n' their terms must be given up. No mere
external go-between can logically connect. What occurs must be more
intimate. The hooking must be a penetration, a possession. The
relation must _involve_ the terms, each term must involve _it_, and
merging thus their being in it, they must somehow merge their being in
each other, tho, as they seem still phenomenally so separate, we can
never conceive exactly how it is that they are inwardly one. The
absolute, however, must be supposed able to perform the unifying feat
in his own inscrutable fashion.

In old times, whenever a philosopher was assailed for some
particularly tough absurdity in his system, he was wont to parry the
attack by the argument from the divine omnipotence. 'Do you mean to
limit God's power?' he would reply: 'do you mean to say that God could
not, if he would, do this or that?' This retort was supposed to close
the mouths of all objectors of properly decorous mind. The functions
of the bradleian absolute are in this particular identical with those
of the theistic God. Suppositions treated as too absurd to pass muster
in the finite world which we inhabit, the absolute must be able to
make good 'somehow' in his ineffable way. First we hear Mr. Bradley
convicting things of absurdity; next, calling on the absolute to vouch
for them _quand meme_. Invoked for no other duty, that duty it must
and shall perform.

The strangest discontinuity of our world of appearance with the
supposed world of absolute reality is asserted both by Bradley and
by Royce; and both writers, the latter with great ingenuity, seek to
soften the violence of the jolt. But it remains violent all the same,
and is felt to be so by most readers. Whoever feels the violence
strongly sees as on a diagram in just what the peculiarity of all this
philosophy of the absolute consists. First, there is a healthy faith
that the world must be rational and self-consistent. 'All science, all
real knowledge, all experience presuppose,' as Mr. Ritchie writes, 'a
coherent universe.' Next, we find a loyal clinging to the rationalist
belief that sense-data and their associations are incoherent, and that
only in substituting a conceptual order for their order can truth
be found. Third, the substituted conceptions are treated
intellectualistically, that is as mutually exclusive and
discontinuous, so that the first innocent continuity of the flow of
sense-experience is shattered for us without any higher conceptual