THE RATIONALE OF PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 777 



Now if this process of looking at things as a whole 

 and not in their isolation has become the order of the 

 day even in special researches, as can be proved not 

 only by the references to foregoing chapters but also, 

 still more convincingly, by glancing, if only cursorily, 

 at recent philosophical writings, it surely must recom- 

 mend itself also in dealing with the totality of things 

 as revealed to us through consciousness. And this 

 looking at wholes is our mental attitude when we 

 take the introspective view. 1 For introspection includes 

 likewise the circumspection to which in the Introduction 

 to this section we found it convenient to oppose it. 

 For whilst the circumspective process or the external 

 view could find no place in its field of vision for the 

 inner or mental world, the introspective view on the 

 other side comprises the whole of the outer world as a 

 large and prominent portion within the field of its 

 vision, in the form of definite sensations and the whole 

 train of ideas connected with them. The unity which 

 we are in search of in philosophical thought certainly 



1 "At any moment my actual 

 experience, however relational its 

 contents, is in the end non-rela- 

 tional. No analysis into relations 

 and terms can ever exhaust its 

 nature or fail in the end to belie 

 its essence. What analysis leaves 

 for ever outstanding is no mere 

 residue, but is a vital condition of 

 the analysis itself. Everything 

 which is got out into the form of 

 an object implies still the felt 

 background against which the 

 object comes, and, further, the 

 whole experience of both feeling 

 and object is a non-relational im- 

 mediately felt unity. The entire 

 relational consciousness, in short, 



is experienced as falling within 

 a direct awareness. This direct 

 awareness is itself non-relational. 

 It escapes from all attempts to 

 exhibit it by analysis as one 

 or more elements in a relational 

 scheme, or as that scheme itself. 

 . . . And immediate experience 

 not only escapes, but it serves as 

 the basis on which the analysis is 

 made. . . . Everything, therefore, 

 no matter how objective and how 

 relational, is experienced only in 

 feeling, and, so far as it is ex- 

 perienced, still depends upon feel- 

 ing." (F. H. Bradley, 'Essays on 

 Truth and Reality,' 1914, p. 176.) 



