...  If the terms contribute anything whatever, then the terms are affected [inwardly altered?] by the arrangement....  That for working purposes we treat, and do well to treat, some relations as external merely, I do not deny, and that of course is not the question at issue here.  That question is ... whether in the end and in principle a mere external relation [i.e., a relation which can change without forcing its terms to change their nature simultaneously] is possible and forced on us by the facts.’[1]

Mr. Bradley next reverts to the antinomies of space, which, according to him, prove it to be unreal, although it appears as so prolific a medium of external relations;

[Footnote 1:  Appearance and Reality, 2d edition, pp. 575-576.]

and he then concludes that ’Irrationality and externality cannot be the last truth about things.  Somewhere there must be a reason why this and that appear together.  And this reason and reality must reside in the whole from which terms and relations are abstractions, a whole in which their internal connexion must lie, and out of which from the background appear those fresh results which never could have come from the premises’ (p. 577).  And he adds that ’Where the whole is different, the terms that qualify and contribute to it must so far be different....  They are altered so far only [how far? farther than externally, yet not through and through?], but still they are altered....  I must insist that in each case the terms are qualified by their whole [qualified how?—­do their external relations, situations, dates, etc., changed as these are in the new whole, fail to qualify them ‘far’ enough?], and that in the second case there is a whole which differs both logically and psychologically from the first whole; and I urge that in contributing to the change the terms so far are altered’ (p. 579).

Not merely the relations, then, but the terms are altered:  und zwar ‘so far.’  But just how far is the whole problem; and ‘through-and-through’ would seem (in spite of Mr. Bradley’s somewhat undecided utterances[1])

[Footnote 1:  I say ‘undecided,’ because, apart from the ‘so far,’ which sounds terribly half-hearted, there are passages in these very pages in which Mr. Bradley admits the pluralistic thesis.  Read, for example, what he says, on p. 578, of a billiard ball keeping its ‘character’ unchanged, though, in its change of place, its ‘existence’ gets altered; or what he says, on p. 579, of the possibility that an abstract quality A, B, or C, in a thing, ’may throughout remain unchanged’ although the thing be altered; or his admission that in red-hairedness, both as analyzed out of a man and when given with the rest of him, there may be ‘no change’ (p. 580).  Why does he immediately add that for the pluralist to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an ignoratio elenchi?  It is impossible to admit it to be such.  The entire elenchus