xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 195 



explanation. 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 become 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, notwithstanding the objections of our wise 

 acres, and there is excellent 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 works on philosophy. There appears to me my 

 friend Jones who has come to tell me that my friend 



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 constitu 

 tionally 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. 



