 At first Russell was an adherent of McTaggart. This afforded him a neat solution to Sidgwick’s problem. The happy day when the harmony becomes explicit can be promoted or retarded by human action. If I benefit myself at your expense not only am I doing down a self with whom I am, in Reality, intimately linked—I am putting off the day when the harmony that Really Is becomes apparent. And since this harmony will be supremely pleasurable I am harming myself into the bargain. Hence morality and self-interest coincide and Practical Reason is reunited with itself (Russell, 1893, “On the Foundations of Ethics”, RoE: 37–40/Papers 1: 206–211). This illustrates the point made by a number of unkind critics, that in the late 19th century Absolute Idealism functioned as a sort of methadone program for high-minded Victorian intellectuals, providing them with moral uplift as they struggled to get off the hard stuff of official Christianity. (See Stove 1991: chs. 5 &amp; 6; Allard 2003 and, in more restrained language, Griffin 2003b: pp. 85–88.) Before long however, Russell moved over to Bradley’s camp and ceased to believe that the timelessly existing harmony would become manifest in time. Nevertheless, since we are all aspects of the Absolute, a sort of timeless super-self, there is essentially the same objection to indulging my desires at your expense as there is to indulging one of my own passions at the expense of others which are inconsistent with it. I am hurting, if not myself, at least a larger whole of which we are both parts (Russell, 1894, “Cleopatra or Maggie Tulliver”, RoE: 57–67/Papers I: 92–8). But before long even this solution ceased to satisfy. In a paper not published until 1957, “Seems Madam? Nay It Is”, Russell argued (as he put it to Moore) that “for all purposes that are not purely intellectual, the world of Appearance is the real world”. In particular, the hypothesis that there is a timeless and harmonious Reality provides no consolation for our present pains since it is a Reality that we never get to experience. If “the world of daily life remains wholly unaffected by [Reality], and goes on its way just as if there were no world of Reality at all”, and if this world of Reality is a world that we not only do not but cannot experience (since experience is necessarily temporal), how can its alleged existence afford us any consolation for what seems to be (and therefore is) evil in the world of Appearance? (Russell, 1897, “Seems, Madam? Nay, It Is”, RoE: 79–86/Papers 1: 105–111/Why I am Not a Christian: 75–82).