus the purification of b — d is an intellectual act, performed as part of the reproduction. It shows clearly that function of selective analysis which belongs to judgment and to inference alike.]: Also right.

 

p. 495/n.16

[The point here is that, without some stability in the content of what comes in Feeling and Sensation, no orderly world would be possible. For order could not be simply super-induced by or from any mere abstract principle or function.]: Quite. But how does the idea of an ‘orderly world’ square with Idealism?

 

p. 502/20-32

[… the earliest intelligence … is scarcely to be recognized; for it lacks, as we saw, the chief marks of intellect. It can not judge, for it has no ideas. It can not distinguish its images from fact … it can not reason … It would not be aware of on ideal activity, but would blindly accept the transformation of an object. … As perceived by the downing reason, the object itself is unable to change; … such a process is too hard for nascent intelligence.]: All this is highly questionable.

 

p. 504/fn.

[… I do not feel at liberty to assume that psychical life does not precede the development of nerves.]: Quite right—you are not.

 

p. 505/8-11

[The so-called ‘muscular sense’ appears to be as doubtful an article in physiology as it is in psychology, and in these pages we are compelled to avoid it wholly.]: Sartre agrees.

 

p. 536/6-8

[We should ask in vain for any harmonious finding as to the bodily process which conditions my feeling of energy put forth.]: This question presupposes that it is caused by the body.

 

p. 539/fn.

[Hence we see that a cause demands previous change. It can not exist without producing its effect, so that, if the effect is to have a beginning, the cause must have a beginning also. To produce the effect it becomes the cause; and that becoming is a change in time, which naturally calls for another cause by which to account for it. Hence first cause is pure nonsense.

Again the effect is the change which issues from the union of the conditions. It is a passing event, and it is only by a licence that we allow ourselves to treat it as a permanent product. Being a phenomenon in time it can not persist. Once more the effect must follow the constitution of the cause; it can not begin until after the moment when the synthesis is complete. It is impossible it should ever co-exist with its cause, and the belief that it does so arises from confusion. For we forget that both cause and effect are events, and we tend to think of them as substances maintaining an identity in spite of events.

But, though the effect succeeds, it succeeds immediately. Causation is really the ideal reconstruction of a continuous process of change in time. Between the coming together of the separate conditions and the beginning of the process, is no halt or interval. Cause and effect are not divided by time in the sense of duration or lapse or interspace. They are separated in time by an ideal line which we drew across the indivisible process. For if the cause remained for the fraction of a second, it might remain through an indefinite future. Permanent cause, unless you take cause in another meaning and treat it as substance, is simply nonsensical. I should be glad to discuss some of the difficulties which arise in connection with causation, but the questions raised would hardly be logical.]: This will not do at all. We have here once again Bradley’s mistaken notions of time. ‘Continuous change’ is a self-contradiction.

 

p. 555/4-6

[Whether rightly or wrongly, all logic assumes that a mere attention, a simple retaining and holding together before the mind’s eye, is not an alteration.]: Attention alters weight or emphasis, but this does not alter relations.

 

p. 577/24-28

[… an ‘otherwise’ that alters is an admissible idea.]: This is quite right.

 

p. 577/29-32

[But obviously, where our A is taken as ultimate Reality, the suggestion of an ‘otherwise’ becomes quite untenable. An ‘otherwise than A,’ whether as a contrary or as an alteration, is here, alike in either case, no idea at all, but is wholly senseless.]: And this is quite wrong—there is no ‘ultimate Reality’ behind appearances.

 

p. 579/26-27

[Is the intellectual experiment the parallel of a movement in the real universe?]: It is a movement in the real (universe).

 

p. 581/11-12

[How frivolous an idea, but how inevitable; and yet once more how wholly indefensible.]: And how elegantly put!

 

p. 583/18-21

[Unless you revolutionize your belief about reality … you cannot maintain the strict correspondence of thoughts and of things.]: But thoughts are things.

