[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 allow that the “badness” is also good, and that the “various degrees” are all equal.  For “the Absolute is perfect in all its detail, it is equally true and good throughout."[2] Whether or not the good is contradictory, as Mr Bradley maintains,[3] we must allow that he succeeds in making his account of it contradictory.

[Footnote 1:  Appearance and Reality, p. 411.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., p. 401.]

[Footnote 3:  Ibid., p. 409.]

I will try to put the gist of the matter in my own words.  Mr Bradley’s Absolute is eternal, relationless, ineffable.  To it goodness cannot be ascribed; indeed no predicate can be properly applied to it, for any predication implies relation:  in earlier language than Mr Bradley’s it involves determination and therefore negation.  Even to say that the Absolute appears or manifests itself is to predicate something, to imply relation, and thus is an offence against the absoluteness of the Absolute.  But nevertheless there is a world of phenomena, which the most mystical of philosophers must recognise, if only as a world of illusion.  The sum-total of these phenomena may be called the appearances of the Absolute; and the Absolute, according to Mr Bradley, “is real nowhere outside them.”  In this sense of reality we may make predicates about it.  Indeed all our predicates, Mr Bradley teaches in his ‘Logic,’ have reality—­the universe of reality—­for their ultimate subject.

In this sense it may be possible to speak of reality as good (though it is a misapplication of the term “Absolute” to call it good).  But the question remains what we mean by “good” in this connexion, and what justification we have for using the predicate.  And the answer must be that Mr Bradley means very little, since the goodness is manifested “in various degrees of goodness and badness,” and that the justification for using the term is not made clear.  It seems to