and inquest is just as to whether parts which you can abstract from existing wholes can also contribute to other wholes without changing their inner nature.  If they can thus mould various wholes into new gestalt-qualitaeten, then it follows that the same elements are logically able to exist in different wholes [whether physically able would depend on additional hypotheses]; that partial changes are thinkable, and through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity; that monism is only an hypothesis; and that an additively constituted universe is a rationally respectable hypothesis also.  All the theses of radical empiricism, in short, follow.]

to be the full bradleyan answer.  The ‘whole’ which he here treats as primary and determinative of each part’s manner of ‘contributing,’ simply must, when it alters, alter in its entirety.  There must be total conflux of its parts, each into and through each other.  The ‘must’ appears here as a Machtspruch, as an ipse dixit of Mr. Bradley’s absolutistically tempered ‘understanding,’ for he candidly confesses that how the parts do differ as they contribute to different wholes, is unknown to him (p. 578).

Although I have every wish to comprehend the authority by which Mr. Bradley’s understanding speaks, his words leave me wholly unconverted.  ‘External relations’ stand with their withers all unwrung, and remain, for aught he proves to the contrary, not only practically workable, but also perfectly intelligible factors of reality.

VI

Mr. Bradley’s understanding shows the most extraordinary power of perceiving separations and the most extraordinary impotence in comprehending conjunctions.  One would naturally say ‘neither or both,’ but not so Mr. Bradley.  When a common man analyzes certain whats from out the stream of experience, he understands their distinctness as thus isolated.  But this does not prevent him from equally well understanding their combination with each other as originally experienced in the concrete, or their confluence with new sensible experiences in which they recur as ‘the same.’  Returning into the stream of sensible presentation, nouns and adjectives, and thats and abstract whats, grow confluent again, and the word ‘is’ names all these experiences of conjunction.  Mr. Bradley understands the isolation of the abstracts, but to understand the combination is to him impossible.[1] ‘To understand a complex AB,’ he

[Footnote 1:  So far as I catch his state of mind, it is somewhat like this:  ‘Book,’ ‘table,’ ’on’—­how does the existence of these three abstract elements result in this book being livingly on this table?  Why isn’t the table on the book?  Or why doesn’t the ‘on’ connect itself with another book, or something that is not a table?  Mustn’t something in each of the three elements already determine the two others