would seem. The Absolute is not "merely personal" (p. 531). The categories of thought and of self-consciousness, as we saw before, are inadequate to express the nature of the one experience of which they too are but partial appearances. If, on the whole, however, the metaphors, despite these negations, so far still seem rather positive than negative, how about the following? In the whole, "the finites blend and are resolved" (p. 429). Lower ideals and finite appearances generally, are "transmuted" (pp. 430, 488). "If truth were complete, it would not be truth, because that is only appearance. . . . The theoretic object moves towards a consummation in which all distinction and all ideality must be suppressed" (p. 462). "All divergences" are "absorbed" in the outcome (e.g., in the case mentioned, p. 467). The "discordance and distraction is overruled" (p. 488). Frequently, too, the positive and the negative metaphors are more or less immediately united in one expression. "Every finite diversity is also supplemented and transformed. Everything in the Absolute still is that which it is for itself. Its private character remains, and is but neutralized by complement and addition" (p. 510).
In the Absolute, then, in order to preserve the consistency of the whole, the finite blends, is preserved, is transmuted, is neutralized, is supplemented, is submerged, is laid to rest, is overruled, is absorbed, is undiminished, and is reduced, so that it is fully possessed, and is still that which it is for itself. Yet it is lost to our vision. Its distinctions are suppressed. It goes home and takes its place in the Absolute, to which it contributes and which owns it. There it gets a "rearrangement," an "all pervasive transfusion with a reblending of all material," so that its things "lose their individual natures" (p. 529); and the result is "a compensated system of conspiring particulars" (p. 472). As the "conspiring particulars" have already been described as suppressed, transmuted, submerged and absorbed, one hardly sees what possible and still unused metaphor remains more fitting than to say perhaps that the finite gets whipped and put to bed in the Absolute, and one wonders not to find Mr. Bradley adding this to the rest.
Now the fault about a set of metaphors never lies in the mere fact that they are used, nor in the fact that they are many, nor that, if many, they fail, when set side by side, to give any one clear picture so long as they are merely regarded as images. It is often well to use metaphors, since they fix attention upon aspects of truth, well to vary them, lest they turn into fixed delusions, and well not to trouble
