 After presenting Regress 3, Bradley believes that he has succeeded in showing that the entire relational way of thought is flawed and that relations as such should be relegated to the sphere of appearance, rather than to reality. Central to arriving at such a conclusion has been his assumption that what he calls “independent” relations cannot relate. It seems as if Bradley simply did not know how to think of such entities and often resorts to metaphors and talks about links needing further links at their ends and insists on our inability to show how “solid things” can be joined to other “solids” (cf. Bradley 1893: 28). As these metaphors indicate, Bradley’s worry seems to be that if relations are conceived of as independent from the terms that they relate, they themselves will become just like the terms that need relating and this way they will lose their relating power.