 

p. 584/18-19

[But ideas do not exist, and they can not exist, if existence means presence in the series of phenomena.] ‘the series of phenomena’ u/l: Again, this is a mistake.

 

p. 584/21-22

[I do not mean that ideas, being inside my head, can not also and at once be found outside it.]: Again, all we have ‘in our heads’ is brains, or perhaps a headache. But not ideas.

 

p. 591/1-2

[… a lingering scruple still forbids us to believe that reality can ever be purely rational.]: It is not.

 

p. 591/6-7

[That the glory of this world in the and is appearance leaves the world more glorious …] ‘is appearance’ u/l: It is not appearance as opposed to Reality.

 

p. 519/8-10

[… but the sensuous curtain is a deception and a cheat, if it hides some colourless movement of atoms …] ‘it hides’ u/l: It does not hide anything.

 

p. 592/n.5

[As, however, there is verifiable activity on our side, we can hardly get rid of the problem by leaving the presence of activity on the other side doubtful. The true answer is that there is one joint activity on both sides.]: This is right.

 

p. 594/n.15

[Now an idea, as an idea, in not an event …]: The notion of ‘event’ is vicious. An ‘event’ can only be a change, never a thing. There cannot be a continuous sequence of ‘events’.

 

p. 599/38-40

[The general solution of the problem raised by the essence of inference is found, I think, so far as logic is concerned, in the double nature of the object.] ‘in … object’ u/l: Yes—as dhamma & saṅkhārā.

 

p. 600/5-7

[… the object not only is itself, but is also contained as an element in a whole; and it is itself, we must add, only as being so contained.]: Good.

 

p. 600/14-15

[… that which mediates and necessitates its advance is implied within its own self.]: Yes.

 

p. 606/10-20

[There is … a whole … which in every case is presupposed. Are we to say then that this whole already contains every possible arrangement and succession of arrangements, so that the conclusion of our inference both is and was? Shall we on the contrary, denying this, hold that space and time alter, so that, when our construction in fact happens and is there, our conclusion, then and on this, becomes true and real? Or shall we, thirdly, attempt to maintain both theses at once, though how to bring them together without contradiction we do not know?]: Both, I think, and they can be brought together.

 

p. 606/40-607/1

[… the known nature of space and time …] u/l: This is certainly not generally known.

 

p. 607/1-4

[I may add that to any one who, like myself, holds that the nature of both space and time, as such, involves self-contradiction, the above conclusion is even obvious.]: This is Bradley’s Idealistic dilemma. The accepted view of s and t certainly involves self-contradiction. See NoD.

 

p. 615/16-18

[Since the real whole works in and through myself, its activity and mine are thus one.]: Attā ca loko ca.

 

p. 625/21-25

[… what is false is the conclusion that the unknown conditions of body and mind do not belong to the special object which my judgment asserts.]: Quite.

 

p. 629/33-39

[This two-fold nature of Reality, by which it slides away from itself into our distinction, so as there to become a predicate—while all the time it retains in itself, as an ultimate subject, every quality which we loosen from and relate to it—is, if you please, inexplicable. But none the less, I must insist, it is a fundamental fact, the ignoring of which brings certain ruin to any theory of judgment.]: This is comprehensible in the light of the reflexive reduplication. (NoD—attā (a))

 

p. 631/35-36

[Further, ideas and judgments, when I reflect, are known and recognized by me as things which exist in my head.]: ‘things … head’ u/l: They are not.

 

p. 632/17-21

[Hence, unless the Universe itself is a disconnected conjunction, separable at pleasure, and itself really grouping itself into limited conjunctions at our will—judgment fails to take in connections and conditions apart from which its truth is not true.] ‘disconnected conjunction’ u/l: ‘Une totalité détotalisée.’

 

p. 632/36-634/3

: This is very good.

 

p. 632/36-633/1

[Not only is all judgment conditioned, not only does it involve a ‘because,’ but, in addition, every judgment is conditional and implies and depends on an ‘if.’] ‘conditioned’ u/l: Saṅkhata—‘determined’.

