significance or of adequacy, nay--strange as
it may seem to the reader who has followed Mr Bradley's first line of
thought--"degrees of reality." Relations are excluded from reality;
and degree is a relation; but reality has degrees. The logic is
unsatisfactory, but the conclusion may perhaps have a value of its
own.

Here, then, is another view of the universe--not an unchanging,
relationless, eternal reality, but varying degrees of reality
manifested in that complex process which we call sometimes the world
and sometimes 'experience,' But the two views are connected. For it is
assumed that the Absolute Reality is harmonious and all-comprehensive;
and it is further asserted that these two characteristics of harmony
and comprehensiveness may be taken as criteria of the "degree of
reality" possessed by any "appearance." The more harmonious anything
is--the fewer its internal discrepancies or contradictions--the higher
is its degree of reality; and the greater its comprehensiveness--the
fewer predicates left outside it--the higher also is its degree of
reality. No attempt is made at a measured scale of degrees of reality,
such, for example, as is offered by the Hegelian dialectic; but a sort
of rough classification of various 'appearances' is offered. In this
classification a place is given to goodness which is comparatively
high, and yet "subordinate" and "self-contradictory." [1]

[Footnote 1: Appearance and Reality, p. 420.]

Mr Bradley's Absolute, we may say, has two faces, one of which is
described as good, while the other is inscrutable. "Obviously," he says,
"the good is not the Whole, and the Whole, as such, is not good. And,
viewed thus in relation to the Absolute, there is nothing either bad or
good, there is not anything better or worse. For the Absolute is _not_
its appearances." This is the inscrutable side. But yet "the Absolute
appears in its phenomena and is real nowhere outside them;... it is all
of them in unity. And so, regarded from this other side, the Absolute
_is_ good, and it manifests itself throughout in various degrees of
goodness and badness."[1] What would be contradiction in another writer
is only two-sidedness in Mr Bradley. And it is this second side which
interests us, for here "the Absolute _is_ good," and yet, good as it is,
manifests itself in badness as well as goodness, and that in various
degrees. If we are to follow another statement of the doctrine, however,
we shall have to al