Appearance and Reality, I am here referring, has, nevertheless, maintained that we are wholly unable to “construe” to ourselves the way in which the realm of Appearance finds its unity in the Absolute. He rejects, in consequence, every more detailed effort to interpret our own life in its relations to the Absolute, such as, in the foregoing discussions I have begun, and, in the second series of these lectures, hope to continue. The reason for this rejection, in Mr. Bradley’s case, is of the most fundamental kind. It is founded upon the most central theses of his Theory of Being. The proper place to discuss it is in close connection, therefore, with the general theory in question. I have stated my own case; but I feel obliged to try to do justice to Mr. Bradley’s interpretation. For if he is right, there is little hope for our further undertaking.
The task is no easy one. I myself owe a great debt to Mr. Bradley’s book, a debt manifest in my criticism of Realism in Lecture III, and in many other parts of my discussion. The book is itself a very elaborate argumentative structure. One ought not to make light of it by chance quotations. One cannot easily summarize its well-wrought reasonings in a few sentences. To discuss it carefully would have been wholly impossible in my general course of lectures. On the other hand, to sunder the discussion of it wholly from the present discourse, would have made such a critical enterprise as here follows, seem, for me, a thankless polemical task. For lengthy polemic regarding so serious a piece of work as Mr. Bradley’s is hardly to be tolerated apart from an attempt at construction. And so I have resolved to attempt the task in the form of an essay, supplementary to my own statement of a Theory of Being in these lectures, and preparatory to the discussion of Man and Nature in the next series.
Even here, however, I must attempt to construct as well as to object. And the effort will lead at once to problems which I had no time to discuss in the general lectures. Mr. Bradley, for instance, has shown that every effort to bring to unity the manifoldness of our world involves us in what he himself often calls an “infinite process.” In other words, if, in telling
