ABSTRACT
THE concepts of coherence and non-contradiction have been completely identified both by Bradley and Bosanquet. They speak indifferently of both. Bradley writes: "Ultimate reality is such that it does not contradict itself; here is an absolute criterion."1 "Our standard denies inconsistency and therefore asserts consistency. . . . And our result so far is this. Reality is known to possess a character, but this character is at present determined only as that which excludes contradiction. But we make a further advance. We saw . . . that all appearance must belong to reality. For what appears is, and whatever is cannot fall outside the real. And we may now combine this result with the conclusion just reached. We may say that everything which appears is somehow real in such a way as to be self-consistent. The character of the real is to possess everything phenomenal in a harmonious form."2 Bosanquet, too, speaks of the "postulate of reality with a coherent nature of its own,"3 and the principle of non-contradiction for him is a positive and constructive principle,4 because it is another aspect of the spirit of the whole. In his Logic he writes: "This (immanence) is only another form of words for the principle of non-contradiction, the principle that truth is the whole, and the doctrine that coherence is the test of truth and reality."5
