The first and, as I think, the wrong explanation (though I think Mr. Bradley's words do give some colour to it) is this. It might be said: "The whole business is perfectly easy to explain. When Mr. Bradley says that Time is _not_ real, what he means is that Time, _in the character which it exhibits,_ is not real. Whereas, when he says, Time does exist, is a fact, and is, and that it is nonsense to deny this, what he means is that Time does exist, _in some other character_--some character _other_ than that which it exhibits. He does _not_ mean to make any distinction, such as you suppose, between two meanings of the word I real '--the one of them merely equivalent to 'exists,' 'is,' 'is a fact,' and the other meaning something very different from this. The only distinction he means to make is a distinction between _two_ meanings of 'Time' or of the whole sentence 'Time is real.' He distinguishes between the meaning of this sentence, when it means, 'Time in the character which it exhibits, is real,' which meaning, he says, is evidently false; and its meaning when it means, 'Time in _some other_ character, is real,' and this meaning, he says, is evidently true. This is the complete explanation of your supposed puzzle, which is, in fact, therefore, very easy to solve."
This, I think, might be offered as an explanation of Mr. Bradley's meaning. And it must be admitted that it _would_ furnish a complete explanation of the particular puzzle I have just stated, it would completely absolve Mr. Bradley from the charge of inconsistency; and would show that where he appears to contradict himself about the reality of Time, the contradiction is verbal only and not real. We might, indeed, object to this distinction between Time in one character and Time in another; on the ground that anything which has not got the character which Time exhibits, but only some _other_ character, ought not to be called Time at all. We are, indeed, perfectly familiar with the conception that one and the same thing may _at one time_ possess a character which it does _not_ possess at another, so that what is true of it at one time may not be true of it at another. We are, that is, familiar with the idea of a thing _changing_ its character. But Time itself as a whole obviously cannot change its character in this sense. Mr. Bradley cannot mean to say that it possesses the character "which it exhibits" and in which it is unreal _at one time,_ and possesses some other character, in which it is real, at _some other time._ And hence we might say it is certainly wrong to speak as if Time itself could have two incompatible characters; since nothing can have two incompatible characters, unless it has them _at different times._ And this is an objection which does seem to apply to Mr. Bradley's doctrine in any case, since he does in any case seem to imply this distinction between Time in one character and Time in another, whether this distinction is the complete explanation of our particular puzzle or not. Yet this objection would not necessarily be more than an objection to Mr. Bradley's words; it would not necessarily be an objection to his meaning. Where he seems to imply that Time, in some character other than that which it exhibits, may be fully real, he may only mean that something completely different from Time, but which does in some sense correspond to it, is fully real; and if he does mean this, our objection would only amount to an objection to his giving the name of "Time" to this supposed counterpart of Time; we might say, and I think justly, that it is misleading to speak of this counterpart of Time as if it were Time itself in some other character; but this would go no way at all to show that there may not really be such a counterpart of Time, which _is_ real, while Time itself is unreal. We might ask, too, what this supposed counterpart of Time is like, or (to put it in Mr. Bradley's way) what the precise character is, in which Time Areal? And I think Mr. Bradley would admit that he cannot tell us. But this, you see, would also be no objection to his actual doctrine. He might quite well know, and be right in saying, that there is and must be a real _counterpart_ of Time, completely different in character from Time, as we know it, even though he has not the least idea what this counterpart is like.