472 F. H. BRADLEY ON FLOATING IDEAS. ously as means to a serious end. On the other side there are many plays (we have seen) from which illusion certainly is absent. In other plays again the activity is exercised within an area more or less qualified as imaginary. Lastly there are cases where illusion and pretence are not essential, hut where more or less they tend to come in. And the ex- tent here will be determined by the individual conditions. We have found once more that the ready-made division of our world into matter of fact and ideas, into imaginary and real, has conducted us to error. And we saw that to sunder life into separate spheres of play and earnest is indefensible. Life and the world do not admit those compartments which are blindly fixed by hasty theories. Life and the world offer us an indefinite number of aspects and distinctions, and the worth and reality of these is in every case relative, though, because relative, it may in a given case become absolute. This is the general conclusion which, I trust, throughout this paper has been suggested as true. That world of fact, which we so confidently contrast with the imaginary and which we set up as real, has turned out, when we take it absolutely, to be false appearance. And in our practice, where we do not sink into convention or worse, we assume our right to deal freely with such reality, to treat it as of secondary moment, or even, it may be, as illusory. But in theory this illusion tends to cling to us, to hamper us and to blind us, when we endeavour to do justice to the various aspects of life. To be or do anything, we assuredly must maintain and control our bodies, and we depend on the world which is immediately continuous with these. Apart from this foundation we cannot have reality, and with this foundation we must therefore be in earnest. This is truth, and it is a truth, I agree, which must not be ignored. But on the other hand this basis and condition, if you try to take it by itself, is worthless and in the end it proves unreal. In truth it is itself a mere imaginary abstraction. The world of reality, we may say in a word, is the world of values, 1 and "values are not judged absolutely but are everywhere measured by degree. X I should be willing here to add "of human values," so long as "human" is not understood as "merely human". To use the term " humanity " loosely as covering at once " all finite mind " and again " merely some of the inhabitants of a certain planet," may, as a sup- port to certain views, be found convenient or perhaps necessary. But whether such ambiguity is permissible is of course another question. In this note I find myself repeating that which in another connexion I had to urge some thirty years ago (Ethical Studies, pp. 305-307), and even then the matter was far from new.
