## 1. Life



Bradley was born on 30th January, 1846 in Clapham (then in the county
of Surrey, since absorbed into a much expanded London). He was the
fourth child and eldest surviving son of Charles Bradley, a prominent
Evangelical preacher, and his second wife, Emma Linton. The family was
talented and well connected: George Granville Bradley, a son from the
first marriage, was successively Head Master of Marlborough College,
Master of University College, Oxford, and Dean of Westminster Abbey;
A.C. Bradley, a younger son from the second marriage, taught
philosophy at Oxford until 1881, and, after moving to literary
studies, held chairs at Liverpool and Glasgow, refused one at
Cambridge, and became the most distinguished Shakespearean critic of
his day. Charles Bradley's 'Clapham Sect' (as this
actively evangelical humanitarian group was known at the time) had
strong imperial connections, including among its members a
Governor-General of Bengal, a Governor of Sierra Leone, several
members of Parliament and a permanent head of the Colonial Office.



In 1856 F.H. Bradley's schooling began at Cheltenham College; in
1861 he was transferred to Marlborough College, then under his
half-brother's Headship. While at Cheltenham he began learning
German; he read at least some of Kant's *Critique of Pure
Reason* while still at school, though it is not clear that this
was in the original language. In the winter of 1862-3 he
contracted typhoid fever (at one stage expected to kill him), followed
shortly by pneumonia. Surviving both, he was protected from further
exposure to the rigours of English public school life by leaving
Marlborough in 1863.



In 1865 Bradley entered University College, Oxford, as a Scholar,
getting a first in classical moderations (Mods) in 1867 but only an
unexpected second in *literae humaniores* (Greats) in 1869. The
prominent Plato scholar A.E. Taylor, a later admirer of Bradley and
sympathetic to his idealism, attributed his reverse in Greats to
'the complete incapacity of examiners whose philosophical
scriptures were the writings of John Stuart Mill to comprehend what
philosophy meant to the brilliant younger men who were shortly to
revolutionize philosophical studies in Great Britain.' Whether
or not this is true, there is certainly an undisguised contempt for
Mill and his followers exhibited in Bradley's *Principles of
Logic*. After more than one failure to obtain a college
fellowship, he was in December 1870 elected to one at Merton College
Oxford, tenable for life, with no teaching duties, and terminable only
on marriage. He never married, and remained in his fellowship until
his death.



In June 1871 Bradley suffered a severe inflammation of the kidneys
which appears to have had permanent effects. It has been suggested,
possibly with malice, that the Bradleys in general were disposed to
hypochondria; be that as it may, he was prone thereafter to be
incapacitated by cold, physical exhaustion or anxiety, and in
consequence lived a retired life. He took an active part in the
running of his college, but avoided public occasions, to the extent,
for example, of declining an invitation to become a founding member of
the British Academy. Collingwood records of Bradley in his
*Autobiography*, '[A]lthough I lived within a few hundred
yards of him for sixteen years, I never to my knowledge set eyes on
him.' This relative seclusion added an element of mystery to his
philosophical reputation, a mystery enhanced by the dedication of some
of his books to a person identified only by the initials
'E.R.'



But although Bradley devoted himself to philosophy, so that the
history of his public life is largely that of his books and articles,
it is clear that his was not a narrowly bookish existence. To protect
his health, he frequently escaped the damp chill of Oxford winters for
the kinder weather of southern English and Mediterranean seaside
resorts. (In the course of one of these travels Bradley met an
American engineer named Radcliff, and fell in love with one of his
daughters, the mysterious E.R. of the dedications.) His metaphysics, a
striking combination of the rational and the mystical, makes more than
grudging room for the life of the senses and emotions, and his
writings, especially his posthumously published *Aphorisms*,
could not be the work of a man whose experience had been confined to
the study. He liked guns and disliked cats, indulging his preferences
economically by using the former to shoot the latter in the college
grounds at night.



Bradley's political views are said to have been conservative,
though not of a narrowly doctrinaire kind. Although his writings
reveal a religious temperament, he seems (judging by a letter of 1922)
to have found the evangelical religiosity of his father's
household oppressive, and, perhaps in consequence, the attitude to
Christianity displayed later in his writings exhibits a certain
ambivalence; on the whole, he appears to have been a freethinker. (To
imagine growing up amongst the members of the Clapham Sect, we might
use John Sutherland's suggestion that the characters of Edmund
and Fanny in Jane Austen's *Mansfield Park* give us some
idea of what they would have been like.)



Bradley's public recognition included the conferring of the
honorary degree LL.D. by the University of Glasgow (1883), election to
membership of the Royal Danish Academy (1921), of the *Accademia
dei Lincei* and the *Reale Istituto Lombardo* of Milan
(1922), and election to an Honorary Fellowship of the British Academy
(1923). In 1924, King George V bestowed on him, the first philosopher
to be singled out for this very rare honour, the Order of Merit. Three
months later, after a few days' illness, he died from blood
poisoning on 18th September, 1924. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery,
Oxford.


