APPENDIX D 



BOSANQ^UET'S HEGELIAN ANALYSIS OF 

 'THE CONCRETE UNIVERSAL' 



A GOOD Statement of the organic principle (whether 'vicious' 

 or not may be, ultimately, a matter of taste) is found in 

 - Bosanquet's Gifford Lectures (191 1) published under the 

 title of The Principle of Individuality and Value (especially in Lecture 

 II, on 'The Concrete Universal'). Like Taine in the last book of 

 On Intelligence,'^ Bosanquet uses the principle of non-contradiction: 

 'The endeavour to remove contradiction in experience is therefore 

 more successful when it explicitly assumes a further shape, such 

 as is indicated by the term "a whole of parts", "an organism", 

 "a system", or more generally "a world". '2 However, he goes 

 further in the direction of accepting Hegel's dialectical principle: 

 'The universal in the form of a world refers to diversity of content 

 within every member, as the universal in the form of a class 

 neglects it. Such a diversity recognized as a unity, a macrocosm con- 

 stituted by microcosms, is the type of the concrete universal.' ^ 

 In this view, the only concrete universal is the individual itself, 

 fully understood: 'We conclude, then, that the Individual is one 

 in idea with the true infinite, and is the embodiment of the concrete 

 universal, which is the universal as asserting itself to the full 

 through identity and through difference together. It is complete and 

 coherent — characters whose connection is established by the rela- 

 tion above drawn out between wholeness and non-contradiction. 

 And in the ultimate sense there can be only one Individual''^ The last 

 sentence points in the direction of a cosmic Absolute, which, in 

 some versions, is called God. 



In general, such an extension of the concrete universal concept 

 seems to be most congenial to idealist-aesthetic philosophies, like 

 that of Bosanquet (and of Hegel, from whom Bosanquet derives) . 



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