xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 191 



own example, could have embarked me on so painful a 

 criticism of the cardinal doctrine of Appearance and 

 Reality. Before proceeding from it to the easier and 

 more congenial task of expounding what I conceive to 

 be the real relation of these conceptions, I must however 

 add a word on a point already hinted at, viz., that Mr. 

 Bradley has not really extricated us from that slough of 

 agnosticism, to which their more porcine instincts are ever 

 drawing back even philosophers to wallow. Indeed, his 

 facetious remark about Spencer s Unknowable, 1 that it 

 is taken for God &quot; simply and solely because we do not 

 know what the devil it can be,&quot; might, with quite as much 

 propriety, be applied to his own Absolute. For though 

 he has reserved for it the title of Sole and Supreme 

 Reality, it is only used to cast an indelible slur on all 

 human reality and knowledge. It absorbs, transcends, 

 transmutes, etc., all our knowledge and experience. It is 

 therefore quite as unknowable as Spencer s monstrosity, 

 and adds insult to injury by dubbing us and our concerns 

 mere appearances. And after all the scorn we have seen 

 poured on the futility of an unknowable reality as the 

 explanation of anything, it passes my comprehension how 

 these consequences of his doctrine should have escaped 

 the notice, I do not say of his disciples, but of Mr. 

 Bradley s own acuteness. 



It is useless however to speculate how far Mr. Bradley 

 knows himself to be a sceptic, until he chooses to confess, 

 and we had better concern ourselves with the true 

 relation of reality to appearance. Mr. Bradley s funda 

 mental error seems to be his ^copto-pos, the separation 

 he has effected between them by violently disrupting 

 their continuity. Once we do this, we are lost. The 

 reality we have severed from its appearances can 

 never be regained, and we remain, as Mr. Bradley holds, 

 enmeshed in a web of appearances, and impotent to attain 

 a knowledge or experience of Reality. But all this 

 appears to be the consequence of a gratuitous error of 

 judgment. We should never have admitted that in 



1 App. and Real. p. 128, footnote. 



