Radical skepticism about external reality severs any such bridging claim, reducing Shaftesbury's 'demonstrations of reason' to coherence within a potentially fictive system that carries no genuine obligatory force.

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Demonstrations of reason(epistemology): Logical proofs or arguments that show something is true through rational thinking rather than experience or emotion.
External reality(metaphysics (study of what exists)): The physical world outside your own mind—the idea that objects, people, and events exist independently of whether you're thinking about them.
Fictive system(epistemology): A system of ideas or beliefs that might be internally consistent but could be entirely made up or false—like a logically perfect but imaginary world.
Obligatory force(ethics and moral philosophy): The power to actually bind us morally or legally; the quality that makes something feel like a genuine duty or requirement rather than just an idea.
Shaftesbury(history of philosophy): An 18th-century English philosopher (Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury) who wrote about morality and argued that reason could guide us toward good behavior.
coherence(Applied uniformly by Bosanquet to both religious and non-religious truth claims.): The standard by which truth is assessed — a belief or system of beliefs is true insofar as it forms a consistent, internally unified whole.
radical skepticism(Epistemology; contrast with more moderate skeptical positions): A form of skepticism that doubts the laws of logic and/or refuses to accept any starting point as uncontentious, making engagement with standard philosophical arguments impossible.

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