n
unchanged' although the thing be altered; or his admission that in
red-hairedness, both as analyzed out of a man and when given with
the rest of him, there may be 'no change' (p. 580). Why does he
immediately add that for the pluralist to plead the non-mutation of
such abstractions would be an _ignoratio elenchi_? It is impossible to
admit it to be such. The entire _elenchus_ and inquest is just as to
whether parts which you can abstract from existing wholes can also
contribute to other wholes without changing their inner nature. If
they can thus mould various wholes into new _gestalt-qualitaeten_,
then it follows that the same elements are logically able to exist in
different wholes [whether physically able would depend on
additional hypotheses]; that partial changes are thinkable, and
through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity; that monism is
only an hypothesis; and that an additively constituted universe is
a rationally respectable hypothesis also. All the theses of radical
empiricism, in short, follow.]

to be the full bradleyan answer. The 'whole' which he here treats as
primary and determinative of each part's manner of 'contributing,'
simply _must_, when it alters, alter in its entirety. There _must_
be total conflux of its parts, each into and through each other. The
'must' appears here as a _Machtspruch_, as an _ipse dixit_ of Mr.
Bradley's absolutistically tempered 'understanding,' for he candidly
confesses that how the parts _do_ differ as they contribute to
different wholes, is unknown to him (p. 578).

Although I have every wish to comprehend the authority by which Mr.
Bradley's understanding speaks, his words leave me wholly unconverted.
'External relations' stand with their withers all unwrung, and remain,
for aught he proves to the contrary, not only practically workable,
but also perfectly intelligible factors of reality.

VI

Mr. Bradley's understanding shows the most extraordinary power of
perceiving separations and the most extraordinary impotence in
comprehending conjunctions. One would naturally say 'neither or both,'
but not so Mr. Bradley. When a common man analyzes certain _whats_
from out the stream of experience, he understands their distinctness
_as thus isolated_. But this does not prevent him from equally well
understanding their combination with each other as _originally
experienced in the concrete_, or their confluence with new sensible
experiences in which they recur