ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES. 345 But it is not our sole resource. An apparent contradiction can be cleared out of the road to harmony by other means than a course of dialectics terminating in a flight to an asylum ignorantia, miscalled the Absolute. (1) I would venture therefore to remind Mr. Bradley of many excellent things he has himself said about the immediacy of feeling. {'2) It would seem that in certain modes of aesthetic con- templation the so-called self-contradictions of the discursive reason may vanish into a self-evident harmony. (3) It is well known that our immediate experience enables us to accept, without scruple or discomfort, as given and ultimate fact what philosophers have vainly essayed for centuries to construe to thought. The fact of change is perhaps the most flagrant example. But in the last resort our own -existence, and that of the world, is similarly inconceivable and underivable for a philosophy which makes a point of honour of systematically denying the factual, and labours vainly to reduce all immediate " acquaintance with " to discursive " knowledge about ". And lastly, (4) if the worst should come to the worst, the solution ambulando which in this instance we may translate "by going on" is always open to a philosophy which has not wantonly in- sisted on closing the last door to hope by assuming 'the unreality of " time" (i.e. of the experience-process). For these reasons then I am forced to conclude that Mr. Bradley, in appealing to the principle that the Eeal is not
- self-contradictory, has not succeeded in expressing it in its
complete and ultimate form. His "absolute criterion" is not the whole, but a part of the greater principle of Harmony. And inasmuch as our experience is plainly not as yet harmonious, it is clear that the principle is a Postulate. We must conceive the Eeal to be harmonious, not because we have any formal and a priori assurance of the fact, but because we desire it to be so and are willing to try whether it is not so. (2) Mj r second charge can be dealt with more summarily. It concerns the immense disproportion between the founda- tion of Mr. Bradley's system and the superstructure he has built upon it. Mr. Bradley argues from his absolute criterion to the conclusion that everything which is ordinarily esteemed real, everything which any one can know or care about, is pervaded with unreality, is " mere appearance " in a greater or less degree of degradation. 1 In this Mr. Bradley appears 1 1 cannot here criticise this " doctrine of degrees " as fully as it deserves. It appears to be the only obstacle to our accounting Mr. Bradley's philo-
