might yet be called free: for nothing in the world would be contrary to its will, nor could determine it to an unwilling activity. Supposing this condition were realized, would there be any solid ground for saying that the creative mind was a perfect personality and the created minds were not: and if the condition is not realized does it not prove that there are internal discords in the creator's work, and that there must therefore be discord and incoherence in his nature? It hardly seems pressing logic too far to urge that if the created minds could not be perfect persons, the creative mind could not have been perfect either. We had better, however, proceed further to examine the alleged connexion of finitude and imperfection.

§3. The Alleged Imperfection of
Finite Personality

LET us dismiss therefore the contention that there

It seems metaphysically many and that the many

can be only one true person. certain both that there are cannot be reduced to one. Does it follow that metaphysics is proving impossible what ethics demands as necessary? That though only finite persons exist, no finite person could be thoroughly good? We have now to consider the familiar view that limitation involves positive evil: that if persons differ they must differ for better or worse. Let us consider too, in the first instance, the effects of limitation as such, so far as is possible, not merely of the peculiar limitations of our own lives. In the first place it may be suggested that a finite person cannot satisfy the demands of coherence and harmony which must be satisfied in true personality. In what sense such harmony is really good shall be examined

later. For the present let it be noticed that a finite person need not be disharmonious. So far as some element in his surroundings imposes an alien will upon him, and makes him do things that he would wish to escape, there is a lack of harmony between his desires and his compulsory activities. But this discord arises not from his limitation simply, but from the failure of the environment to correspond with his wishes, or to give him scope for the actions he regards as best. Such a failure, it must at once be admitted, exists everywhere in the world we know: and as a result the persons of this world are not completely harmonious beings. But this does not appear to be a necessary result of the finitude, nor to demonstrate that a perfect world would not include or even consist of finite persons.

We must pass on to more substantial indictments. It is also suggested that finite beings must of their own nature behave imperfectly: that their minds must be limited in the sense that they are incapable of a full grasp of truth or of a will devoted to the good: that their activities must be imperfect in the sense of perverted.

First as to knowledge. It is supposed that the knowledge of finite beings must be imperfect. The creature can never know the creator, we are told, and so God's nature is hidden from our waking thoughts at any rate. Or when the vocabulary of science is preferred, how shall the intellect, itself a product of evolution, grasp the process that led to its own production? But such a question, whatever its precise formulation, is purely rhetorical at bottom: for it is neither self-evident that a part could not grasp the whole to which it belongs, nor is real ground offered from which this could be inferred. Yet

the influence of this line of thinking is sometimes felt even where no such conclusions are reached. It is often supposed that even if individuals could know a truth that is universal, so far as knowledge is attained individuality disappears. What separates one from others is something personal and peculiar to him. Scientific knowledge of the world is neither yours nor mine. The truth, because it is the truth, belongs to nobody.

All through the Hegelian Logic this personal indifference of the truth is insisted on. Thought is not a mere subjective activity, and it really exists most truly where individual opinion or prejudice has disappeared. 'In point of contents thought is only true in proportion as it sinks itself in the facts: and in point of form it is no private or particular state or act of the subject, but rather that attitude of consciousness when the abstract self, freed from all the special limitations to which its ordinary states or qualities are liable, restricts itself to that universal action in which it is identical with all individuals.'1 Or in more difficult language' We may say I and thought are the same, or more definitely I is thought as thinker'.2 To elucidate exactly this last sentence would require a study of Hegelianism as a whole. But what it means may be compared with the doctrine of Aristotle about the two elements in the subject-mind, the one particular and the source of all particular feelings, sensations, and imaginings, the other universal, and in the true sense neither yours nor mine. It thinks in us', some one has concisely stated this doctrine; and this impersonal reason alone has immortality. On this line of

thought so far as men were pure intelligences they could not be individually different. To take a quotation from 2 Ibid., p. 48.

1 Hegel, Logic, p. 45 (Wallace's Translation).

a modern thinker: 'Men may no doubt be distinguished from one another by what they know and how they know it. But such distinction depends on the limitations and imperfections of knowledge... If A and B both knew X as it really is, this would give no separate nature to A and B.'1

I believe this view to be entirely mistaken, and moreover to rest in the end on that very mistake which it condemns. It is put forward against subjectivist theories which can see nothing in thought but the constructions of this man or that man, and suppose accordingly that what is so constructed must be this man's or that man's world. Yet in arguing against these conclusions it tacitly assumes that if thought were in any sense a subjective activity this would follow: and to save the universal validity of the object it thereupon denies the particularity of the subject. But just as it does not follow that because I am a particular person I cannot know a world that belongs to all and none, so too it will be quite conceivable that equally true knowledge of the one real world should exist in a number of different individuals. Here, as so constantly in these discussions, we are stumbling against a common ambiguity in words. like 'thought'. Thought can mean both the object to which reference is made and the conscious activity that makes the reference.2 When it is said my thought is mine only, that is true if you refer to the thinking: when it is said my thought is in no exclusive sense mine at all, that is also true supposing that you are referring to the object grasped and that my thought is accurate. There

1 McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, p. 284.

2 Cp. the double use of perception as perceptor and perceiving: or of judgement as both the judging and the facts judged to be real.

fore in one sense two thoughts about the same object cannot be true and different: in another sense they cannot in any case be the same.

If in the light of this discussion we ask, Could individuals exist if they could do nothing but think, and all thought correctly? it is perfectly plain that they could. If it is still asked what would differentiate them seeing that they did nothing but think and that they all thought alike, it may be replied that there is nothing to differentiate them except the fact that one of them is this thinker, another of them that thinker: but this difference is quite enough. If it is not absurd to suppose three savants in a learned discussion at some point having each of them the same idea in their minds, are we to suppose that nothing would differentiate them except that their thoughts-in which we will suppose them entirely lostwere connected with different bodily organizations and vague semi-conscious organic sensations? This would be to suppose that nothing but what for the persons concerned is practically non-existent prevents the good savants from tumbling into one. But the existence of a learned world does not depend on unsolved controversies. There is no reason why there should not be a number of different thinkers even though they all did nothing but think of the same facts. Indeed, although in some quarters it is the

1 It might be possible to refer here to some such distinction as that which Mr. Russell draws between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, and urge that the former at any rate cannot be shared by all. Each man experiences his own feelings and so knows them directly in a way that nobody else can. I am inclined to question whether these experiences are themselves pieces of knowledge, and so whether it is true that they represent exclusive individual knowledge. But in any case I do not think that this need invalidate the point I am urging that different minds need not think differently on the same questions if they are to remain separate.