ong to
remain doubtful. The individual absolute, with its parts co-implicated
through and through, so that there is nothing in any part by which
any other part can remain inwardly unaffected, is the only rational
supposition. Connexions of an external sort, by which the many became
merely continuous instead of being consubstantial, would be an
irrational supposition.

Mr. Bradley is the pattern champion of this philosophy _in extremis_,
as one might call it, for he shows an intolerance to pluralism so
extreme that I fancy few of his readers have been able fully to share
it. His reasoning exemplifies everywhere what I call the vice of
intellectualism, for abstract terms are used by him as positively
excluding all that their definition fails to include. Some Greek
sophists could deny that we may say that man is good, for man, they
said, means only man, and good means only good, and the word _is_
can't be construed to identify such disparate meanings. Mr. Bradley
revels in the same type of argument. No adjective can rationally
qualify a substantive, he thinks, for if distinct from the
substantive, it can't be united with it; and if not distinct, there is
only one thing there, and nothing left to unite. Our whole pluralistic
procedure in using subjects and predicates as we do is fundamentally
irrational, an example of the desperation of our finite intellectual
estate, infected and undermined as that is by the separatist
discursive forms which are our only categories, but which absolute
reality must somehow absorb into its unity and overcome.

Readers of 'Appearance and reality' will remember how Mr. Bradley
suffers from a difficulty identical with that to which Lotze and Royce
fall a prey--how shall an influence influence? how shall a relation
relate? Any conjunctive relation between two phenomenal experiences
_a_ and _b_ must, in the intellectualist philosophy of these authors,
be itself a third entity; and as such, instead of bridging the one
original chasm, it can only create two smaller chasms, each to be
freshly bridged. Instead of hooking _a_ to _b_, it needs itself to be
hooked by a fresh relation _r'_ to _a_ and by another _r"_ to _b_.
These new relations are but two more entities which themselves require
to be hitched in turn by four still newer relations--so behold the
vertiginous _regressus ad infinitum_ in full career.

Since a _regressus ad infinitum_ is deemed absurd, the notion that
relations come 'betwee