 

p. 633/7-8

[The question ‘What is because?’ asks (I understand) about the nature of a ‘ground.’] ‘ground’ u/l: loka.

 

p. 633/10-21

[Hence on one side … there can not conceivably be a ground and ‘because’ which is merely external. If the ground is not implied and so intrinsic, it, as a ground, has no meaning. On the other side, unless the ground is beyond, it, once more and no less, is meaningless. And for anything to imply merely itself is, to my mind, nonsense.

The result of the above … is that the ground in a whole, in which the thing to be grounded must be included. It is a whole pervaded essentially by connection and implication, and is, in some sense, a system which throughout justifies its contents.]: Yes.

 

p. 633/24-31

[If this is the ‘ground,’ what then (we have next to enquire) is a ‘condition’? A condition appears (we must reply) to be a partial ground. Where anything is included in a whole which is its ground, there any other part of the ground, beyond this thing itself, is called its condition. And this element will be one among our thing’s many conditions, unless at least we can assume or show that no further element is contained in the ground.] first ‘condition’ u/l: Saṅkhāra—a ‘determination’.

 

p. 633/32-634/3

[Hence the ‘because’ of anything may be called that by which it is conditioned. Its full ‘because’ implies the presence of the entire whole of its conditions, and includes in this whole the thing’s own nature, so for as grounded. This, and no less than this, is the true and real ‘because.’ But we can use ‘because’ again in a less complete sense where we take the thing as conditioned partly. Here we single out and refer merely to one selected element, one part of the whole of those connections which one involved in the ground. Such an imperfect use of ‘because’ is unavoidable and necessary in practice, but, indefensible in the end, it is even in practice a constant source of grave and insidious error.

 

p. 634/4-12

[In proceeding from the above to ask next for the meaning of ‘if,’ we may be said, leaving the conditioned, to pass on to that which is merely conditional. The first of these gave us a judgment which actually is mediated. S here is P because of M. We had, in other words (we saw), a whole which includes and supports and guarantees at once S and P and also their actual junction. This is what is implied, and this is what we should mean when we call a judgment conditioned.]:The point is that a thing’s determinations are its significances or possibilities, and it may become one (and in Judgement it does become one, but in imagination) of its possibilities. Cf. Sartre’s ‘circuit de l’ipseité’.

 

p. 650/3-4

[The case of the Universe (to take that first) seems free from doubt.]: ‘The Universe’ as a closed totality is an impossible idea. You cannot ‘take the case of the Universe’ unless you can get outside it. Each universe is a closed totality, and for that very reason there is always more beyond, and no universe is The Universe. If you say ‘all’, it is an open totality that you say; and this means that you can never take it as a whole. See pp. 660-1.

 

p. 652/5-12

[Further, what is given has degree, extensive or intensive or both; and it is tinged again by ‘feeling’ in various senses of that term. And we can neither exhibit these differences each by itself, nor understand how in a given case they unite to make our unique particular. Nor, even with so much, have we reached the end. For the diverse appearances of our quality in space and time seem, I may say, even obviously to belong to it.] ‘For … to it’ noted: Certainly.

 

p. 654/19-21

[And if in change we find also a ‘not-yet,’ we have, with this, a feature which, even apparently, is ideal and transcendent; …]: It is actually transcendent.

 

p. 655/23-32

[On the other hand we may agree that about the ‘this,’ as again about the diversity of qualities, there really is something unique. We have something here at once positive and yet not resolvable wholly into an aspect of ‘such’. But what in the end this ‘something’ is we are unable to say; and, attempting here to advance, we do but turn in a maze of repeated dilemmas. The aspect which we claim to have found we are unable to produce, nor can we show that, if produced, it would not more or less belie a character due to our partial apprehension.]: All this is very good; but the point is that the ‘this’ is a transcendent.

 

p. 655/fn.

