540 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



hopelessly without appeal to any unity above them. . . . 

 Such a separation of worth from reality and truth would 

 mutilate our nature, and could end only in irrational 

 compromise or oscillation." 

 62- It may here be remarked that Lotze has been reproved 



His Monism v ,. f ., j . . , 



or Absolut- by some critics for countenancing this indecision or oscil- 

 lation. Mr Bradley, on the other side, is clearly a monist ; 

 he believes in one comprehensive Absolute, and he recon- 

 ciles the existence of this supreme unity with the ap- 

 parent plurality and the many-sidedness of the phe- 

 nomenal world by his doctrine of " Degrees of Reality." 

 This is indeed a most important idea, which Mr Bradley 

 has revived in an original manner, and, as it were, intro- 

 duced into British philosophy. Though very sparing in 

 his quotations and references to earlier thinkers, he 

 distinctly acknowledges his indebtedness to Hegel when 

 he enters on an exposition of this his central conception. 

 Thus he emphasises quite as much that nothing phe- 

 nomenal, neither external things nor the phenomena and 

 experiences in the regions of art, morals, and religion, are 

 true and comprehensive expressions of the Absolute, as, 

 on the other side, he maintains that they all partake of 

 the truly Real, in some degree ; that their reality is not 

 lost but preserved in the truly Real. " Throughout our 

 world, whatever is individual is more real and true, for 

 it contains within its own limits a wider region of the 

 Absolute, and it possesses more intensely the type of 

 self - sufficiency. Or, to put it otherwise, the interval 

 between such an element and the Absolute is smaller. 

 We should require less alteration, less destruction of its 

 own special nature, in order to make this higher element 



