xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 185 



metaphysics. I venture to assert with the utmost 

 trepidation, and at the risk of being crushed, like Mr. 

 Bradley s other critics, by a sarcastic footnote to his 

 next article, that in putting forward his fundamental 

 assumption that ultimate Reality is such that it does 

 not contradict itself, and in erecting this into an absolute 

 criterion, he builds in part on an unsound foundation 

 which has not reached the bottom rock, in part on an 

 airy pinnacle, a sort of what in Alpine parlance is called 

 a gendarme, which will not bear the weight of the 

 mountains of paradox which are subsequently heaped 

 upon it. 



(i) By the first charge what I mean to convey is 

 that the ultimateness of Mr. Bradley s absolute criterion 

 has been taken for granted far too easily. But before 

 adducing reasons for this contention, I must disavow 

 every intention of impugning the validity of the Principle 

 of Contradiction as such. I accept it fully and without 

 reserve ; nay more, I use it every day of my life. But 

 my intellectual conscience impels me to ask As what 

 must I accept it ? And in what sense ? To these 

 questions Mr. Bradley s criterion of non- contradiction 

 appears to supply no obvious answer. It is enunciated 

 quite abstractly, and it is not clear to me that, as stated, 

 it has a sense adequate to bear the metaphysical structure 

 put upon it, or indeed any sense at all. 1 



The meaning of Mr. Bradley s absolute criterion (as 

 of everything else) must therefore be sought in its 

 applications. But Mr. Bradley s applications seem to 

 warrant the utmost suspicion, if not of the principle 

 in the abstract, yet of the sense in which it is actually 

 used. A principle which asserts itself alone contra 

 mundum, and convicts the whole universe of self-con 

 tradiction may surely give pause to the most reckless. 

 There is no need, therefore, to question the principle in 



1 As Mr. Alfred Sidgwick well says, &quot; every fact that changes its character in 

 the least degree proves to us daily that the Laws of Thought, those pillars of 

 elementary logic, are too ideal and abstract to be interpreted as referring to the 

 actual things or particular cases that names are supposed to denote.&quot; Distinction 

 and the Criticism of Beliefs, p. 21. Cp. my Formal Logic, ch. x. 



