ME. F. H. BEADLEY'S ANALYSIS OF MIND. 575

presentations. 1 Now it seems to me that some reflection might have shown Mr. Bradley that relations are not generally events that of subject and object is not and that relations between presentations often do not " exist " (i.e., are not given) till they are made. So far from activity being resolvable into a relation between presentations, it is not possible, I maintain, to explain the psychological relations of presentations except we start from psychical activity. I cannot do better in this connexion than quote a passage Mr. Bradley has himself cited : " In the very lowest stage of psychical existence we can still point to a central activity, and verify there a rudiment of inference. And a soul, so far as we are able to see, would be no soul at all if it had not this centre." 2 "An inference," this same writer elsewhere ex- plains, "cannot wholly come in from without or be passively received." Between inferring and relating, it need hardly be said, there is more than an etymological connexion. To smri up ; In spite of his great astuteness and ability, Mr. Brad- ley has, it seems to me, involved himself in inconsistency and con- fusion, because he has not merely forsworn all speculation, but repudiated also the fundamental conceptions from which specu- lation starts : his procedure is much like bleeding yourself to death to guard against blood-poisoning. A cursory survey of knowledge discloses two limits what is beyond our reach and what is too near to reach. The nearer limit only affects psy- chology, and Mr. Bradley, in essaying to treat psychology as a natural science, has ignored this peculiarity : because he can't see his own eyes, he seems to think he must say he hasn't any. He denies activity to mind as a whole, but allows its elements to struggle towards an independent totality. Out of this psychical machinery he tries to develop its own presuppositions, and smuggles into it what is really distinct from it and is its only motive-power. The plausibility and the hopelessness of such a task suggests a certain parallel to the old dreams of perpetual motion. 1 Mr. Bradley, supposing me to have said that activity contains a relation, invites me to say, further, whether the terms of the relation are presentations ; or, if not that, what else they are as if no other possibility were conceivable. All I meant was that an act of attention may be simple and original, albeit the conception of it is composite and derivative, not possible till we have first acquired the ideas of a self and a not-self, and got to know that changes in the latter ensue upon modes of the former a point irrelevant enough to the main question, on which Mr. Bradley- keeps insisting still. 2 Principles of Logic, 3, p. 456.