(p. 144), or be "much the same as given and present fact." This does not mean that reality is "object" for a "subject"; but that "reality is indissolubly one with sentience"; and so the Absolute is a "single and all inclusive experience, which embraces every partial diversity in concord." The nature of this unity cannot be exhaustively expressed by thought. Thought involves the finite sundering from its own Other or object, and so thought too belongs to the world of appearance. "The entire reality will be merely the object thought out, but thought out in such a way that mere thinking is absorbed" (p. 182). The same is in a greater or less degree true of any other finite aspect, such as "error," or "temporal and spatial appearance." Solipsism, too, like other erroneous accounts of the one "experience," will fail by reason of the self-contradictoriness of its own exclusive character (Chap. XXI).
It is plain that Mr. Bradley's Absolute thus has something of the familiar "lion's den" character in its position with reference to the finite things; yet our author unquestionably means the relation of this consistent individual whole to the inconsistent finite appearances to be not as negative as was the relation of the jaws of the "glorified form" of Krishna to the heroes in the vision of the Bhâgavat-Gita. To the question, Does or does not the appearance lose itself, get so absorbed as to be utterly destroyed in the Absolute? Mr. Bradley replies again and again that nothing is lost. But beyond this point only metaphors, themselves somewhat Protean, as well as confusing, in their character, seem to be at our author's disposal for the definition of the true relations of the Absolute and its Appearances. The usual idealistic method of seeking in self-consciousness for the concrete and unmetaphorical instance of the true form of unity in variety has already been deliberately rejected by our author. The content of appearance "comes together harmoniously in the Absolute" (p. 239). "The content which the struggle has generated is brought home and laid to rest undiminished in the perfect" (p. 244). The Absolute is therefore "fully possessed of all hostile distinctions." "The main aspects of the world are all able to take a place within the Absolute" (p. 247). "The distinctions are reduced" "in the one great totality of absolute experience." And, p. 266: "They are lost there for our vision, but survive most assuredly in that which absorbs them."
Whatever this process is, it is, for the rest, entirely comprehensive. Even God, as religion must conceive him, is but an appearance (p. 448). He, too, must therefore be "laid to rest," as
