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On the other hand, the romantic type of art, like every other, needs an external mode of expression. But the spiritual has now retired from the outer mode into itself, and the sensuous externality of form assumes again, as it did in symbolic art, an insignificant and transient character.
Not the self of externality. Not the self that says "I am a white man; or a black man; or a yellow man; or a red man." That says "I am John Smith" or any other name. The awareness of this kind of selfhood, this personal self, is like looking at one's reflection in the mirror and saying, "Ah, I have on a becoming attire," or "my face looks sickly to-day."
The relation of natural objects to one another and their action upon one another is an external one: they are governed by mechanical necessity, and the contingency of influences from without arrests and disturbs their development, so that while reason is everywhere discernible in nature, it is not reason alone; and much that is illogical, contrary to purpose, lawless, painful, and unhealthy, points to the fact that the essence of nature consists in externality.
But when, in the Song of Myself, he writes, "We found our own, O my Soul, in the calm and cool of the daybreak," he sets before us no imitation of habituated externality, but in a flash reminds us by suggestion of so much, that to recount the full experience thereof would necessitate a volume.
Deeply corporealised, and enchained hopelessly in the grovelling fetters of externality, must be the mind, to which, in its better moments, the image of the high-souled, high-intelligenced Quixote the errant Star of Knighthood, made more tender by eclipse has never presented itself, divested from the unhallowed accompaniment of a Sancho, or a rabblement at the heels of Rosinante.
There is no important distinction to be made between the method or the thoroughness with which he collected his facts in the one case or the other; and the story of the war of the mercenaries against the Carthaginians is evolved with the same alternation of picture and dramatic spectacle and the same hard merciless externality that distinguish the evolution of Emma Bovary's history.
As regards the self, Bergson recognizes that we have much to gain by keeping up the illusion through which we make our conscious states share in the reciprocal externality of outer things, because this distinctness and solidification enables us to give them fixed names in spite of their instability, and distinct names in spite of their interpenetration.
Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world, as Clifford called it, the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind.
I have some difficulty about the psychology implied in this doctrine: surely the apparent externality of the religious command seems to belong to a fairly common type of experience, in which the personality is divided, so that first one part of it and then another emerges into consciousness.
and he then concludes that 'Irrationality and externality cannot be the last truth about things. Somewhere there must be a reason why this and that appear together. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis. Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an ignoratio elenchi? It is impossible to admit it to be such.
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