196 HUMANISM xi 



Smith has been arrested on a charge of bigamy and wants 

 me to bail him out. I have no reason to doubt the 

 veracity of Jones or the reality of the situation. I feel 

 therefore the urgent necessity for instant action, and, 

 hastening to the rescue, I awake with a start ! It was 

 all a dream, you will say. On the contrary, I reply, it 

 was all a reality. While I lived through it, the experience 

 was as vivid and real as anything I ever experienced. 

 It is so still : the thought of Smith s bigamy he happens 

 to be the primmest of old bachelors -still affords me 

 uncontrollable amusement. It is true that I have now 

 modified my opinion as to the order of reality to which 

 the experience belonged. I had thought that it belonged 

 to our common waking world ; I now regard it as belong 

 ing to a more beautiful dream-world of my own. 1 We, 

 see, therefore, how the higher reality depends on the 

 immediate. The reality of Smith s excessive susceptibility, 

 of Jones s visit, and of the bigamy itself, rested upon and 

 was relative to that of my dream-experience. When my 

 experience changed, I was no longer entitled to infer the 

 existence of my previous realities in the world of my 

 waking life. 2 



The application of this principle is quite general. A 

 change in any particular appearance may entirely in 

 validate the argument for the reality which served to 

 explain it in its previous condition ; its annihilation 

 would destroy the ground for the assumption of this 

 reality ; and the annihilation of all appearances would 

 obviously destroy all the reasons for assuming any 

 reality. 3 The principle is one of considerable speculative 

 importance, for it enables us to conceive how we should 

 think the reality of a lower to be related to that of a 

 higher world of experience, if and when we experienced 

 such a transition from one to the other. And to Religion, 

 of course, this is a point of capital importance. For 



1 And possibly also of Jones, if (as sometimes happens) he also dreamt the 

 story he told me. 



2 Cp. pp. 18, 32, 43, 284. 



3 Hence we may say that Mr. Bradley s maltreatment of appearances 

 destroys all reality. 