[With regard to the limit of the ‘this’ on the side of the future, I find myself now (I may add) for less inclined to admit its fixity.]: Good.

 

p. 657/1-14

[Every finite individual is hence on one side imperfect in a varying degree. … Perfect uniqueness and individuality remain therefore in one sense an ideal. …

Every individual is in some sense perfect … and, in its very striving for perfection, it is already, beyond our vision, itself unique and complete.]: At what point does Bradley’s mysticism start?

 

p. 657/19-23

[And no true religion, we may add, will seek to justify, whether in this world or in any other world, the perfection of the individual, if taken by himself; nor will it anywhere think to escape from the grace of God and from the life gained only through constant dying.]: And what about the perfection of God?

 

p. 660/1-2

[It is … clear that we have ideas alike of ‘this,’ ‘now,’ ‘my,’ and ‘here’; …]: Ideas?

 

p. 660/16-27

[Everything, to be in any sense real, must hold of the one Reality. And the felt ‘this’ is therefore, so far, the real Universe. On the other side, while the Universe is the ‘this,’ it also is more and beyond, and it contains within itself other ‘thises’ innumerable.]: The Universe can only be ‘this’ against a background of ‘not-this’, which shows the inadequacy of ‘the Universe’ as an ultimate concept—you can only speak of ‘the Universe’ or ‘the one Reality’ if you can get outside it. See p. 650.

 

p. 661/14-17

[But if the reader asks how in the end the one Reality has such a character as to appear in various special diversities—I would once more repeat that to my mind no explanation is possible.]: See remarks on ‘The Universe’ on p. 650. Each universe or reality as a closed totality is a Group (in the mathematical sense), and every Group is a ‘totalité détotalisée’, in Sartre’s phrase. For detail, see NoD—FS.

 

p. 662/1

[ESSAY VI]: This is an excellent essay.

 

p. 663/14-19

[… I emphasize one element in my whole while disregarding the residue. But this residual mass, none the less, is there, and is actually experienced. And hence, even at this stage, I am in some sense positively aware of a totality which includes in itself both an aspect emphasized and an aspect ignored.]: Admirable.

 

p. 663/26-29

[Our ‘universe,’ as the conditions vary, brings forward or puts back now this feature and now that, and, according to the conditions, it hence shows itself as ‘either,’ and it is itself one or the other alternative.]: Yes. So also Sartre.

 

p. 663/30-36

[A long road, I agree, separates our first distinction from … a scheme of distinctions where each at once excludes and affirmatively qualifies the rest. But the way is traceable, and its course would show how the ultimate end is present in a sense at the start …]: See NoD, FS.

 

p. 665/4-6

[… I have to turn my experience into a disjunctive totality of elements which, according to the conditions, explicitly imply and negate one another.] ‘explicitly … another’ u/l: Yes.

 

p. 665/9-12

[This task, I agree, can never be accomplished in full. But we have seen how in principle it is laid on us from the first, and how negation aids and is essentially implied in all positive construction.]: Yes—see Kierkegaard, CUP.

 

p. 665/32-666/2

[Hence, again, negation is not ‘subjective.’ You may, when it is compared with affirmation, call it, if you please, more ‘reflective’, in the sense that we, perhaps generally, know that we assert, before we know that we deny. But such prior or greater awareness is irrelevant to the point here at issue. The distinctions in our ‘objective’ world do not become merely ‘subjective,’ because we can be said to make them or again because we know that we make them. On the contrary they form the essential structure of that world.] ‘On … world’ u/l: FS.

 

p. 666/17-20

[If you confine your real world to one asserted position and identify this one position with the Universe, then, with this (if it were possible), negation, I admit, has become barely ‘subjective.’] ‘if … possible’ u/l: It is not possible, since there is no ultimate ‘Universe’.

