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ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES. 343 former point, as it is clear that if the Principle of the impos- sibility of self-contradiction in the Real can be shown not to be ultimate, it will follow that Mr. Bradley was wrong in taking it to be such. My first question must be to inquire what shall be held to constitute such self-contradiction as will render a supposed reality amenable to the jurisdiction of the absolute criterion? Mr. Bradley appears to hold that any quibble will suffice to bring an aspirant to reality before the revolutionary tribunal of his incorruptible philosophy, and that an unguarded phrase, such as ordinary language can scarcely abstain from, is evi- dence enough for ordering off to instant execution the wretched " appearance " which had dared to simulate "reality". But surely justice should require some more decisive proof of iniquity than the fact that something which claims to be real can be formulated in what appear to be contradictory terms ? For may it not be the contradiction rather than the reality which is 'appearance'? Yet such apparent contradic- tion is all that Mr. Bradley's negative dialectics seem in the great majority of instances to prove. It is a result which does not astonish me, but seems to be of little value. In words everything can be made to look contradictory, and Mr. Bradley has but completed the work of Gorgias and Zeno, with his own peculiar brilliance and incisiveness. But I do not see that this necessarily proves more than that language has not yet been rendered wholly adequate to the description of reality. And it ought not to be necessary to remind serious thinkers that to dazzle the spectators by a display of dialectical fire- works is not to explain the universe. The most illusory of seeming realities is worthy, not merely of being ridden down and "riddled with contradictions" and left for dead upon the field, but also of being understood. And I am at a loss to see how to call it self-contradictory and then immediately to invoke a self-subsistent, inaccessible Absolute, which in- cludes all appearances and transcends all apprehension and inexplicably atones for the incurable defects of our actual experience, is to explain it, or anything else whatsoever. As against such cavalier methods I should protest that only propositions are properly contradictory, that only a reasoning being can contradict itself, and that it is an abuse of language to describe our use of incompatible statements about the same reality as an inherent contradiction in the reality itself. Indeed I should combat Mr. Bradley's con- tention that everything sooner or later turns out to be self- contradictory with the axiom that nothing ivhich exists, in