1 88 HUMANISM 



XI 



which I vainly look for in that of contradiction. It 

 forms a postulate higher and more ultimate than that of 

 non-contradiction, which indeed seems to be only a special 

 case thereof, viz. that of a harmony among the contents 

 of our thought. The contradictory involves a jar or 

 discord in the mind, which most people in their normal 

 condition feel to be unpleasant (when they perceive it), 

 and this is the first and immediate reason why we avoid 

 contradictions and reject the contradictory. The second 

 reason is that our Thinking rests on the Principle of 

 Contradiction, and that if we admitted the contradictory, 

 we should have (if we were consistent) to give up thinking. 

 But thinking is too inveterate a habit (at least in some of 

 us), and on the whole too useful, to permit of the serious 

 adoption of this alternative. 



Thus the struggle to avoid and remove contradictions 

 appears as an integral part of the great cosmic striving 

 towards satisfaction, harmony, and equilibrium, in which 

 even the inanimate appears more suo to participate. 1 In 

 this struggle the intellectual machinery which works by 

 the Principle of Contradiction plays an important part, 

 and we should fare but ill without its aid. 



But it is not our sole resource. An apparent contra 

 diction can be cleared out of the road to harmony by 

 other means than a course of dialectics terminating in a 

 flight to an asylum ignoranticz, miscalled the Absolute, 

 (i) I would venture therefore to remind Mr. Bradley of 

 many excellent things he has himself said about the 

 immediacy of feeling. (2) It would seem that in certain 

 modes of aesthetic contemplation the so-called self-con 

 tradictions of the discursive reason may vanish into a 

 self-evident harmony. (3) It is well known that our 

 immediate experience enables us to accept, without scruple 

 or discomfort, as given and ultimate fact what philo 

 sophers have vainly essayed for centuries to construe to 

 thought. The fact of change is perhaps the most flagrant 

 example. But in the last resort our own existence, 

 and that of the world, is similarly inconceivable and 



1 See p. 214. 