## 2. Reputation



As the above (by no means complete) account of his public recognition
reveals, in his own day Bradley's intellectual reputation stood
remarkably high: he was widely held to be the greatest English
philosopher of his generation, and although the idealists were never a
dominant majority, amongst some philosophers the attitude towards him
seems to have been one almost of veneration. The significance of his
work and its impact upon British philosophy were recognized by friends
and foes. The second volume of J.H. Muirhead's prestigious
*Contemporary British Philosophy: Personal Statements* --
a book which appeared shortly after Bradley's death and
collected papers by all major philosophers of the time, including
thinkers as hostile to the idealistic outlook as G.E. Moore --
opens with the following dedication: 'To F.H. Bradley, Order of
Merit: To whom British Philosophy owed the impulse that gave it new
life in our time'.



This reputation began to collapse fairly quickly after his death. The
reasons for this are complex, and include matters seemingly extraneous
to philosophy itself, such as the reaction against British imperialism
(whose moral and spiritual mission had been justified by some idealist
philosophers and undertaken by their pupils) following the Great War.
One more locally significant factor was the tendentious but still
damaging accounts of his views which appeared in the writings of Moore
and Russell following their defection from the idealist camp.
Russell's widely read and justly celebrated 'On
Denoting' provides a wonderful example of philosophical
propaganda. Considering the question whether either 'The King of
France is bald' or 'The King of France is not bald'
is true or false in the absence of a present King of France, Russell
wittily observes that 'Hegelians' will conclude that he
wears a wig. Russell had a special literary talent for producing
remarks of this sort, which could not fail to leave their mark, as
there is no worse enemy than a charming irony. At the same time,
Russell does not name any specific authors, nor does he address any
specific idealist theory. The whole of British Idealism is thus simply
dismissed because of its alleged association with Hegel, here ably
introduced as the acme of absurdity.



Another factor was logical positivism, whose representatives
repudiated metaphysics in general as meaningless: in the first chapter
of A.J. Ayer's anti-metaphysical tract *Language, Truth and
Logic*, Bradley is presented solely as a metaphysician and, on the
basis of a single out-of-context sentence, selected for ridicule (p.
36). The chosen sentence ("the Absolute enters into, but is
itself incapable of, evolution and progress", which Ayer in fact
slightly paraphrased from p. 442 of *Appearance and Reality*)
was Bradley's expression of the familiar doctrine that ultimate
reality, though changeless in itself, constitutes the ontological
foundation of our finite world of change and becoming. Ayer offered
this claim as an example of what he called
'pseudo-propositions', that is, English sentences
seemingly expressing a meaning but actually devoid of informative
content; and his malicious remark that the quoted proposition was
taken 'at random' from *Appearance and Reality* was
clearly designed to implant in the mind of the reader the idea that
Bradley's book largely consisted of such pseudo-propositions.
Consequent upon such influences was a change, inimical to idealism, in
the whole style of doing philosophy, a change characterized by the
development of formal logic and the new respect paid to the
deliverances of common sense and of ordinary language. Bradley's
highly wrought prose and his confidence in the metaphysician's
right to adjudicate on the ultimate truth began to seem alien to a
later generation of philosophers reared on a mixture of plain talk and
formalization and encouraged to defer to mathematics and empirical
science. But stylistic choices are not philosophically neutral; no one
engaged in producing a system of revisionary metaphysics is likely to
accept limitations imposed by ordinary language.



Such influences ensured that a misleading and dismissive stereotype of
Bradley became current among analytic philosophers and established in
their textbooks, so that serious discussion of his work largely
disappeared. One result has been that, despite his seminal influence
on Russell and their extended controversy over fundamental matters,
books and articles on Russell can contain few or even no references to
Bradley. Another is that the incidental textbook references to some of
Bradley's most characteristic, original and significant views,
e.g. on relations and on truth, are often based on hostile
caricatures. With a few exceptions (for instance, McTaggart's
argument for the unreality of time), discussion of the work of the
idealists has been sparse since the nineteen thirties. Discussion of
Bradley began to revive, as did his reputation, in the nineteen
seventies, continuing through the following decades up to the present
day. This reorientation does not usually go with an attempt at
vindicating Bradley's overall philosophical outlook. It stands
rather in close connection with a revival of interest in the origins
of analytic philosophy partly prompted by Rorty's critique in
*Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature*. Rorty's attack
encouraged analytic philosophy to self-examination and led some
thinkers within that tradition to re-examine the foundational myths at
the basis of their own ways of practising and conceiving of
philosophy.



