Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/365

 ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES. 351 works on philosophy. There appears to me my friend Jones who has come to tell me that my friend Smith has been arrested on a charge of bigamy and wants me to bail him out. I have no reason to doubt the veracity of Jones or the reality of the situation. I feel therefore the urgent necessity for instant action, and, hastening to the rescue, I awake with a start ! It was all a dream, you will say. On the contrary, I reply, it was all a reality. While I lived through it, the experience was as vivid and real as anything I ever experienced. It is so still : the thought of Smith's bigamy he happens to be the primmest of old bachelors still affords me uncontrollable amusement. It is true that I have now modified my opinion as to the order of ' reality ' to which the experience belonged. I had thought that it belonged to our common waking world ; I now regard it as belonging to a more beautiful dream-world of my own. 1 We see, therefore, how the ' higher ' reality depends on the immediate. The reality of Smith, Jones, and the bigamy rested upon and was relative to that of my dream-experience. When my experience changed I was no longer entitled to infer the existence of my previous realities. The application of this principle is quite general. A change in any particular "appearance " may entirely invalidate the argument for the " reality " which served to explain it in its previous condition ; its annihilation would destroy the ground for the assumption of this reality ; and the annihilation of all appearances would obviously destroy all the reasons for assuming any reality. 2 The principle is one of considerable speculative importance, for it enables us to conceive how we should think the reality of a ' lower ' to be related to that of a ' higher ' world of experience, if and when we experienced such a transition from one to the other. And to Religion, of course, this is a point of capital importance. For unless we can conceive how the higher or ' spiritual ' world can transcend and absorb, without negating, the lower or ' material ' world, the postulates of the religious conscious- ness must continue to seem idle fairy tales to the austere reason of the systematic thinker. (4) The reality of the ' higher reality ' must be made to depend throughout on its efficiency. This follows implicitly from what we have already established. Immediate experi- ence forms the touchstone whereby we test the value of our that he told me the story. 2 Hence we may say that Mr. Bradley 's mal-treatment of " appear- ances " destroys all " reality ".
 * And possibly also of Jones, if (as sometimes happens) he also dreamt