ent to reality are 'all' and 'none.'

The question runs into the still more general one with which Mr.
Bradley and later writers of the monistic school have made us
abundantly familiar--the question, namely, whether all the relations
with other things, possible to a being, are pre-included in its
intrinsic nature and enter into its essence, or whether, in respect to
some of these relations, it can _be_ without reference to them, and,
if it ever does enter into them, do so adventitiously and as it
were by an after-thought. This is the great question as to whether
'external' relations can exist. They seem to, undoubtedly. My
manuscript, for example, is 'on' the desk. The relation of being 'on'
doesn't seem to implicate or involve in any way the inner meaning
of the manuscript or the inner structure of the desk--these objects
engage in it only by their outsides, it seems only a temporary
accident in their respective histories. Moreover, the 'on' fails to
appear to our senses as one of those unintelligible 'betweens' that
have to be separately hooked on the terms they pretend to connect.
All this innocent sense-appearance, however, we are told, cannot pass
muster in the eyes of reason. It is a tissue of self-contradiction
which only the complete absorption of the desk and the manuscript into
the higher unity of a more absolute reality can overcome.

The reasoning by which this conclusion is supported is too subtle and
complicated to be properly dealt with in a public lecture, and you
will thank me for not inviting you to consider it at all.[13] I feel
the more free to pass it by now as I think that the cursory account of
the absolutistic attitude which I have already given is sufficient for
our present purpose, and that my own verdict on the philosophy of
the absolute as 'not proven'--please observe that I go no farther
now--need not be backed by argument at every special point. Flanking
operations are less costly and in some ways more effective than
frontal attacks. Possibly you will yourselves think after hearing my
remaining lectures that the alternative of an universe absolutely
rational or absolutely irrational is forced and strained, and that
a _via media_ exists which some of you may agree with me is to
be preferred. _Some_ rationality certainly does characterize our
universe; and, weighing one kind with another, we may deem that the
incomplete kinds that appear are on the whole as acceptable as
the through-and-thr