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 ‘between’ 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