 Appearance and Reality is divided into two books. The first, ‘Appearance’, is brief, and its aim destructive, arguing that ‘the ideas by which we try to understand the universe’ all bring us ultimately to contradictions when we try to think out their implications. Some of these ideas belong especially to philosophy, such as the view that only the primary qualities are real and the Kantian notion of a thing-in-itself; others, for instance the notions of cause, motion, self, space, thing and time, are deployed in everyday life. The second book, ‘Reality’, is long; its aim is to provide a positive account of the Absolute — the ultimate, unconditioned reality as it is in itself, not distorted by projection through the conceptual mechanisms of thought. A large proportion of his discussion is devoted to consideration of natural objections to this positive account.