 

p. 666/31-667/40

[Real assertions and denials … are made always with some intention, and never apart from a certain interest. … this ‘reason why’ is a ground which never fails to qualify our original position. … denial affirms throughout an identity and a difference … This diversity affects throughout, in my view, the relation … But, as far as a judgment is purposeless and useless theoretically, it so far, we may say, is not any real judgment. It is either meaningless, and, if so, as a judgment it is nothing, or else its meaning and consequence fall somewhere beyond that knowledge which at the moment we possess. We must hold on to this truth in the case of affirmative judgments, and apply it, certainly with not less strictness, when we deal with negation.]:All this is excellent.

 

p. 667/19-20

[But, if at least we view the Universe as a whole …] u/l: See p. 650.

 

p. 699/27-29

[What you have so far is a ‘real’ which (if you please) may be said to lie below possibility.]: See p. 706.

 

p. 700/10-13

[… I shall take as an instance here the sphere of things as happening and enduring in time—the region, that is, which often is called the ‘real world’ of Common Sense, and which is better termed ‘existence.’]: The trouble with this is that it seems to imply that only what is in accordance with Common Sense really ‘exists’. It seems unfortunate to link ‘Common Sense’ and ‘existence’, though certainly the ‘world of Common Sense’ is useful—see p. 702.

 

p. 702/8-9

[… the idea that only in ‘existence’ can anything actual be found seems cleanly untenable.]: See p. 700. (If anything can ‘be found’, it must in some sense ‘exist’.)

 

p. 702/11-37

[Far from having but one world we all, I presume, live in worlds many and of diverse kinds. And even to conclude that but one of these worlds is ‘real’ will hardly warrant the result that no other can be actual. On the contrary this distinction of ‘actual’ and ‘possible’ is used habitually within those very worlds which, taken as imaginary, we oppose to ‘existence.’ We speak, for example, of actual and possible occurrences in a novel; and how could this be, if such events were, all alike, merely possible?

… There is a valid distinction between that which is absolutely possible and that which, on the other hand, is but possible relatively or possibly … The possible always is partly real, but that reality, which it involves and on which it stands, may either be real absolutely, or, again, may be something less which we take for our purpose as real. Hence the imaginary existence, though merely conditional as against that existence which is absolute and actual, may, by a legitimate abstraction from its conditional character, be used as actual and real. And, by a permissible artifice, this secondary existence may further be taken to serve as itself the ‘actual’ basis of possibilities within itself, and so on indefinitely. Hence in any possible world we can have possibilities to which this world is opposed as actual.]: This is very good.

 

p. 703/24-25

[… if by ‘existence’ we mean the ‘real world’ of fact and event, …]: See p. 700.

 

p. 704/19-27

[Certainly the world of truth is on my view pervaded by inconsistency. It claims on the one hand to be itself actually a grounded system, where every element is there and each is actual. And in such a world the ‘more or less actual or possible’ can hold only with regard to differences in amount of reality. Truths will be more or less dependent, as reigning over and as standing on a less or greater area of the common ground, and as containing, each within itself, less or more of the total system.]: The world of propositions, inhabited by logicians.

 

p. 706/6-11

The mind’s presence [… shows itself again within logic, when, as applied to existence, it is termed Designation or pointing. Employed, as above, to mark and distinguish a point of departure within the world of truth, this felt presence (I would repeat) is no temporal event, nor is it borrowed from what we call Time.]: Is this about the ego?

 

p. 706/17

[… the fact of feeling …] u/l: Perhaps Bradley uses ‘feeling’ in the sense of ‘subjectivity’.

 

p. 707/2-4

[… actuality is the mark of an individual, an individual that is at once above more immediacy and, again, superior to any mere grounding.]: God and the Universe?

 

p. 707/31-35

[… we must even be careful as to what we mean if we go on to add that the Universe itself is actual.]: We must indeed!

