[Footnote 1:  Appearance and Reality, p. 407]

[Footnote 2:  Appearance and Reality, p. 418.]

We need not concern ourselves at present with the adequacy of this statement as an account of the way in which we come to ‘approve’ or hold something as good.  The point is, that it does not advance us at all towards determining the validity of this approval, or towards an objective criterion for distinguishing ‘good’ from evil.

Mr Bradley draws a distinction between a general and a more special or restricted meaning of goodness.  For the former it is enough that existence be “found to be in accordance with the idea”; for the latter, it is necessary that the idea itself produce the fact.[1] In the former sense “beauty, truth, pleasure, and sensation are all things that are good,"[2] quite irrespective of their origin; in the latter sense, only that is good which the idea has produced, or in which it has realised itself, which is the work, therefore, of some finite soul.  In this narrower meaning goodness is the result of will:  “the good, in short, will become the realised end or completed will.  It is now an idea which not only has an answering content in fact, but, in addition also, has made, and has brought about, that correspondence....  Goodness thus will be confined to the realm of ends, or of self-realisation.  It will be restricted, in other words, to what is commonly called the sphere of morality,"[3] Even in its more general meaning, as we have seen, Mr Bradley has not succeeded in giving an objective account of good.  For the correspondence of idea and existence in which it is said to consist is defined in relation to desire, and to some kind of feeling on the part of the conscious subject.  Nor was his account successful in distinguishing good from evil:  to that distinction feeling is a blind guide.  When he goes on to discuss goodness in the narrower sense, in which it belongs to the results of finite volition, he adopts, as expressing the nature of goodness, that conception of ‘self-realisation’ which, as put forward by Green, has been found inadequate.  The same conception was used by Mr Bradley, in his first work, as “the most general expression for the end in itself,” “May we not say,” he asked, “that to realise self is always to realise a whole, and that the question in morals is to find the true whole, realising which will practically realise the true self?"[4] It is easy to make the distinction between good and evil depend upon this, that in the former the true self is realised, and that what is realised in the latter is only a false self.  But it is equally easy to see that this is only to substitute one unexplained distinction for another.  This short and easy method is not that which Mr Bradley adopts in his later work.  He has something of much greater interest to say regarding the nature of the self-realisation in which goodness is made to consist; and upon it he lays stress, “solely