Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/360

346 F. C. S. SCHILLER I to carry the policy of ' thorough ' to an excess which renders his whole method unendurable. If only he had exempted a few trifles, like religion and morality, from this reduction to illusion, we might have tolerated his onslaughts on the abstractions of metaphysics ; as it is there is nothing that can withstand the onset of his awful Absolute. Now if anything of the sort had happened to a philosophic argument of my own, I should have been appalled. I should have felt that something had gone wrong, that some secret source of error must have sprung up somewhere, or that I must somehow have misunderstood my principle. If the result of my intellectual manipulations of the world had been to convict it of radical absurdity, I should have re- garded this as a reflexion, not on the universe, but on the method I had used. I should have felt I had failed intel- lectually, and must try again in another way. I should never have dared to condemn the universe in reliance on so protracted an argument from so narrow a basis. In the last resort I might even have doubted the validity of my principle. I should certainly have doubted its application. Mr. Bradley, apparently, is exempt from any such scruples, but, at the risk of making a deplorable exhibition of the crassest 'common-sense,' I must submit that a system which culminates in so huge a paradox thereby discredits its foundations. And so Mr. Bradley's final Ascension from the sphere of Appearances and Keception into the bosom of the Absolute reminds me of nothing so much as of the fabled ' rope-trick ' of the Indian jugglers. II. Only a strong conviction of its necessity, together with a habit of outspokenness learnt from Mr. Bradley's own ex- ample, could have embarked me on so painful a criticism of the cardinal doctrine of Appearance and Keality. Before sophy the purest scepticism or rather nihilism, but I cannot but regard it as thoroughly indefensible, and even unintelligible. For, as Mr. H. V. Knox has pointed out to me, it seems impossible even to state it without recurring to a number of the lower categories which Mr. Bradley had previously invalidated. Otherwise the consideration of the different amounts of rearrangement required for the " conversion " of " appear- ances" into the Absolute, of the greater or less intervals separating them from it, of the varying lengths of time needed to see through an appear- ance, would seem" to be simply irrelevant, and unable to establish the distinctions of kind among appearances which are aimed at. Yet strangely enough, Time, Space and Quantity have themselves been written down as "mere appearances" (Appear, and Real., pp. 362, 364,. 369, etc., first ed.).