No attempt is made at a measured scale of degrees of reality,
such, for example, as is offered by the Hegelian dialectic; but a sort
of rough classification of various 'appearances' is offered. In this
classification a place is given to goodness which is comparatively
high, and yet "subordinate" and "self-contradictory." [1]
[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.
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