I think his failure can be explained as follows. It may have been noticed that, in the passages I quoted from him, he insists in one place, that to deny that appearances exist is not merely false but _self-contradictory,_ and in another appeals to the principle that "any deliverance of consciousness is but a deliverance of consciousness" in support of his contention that what _is_ a fact need, nevertheless, _not_ be real. And the fact that he does these two things does, I think, give colour to the suggestion that the reason why he thinks that what is unreal may yet exist, and be a fact, and be, is the following. It is undoubtedly the case that, even if temporal facts are unreal, _i.e.,_ there _are_ no such things, we can and do _think of them,_ just as it is undoubtedly the case that, though unicorns are unreal, we can and do imagine them. In other words, "temporal facts" and "unicorns" are both quite certainly "deliverances of consciousness," at least in the sense that they are "objects of thought"; being "objects of thought" they are, in a wide sense, "appearances" also, and I cannot help thinking that Mr. Bradley supposes that, merely because they are so, they _must_ at least BE. "How" (I imagine he would ask) "can a thing 'appear' or even 'be thought of' unless it is there to appear and to be thought of? To say that it appears or is thought of, and that yet there is no such thing, is plainly self-contradictory. A thing cannot have a property, unless it is there to have it, and, since unicorns and temporal facts _do_ have the property of being thought of, there certainly must be such things. When I think of a unicorn, what I am thinking of is certainly not nothing; if it were nothing, then, when I think of a griffin, I should also be thinking of nothing, and there would be no difference between thinking of a griffin and thinking of a unicorn. But there certainly is a difference; and what can the difference be except that in the one case what I am thinking of is a unicorn, and in the other a griffin? And if the unicorn is what I am thinking of, then there certainly must _be_ a unicorn, in spite of the fact that unicorns are unreal. In other words, though in one sense of the words there certainly _are_ no unicorns--that sense, namely, in which to assert that there are would be equivalent to asserting that unicorns are real--yet there _must_ be _some_ other sense in which there _are_ such things; since, _if_ there were not, we could not think of them."