196 HUMANISM xi 



experience is easy to illustrate. I sit in my armchair 

 and read, what I will call one of the more severely 

 scholastic works on philosophy. There appears to me my 

 friend Jones who has come to tell me that my friend 

 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 



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

 story he told me. 



2 Cp. pp. 18, 32, 43, 369. 



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

 destroys all reality. 



