Note 9 — JOCASTA

Or again, these positions might be illustrated in their respective attitudes to size. The collective-realist thinks of society as a big, symbolical unit, the individual-realist as a small, concrete unit. The unreal self does not think of size, or of society, as significant concepts at all. The collective-realist makes the individual emotionally as large as the many. The individual-realist makes the individual intellectually as large as himself—that is, of a standard realistic size. The unreal self gets rid of even the fractional reality of the self of the individual-realist: it is not the quantitative nothing derided by Mr. Lewis, but a sizeless invisibility from reality. Mr. Lewis disapproves of nothing; and he disapproves of Bradley’s Absolute because ‘he did not succeed in relieving it of a certain impressive scale and impending weight.’ What he seems to imply is an Absolute temperately placed between all and nothing—a sort of safely quantitative qualitative absolute; a short, certain, academic eternity as opposed to a vulgar, tentatively eternal eternity; a small, well-bred, provincial church in which to worship a congregationalist Absolute as opposed to a popular arena erected to a universalist (demogogic as opposed to pedagogic) Absolute.