[47] The difficulty, of course, is not a merely formal one, much less a verbal one. Instinctively we grant to Bosanquet his statement that reality is a continuous whole; we feel it almost captious to question his right to it. But why? Because the _content of judgment_ is continuous; judgment is always engaged with the determination of a related totality. But if all content is ideal, and judgment is just the application of this content to reality in virtue of an isolated contact, surely it begs the entire question to say that reality apart from the content applied is continuous, and then to use this assertion to justify the objective validity of the judgment--its element of permanent truth. [48] There is good reason for believing that Mr. Bosanquet escapes, in his own mind, the difficulty by the term "correspondence." "The name stands for these elements in the idea which _correspond_ in the separate worlds;" we may even be accused of injustice in confusing this correspondence with bare identity of existence. But if one idea corresponds to another in the sense of referring to it, what is this but the fact to be explained--how an existence can refer beyond itself? [49] This conclusion is clearly recognized by BRADLEY, _Appearance and Reality_, chap. 4. [50] It would be suggestive to inquire in what sense conscious thought claims to know. Is it a general claim which thought _qua_ thought puts forth, or is it the claim of the content of some particular thought? The former, of course, is a mere pious aspiration having no reference to specific validity or truth; the latter is precisely the problem under consideration. [51] Bosanquet would seem to have followed Lotze in this insertion of a world of "meanings" intermediate between the individual idea as such and the real object as such. See the criticism already passed, pp. 93-5. [52] Or, the situation as questioned is itself a fact, and a perfectly determinate (though not determined) one. See pp. 38, 50.