xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 187 



being ridden down and riddled with contradictions and 

 left for dead upon the field, but also of being understood. 

 And I am at a loss to see how to call it self-contradictory 

 and then forthwith to invoke a self-subsistent, in 

 accessible Absolute, which includes all appearances and 

 transcends all apprehension and inexplicably atones for 

 the incurable defects of our actual experience, is to explain 

 it, or anything else whatsoever. 



As against such cavalier methods I should protest that 

 only propositions are properly contradictory, that only a 

 reasoning being can contradict itself, and that it is an 

 abuse of language to describe our use of incompatible 

 statements about the same reality as an inherent con 

 tradiction in the reality itself. Indeed, I should combat 

 Mr. Bradley s contention that everything sooner or later 

 turns out to be self-contradictory with the axiom that 

 nothing which exists, in however despicable a sense, can 

 really be contradictory. The very fact of its existence 

 shows that the contradictions, which our thought dis 

 covers in it, are in some way illusory, that the reality 

 somehow (to use Mr. Bradley s favourite word in this 

 connexion) overpowers, swallows, reconciles, transcends, and 

 harmonizes them. 1 If therefore it appears contradictory, 

 the fault is ours. It is, in Herbart s language, a zufallige 

 AnsicJit. It can be purged of its apparent contradiction, 

 and it is our duty to effect this and to interpret it into a 

 harmony with itself which our mind can grasp. Only 

 of course I can see that this purification may require 

 something more than a dialectical juggle with terms : we 

 may need a real discovery, we may have to make a real 

 advance, before the refractory ore of appearance will 

 yield us the pure gold of reality. 



I have intentionally used a word which seems to me 

 to give the clue out of the labyrinth into which Mr. 

 Bradley has beguiled the fair maid, Philosophy. The 

 conception of Harmony seems to me to be one legitimately 

 applicable to ultimate reality and to contain a meaning 



1 Unless indeed the internal conflict which is described as a contradiction 

 be the essential nature of all reality as such as some extreme pessimists have 

 contended. 



