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350 F. C. S. SCHILLER I III. Thus the struggle to attain a glimpse of such an Ultimate Keality forms the perennial content of the drama of Philo- sophy. But that struggle is foredoomed to failure, unless we can manage to avoid certain pitfalls and to hold fast to certain guiding principles. (1) The Ultimate Reality must be made into a real ex- planation. It must never therefore be allowed to become transcendent, and to sever its connexion with the world of " appearances" which it was devised to explain. There must always be preserved a pathway leading up to it from the lowest " appearances," and down to them from the Throne of Thrones, in order that the angels of the Lord may travel thereon. If this be neglected, the ultimate reality will be- come unknowable, incapable of explaining the appearances, and therefore invalid. 1 (2) The "appearances" must be really preserved. They must not be stripped of their reality or neglected as mere appearances, merely because we fancy that we have seen in them glimpses of something higher. So long as they exist at all, they are real. The world really is coloured, and noisy, and hard, and painful, and spacious, and fleeting, notwith- standing the objections of our wiseacres, and there is ex- cellent sense even in maintaining that the earth is flat (some of it) and that the sun does rise and set. Even a nightmare does not become less real and oppressive because you have survived, and traced it to too generous an indulgence in lobster salad. For (3) it must never be forgotten that the immediate experience is after all in a way more real, i.e. more directly real, than the ' higher realities ' which are said to ' explain ' it. For the latter are inferred and postulated simply and solely for the purpose of ' explaining ' the former, and their reality consequently rests for us upon that of the former. Or in so far as the higher realities are more than inferences, they become such by entering into immediate experience and transfiguring it. 2 The dependence of all ulterior reality upon immediate experience is easy to illustrate. I sit in my armchair and read, what I will call one of the more severely scholastic 1 It is clear that this objection alone would justify the rejection of Mr. Bradley's Absolute. But, so far as I can understand it, it seems to be constitutionally incapable of complying with any of the conditions I am laying down. 2 The simplest example of this is the way in which the results of thought attain immediacy in perception.