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ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES. .".17 proceeding from it to the easier and more congenial task of expounding what I conceive to be the real relation of these conceptions, I must however add a word on a point already hinted at, viz., that Mr. Bradley has not really extricated us from that slough of agnosticism, to which their more porcine instincts are ever drawing back even philosophers to wallow. Indeed his facetious remark about Mr. Spencer's Unknow- able 1 might, with quite as much propriety, be applied to his own Absolute. For though he has reserved for it the title of Sole and Supreme Keality, it is only used to cast an indel- ible slur on all human reality and knowledge. It absorbs, transcends, transmutes, etc., all our knowledge and experi- ence. It is therefore quite as unknowable as Mr. Spencer's monstrosity, and adds insult to injury by dubbing us and our concerns " mere appearances ". And after all the scorn we have seen poured on the futility of an unknowable reality as the explanation of anything, it passes my comprehension how these consequences of his doctrine should have escaped the notice, I do not say of his disciples, but of Mr. Bradley's- own acuteness, It is useless however to speculate how far Mr. Bradley knows himself to be a sceptic, until he chooses to confess, and I proceed to state what I conceive to be the true relation of reality to appearance. Mr. Bradley's funda- mental error seems to me to be his %w^to-/io?, the separation he has effected between them by violently disrupting their continuity. Once we do this, we are lost. The ' reality * we have severed from its ' appearances ' can never be regained, and we remain, as Mr. Bradley holds, enmeshed in a web of appearances, and impotent to attain a knowledge or experience of Eeality. But all this appears to be the consequence of a gratuitous error of judgment. We should never have admitted that in grasping a higher reality we were abandoning the reality of the lower. In the ascent to Truth we can never lose touch with a continuous reality. I should liken the advance of knowledge to a severe rock- climb on which we must secure our handhold and our foot- hold at every step. Rightly used, the rope of metaphysical speculation is an added safeguard which unites the workers at their different posts ; it must not be made into an instrument to juggle with. Mr. Bradley on the other hand seems to tell us that we can never reach the summit of our ambitions unless we can throw our rope up into the air and climb up after it into the hypercosmic void. 1 App. and Real, p. 128, footnote.