 

p. 716/1-8

[Practical activity, in the first place, can not consist in a mere sequence of events and in a consequence which simply happens. An alteration of existence is, by itself, clearly not an activity. And practice in the proper sense involves, on my view, an idea which carries itself out into the changed fact, and, by and in that issuing change, so realizes itself. And, apart from the self-realization of an idea, there is not, I contend, any such thing as an experienced activity.]: If this statement is equivalent to Sartre’s (in L’Être et le Néant, p. 556): Si l’acte n’est pas pur mouvement, il doit ce définir per une intention’—then it is correct. ‘Intention’ can be taken as an absence that becomes a presence. This is Bradley’s ‘self-realization of an idea’.

 

p. 716/24-30

[And further, since in practice the idea is felt as in opposition to the existing fact, the subject, which the idea qualifies and to which it belongs, must itself be at once over against the mere fact, and yet actually real. A real world, other then what merely exists, is hence involved in the essence of all practical activity, and something belonging to such a world is, in practice everywhere, judged to be real.] and

 

p. 717/16-20

[To say that, in every experience of a something ‘not there’ and ‘yet to be,’ I realize to myself that there is a world other than and opposed to the actual fact, and that in this world I knowingly place my idea as real—would to my mind be ridiculous.] and

 

p. 718/fn.

all three passages are indicated by arrows pointing to them originating from the single word (on p. 716, margin): Teleology.

 

p. 717/16-32

[To say that … ridiculous. For no such consciousness as the above belongs necessarily to all judgment, nor can it belong to any judgment if that is taken as below a certain level of reflection. On the other hand judgment actual in its full essence, though not as yet reflective, is a fact which to me is familiar and constant; and it is in this sense of judgment that I have insisted on its necessary presence in practice. And a failure here to keep the right path may in two opposite ways bring disaster. We may deny the implication of any judgment, and perhaps of any idea, in practical activity. Or, on the other side, we may insist on the unfailing presence there of one or both in a form which collides ruinously with the actual fact.] ‘experience of a something “not there” and “yet to be,”’ and ‘below a certain level of reflection’ are both u/l, the entire passage is noted: Yes.

 

p. 717/33

[Passing from this point I will now deal briefly with a second mistake. In this it is admitted that idea and judgment are present in all practical activity, but judgment and idea are taken to refer merely to a future event. Their completed issue and result in a consequent fact is that which (according to this view) is affirmed by the judgment. Hence (it may be added) there is no world other than that mere sequence of events in which existence consists. The facts, as they happen, are everywhere the one sole reality, and it is nothing (in any case) but the future fact which is anticipated in practice and so judged to be real.]: Yes. The point is that the future is essentially underdetermined. See NoD, FS.

 

p. 718/fn.

[How far (a) must that which in practice I feel as a ‘not-here,’ be also even felt as a ‘not-yet,’ and a ‘to be hereafter’? It is when this question is answered that we arrive at the further problem—‘How far (b) does and must all that I feel in practical activity, itself enter into that which the idea affirms?] noted

 

p. 718/fn.

[And both of these aspects at once will now be essential in and to practical activity. Hence, without the affirmed reality of that which, none the less, is to realize itself in the coming ‘hereafter,’ and which yet itself is so qualified actually and now, the essence of our experience as practical will have been missed.]: i.e. as not this. Very good. See NoD, a note on paṭiccasamuppāda §14.

 

p. 719/fn.

[For the very meaning of practice is that something, real in another world, is to realize itself in the world of existing events.]: See Sartre and Heidegger.

 

p. 719/fn.

[And fasten your eyes on time’s process, and regard the future as something which is merely to come about or to become done—and you have shut out that ideal, emptied of which the future event or action has become worthless, since it now realizes nothing. Remove in short the contradiction, and you have abolished that which makes practice to be itself, as a fact and as a human value.]: Yes—except the contradiction can be accounted for. See FS.

 

p. 720/7-8

[Reality as a bare succession of passing events is itself self-contradictory; …] u/l: Yes—but Bradley is not able to resolve the self-contradiction (which rests on B’s idea of time).

 

p. 728/bottom

: 3.5.1964