"It is mere superstition to suppose that an appeal to experience can prove _reality._ That I find something in existence in the world or in my self, shows that this something _exists_, and it cannot show _more._ Any deliverance of consciousness--whether original or acquired--is but a deliverance of consciousness. It is in no case an oracle and a revelation which we have to accept as it is a fact, like other facts, to be dealt with; and there is no presumption anywhere that any _fact_ is better than appearance."
Here Mr. Bradley seems plainly to imply that to be "real" is something _more_ and other than to be a fact or to exist. This is the distinction which I think he means to make, and which, I think, is the real explanation of his puzzling language, and this is the distinction which I am going presently to discuss. But I want first to say something as to that other distinction, which I said might be supposed to be the explanation of the whole difficulty--the distinction implied by the qualification "Time, _in the character which it exhibits_"; the suggestion that, when we talk of "Time," we may sometimes mean Time in one character, sometimes in another, and that what is true of it in the one character may not be true of it in the other. It might, I think, be suggested that this is the explanation of the whole difficulty. And I want briefly to point out why I think it cannot be the only explanation.
Stated very badly and crudely, the difficulty which requires explanation is this: Mr. Bradley says, "It is sheer nonsense to say Time is not real." But this thing which he says it is sheer nonsense to say is the very thing which he himself had formerly said. He had said, "Time has most evidently proved not to be real." Now, Mr. Bradley certainly does not mean to say that this proposition of his own is sheer nonsense; and yet he says, in words, that it _is_ sheer nonsense. This is the difficulty. What is the explanation? Quite obviously, the explanation can only take one possible form. Mr. Bradley must be holding that the words "Time is real" may have two different _senses._ In one sense, the denial of them is sheer nonsense; in the other sense, so far from being sheer nonsense, denial of them is, according to him, evidently true. Now, what are these two different senses, between which the difference is so enormous? It is here that the two different explanations come in.