to it, so that they do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely?  Mustn’t the whole fact be prefigured in each part, and exist de jure before it can exist de facto?  But, if so, in what can the jural existence consist, if not in a spiritual miniature of the whole fact’s constitution actuating; every partial factor as its purpose?  But is this anything but the old metaphysical fallacy of looking behind a fact in esse for the ground of the fact, and finding it in the shape of the very same fact in posse?  Somewhere we must leave off with a constitution behind which there is nothing.]

says, ’I must begin with A or B.  And beginning, say with A, if I then merely find B, I have either lost A, or I have got beside A, [the word ‘beside’ seems here vital, as meaning a conjunction ‘external’ and therefore unintelligible] something else, and in neither case have I understood.[1] For my intellect cannot simply unite a diversity, nor has it in itself any form or way of togetherness, and you gain nothing if, beside A and B, you offer me their conjunction in fact.  For to my intellect that is no more than another external element.  And “facts,” once for all, are for my intellect not true unless they satisfy it....  The intellect has in its nature no principle of mere togetherness’ (pp. 570, 572).

Of course Mr. Bradley has a right to define ‘intellect’ as the power by which we perceive separations but not unions—­provided he give due notice to the reader.  But why then claim that such a maimed and amputated power must reign supreme in philosophy, and accuse on its behoof the whole empirical world of irrationality?  It is true that he elsewhere (p. 568) attributes to the intellect a proprius motus of transition, but says that

[Footnote 1:  Apply this to the case of ‘book-on-table’!  W.J.]

when he looks for these transitions in the detail of living experience, he ‘is unable to verify such a solution’ (p. 569).

Yet he never explains what the intellectual transitions would be like in case we had them.  He only defines them negatively—­they are not spatial, temporal, predicative, or causal; or qualitatively or otherwise serial; or in any way relational as we naively trace relations, for relations separate terms, and need themselves to be hooked on ad infinitum.  The nearest approach he makes to describing a truly intellectual transition is where he speaks of A and B as being ’united, each from its own nature, in a whole which is the nature of both alike’ (p. 570).  But this (which, pace Mr. Bradley, seems exquisitely analogous to ‘taking a congeries in a lump,’ if not to ‘swamping’) suggests nothing but that conflux which pure experience so abundantly offers, as when ‘space,’ ‘white,’ and ‘sweet’ are confluent in a ‘lump of sugar,’ or kinesthetic, dermal, and optical sensations confluent in ’my hand.’[1] All that I can verify in the transitions which Mr. Bradley’s intellect desiderates as its proprius motus is a reminiscence of these and other sensible conjunctions (especially space-conjunctions),