These efforts produced significant results; several monographs and
collections became available that correct the inherited
misconceptions, discussing Bradley's philosophy in a more
balanced manner. There has also been a revival of interest in his
critical examination of the concept of relation within the field of
analytic ontology, yet with apparently little interest and
appreciation of those broader speculative issues that so much mattered
to him. At the time of writing it is clear that he is still widely
underrated; it is, however, far from clear that his reputation will
ever again stand as high as it did in his own lifetime.


## 3. Philosophy of History



Bradley's first substantial contribution to philosophy was the
publication in 1874 of his pamphlet 'The Presuppositions of
Critical History'. Although it was not widely noticed at the
time, it did have an impact on the thinking of R.G. Collingwood, whose
epistemology of history, like Bradley's, evinces a certain
scepticism concerning historical facts and the authority of testimony,
and it has had a considerable subsequent influence. Bradley's
views were inspired by his reading of German biblical critics, and
such views have been prominent since in religious studies, where a
reluctance to take at face value testimony of the occurrence of
miracles which violate the laws of nature is appropriate. But
Bradley's attempt to extend this reluctance to historical
reports in general underestimates the contrast between the uniformity
of nature and the variety of human history.



Although its overall argument cannot be regarded as satisfactory, the
pamphlet is nevertheless worth reading both for its historical
significance and for its value as a fairly brief introduction to
Bradley's thought. Some characteristic later themes, such as the
fallibility of individual judgments and the rejection of
correspondence accounts of truth, here make an early appearance; and
Bradley's philosophical style -- often obscure, typically
disdainful of illustrative example, and by late twentieth-century
standards uncomfortably literary -- can be seen in high
relief.


## 4. Ethics



Bradley's views on ethics were expressed at length in his first
widely acknowledged publication, *Ethical Studies* (1876). One
reason it was noticed is that the book is highly polemical. (Sidgwick
called it 'vehemently propagandist' in his *Mind*
review.) He did not change these views significantly in later years:
in 1893 he described it as 'a book which, in the main, still
expresses my opinions' (*Appearance and Reality*, p.
356n) and at the time of his death was working on a second edition
which, characteristically, was to retain the original text intact but
incorporate additional matter.



Bradley says in his Preface that his object is 'mainly
critical' and that the ethical theory of his time rests on
'preconceptions metaphysical and psychological', which are
'confused or even false'. In this the most Hegelian of his
books, his approach is, in a series of connected essays, to work
dialectically through these erroneous theories towards a proper
understanding of ethics. Accordingly he tells us that the essays
'must be read in the order in which they stand', and a
corollary of this is that the common practice of extracting one or two
of them (usually the brilliantly written 'Pleasure for
Pleasure's Sake' and 'My Station and Its
Duties') from the whole, on the basis of their individual
merits, can result in a misleading impression of their significance
within Bradley's moral thinking: neither represents some
finished position.



The development of this proper understanding begins by examining the
'vulgar' notion of moral responsibility and the apparent
threats to it posed by the philosophical doctrines of determinism and
indeterminism, threats which he argues evaporate once we examine the
reality of human action. (A prominent theme in the book is that
everyday moral thought is not to be overturned by moral philosophy.)
It proceeds by turning to the question 'Why should I be
moral?', which he answers by suggesting that the moral end for
each of us is self-realization. What this is, is then gradually
unfolded through examination of representative philosophical theories
each of which is rejected as unsatisfactory because of its one-sided
concentration upon particular features of the moral life.
Nevertheless, he thinks, each theory captures something important
which must not be forgotten in the proper understanding he aims at.
For example, in the third essay, 'Pleasure for Pleasure's
Sake', a still-classic critique of hedonistic utilitarianism,
Bradley argues that its individualism is insupportable, as is its
hedonistic conception of happiness as a pleasurable state identifiable
independently of the means by which it is attained (so that it could
in principle be achieved more conveniently than through moral
behaviour). But purged of these errors, the essential utilitarian
insight of the importance of happiness as the point of morality can be
retained. Likewise, in the next essay's examination of a Kantian
(if not quite Kant's) ethics of duty, he argues that from this
conception of morality we should abandon, as the result of a false
abstraction, its idea that duty should be done just for duty's
sake. We can, however, retain the insight that morality requires the
performance of individual *duties*, provided we are clear that
their obligatoriness arises from the nature of each duty rather than
from some formal principle.



These theories are inadequate because they have a deficient conception
of the self, a deficiency he begins to remedy in the fifth essay, the
famous 'My Station and Its Duties', where he outlines a
social conception of the self and of morality with such vigour that it
is understandable that the mistaken idea that it expresses his own
position has gained some currency. This Hegelian account of the moral
life, in which the self is fully realized by fulfilling its role in
the social organism which grounds its duties, is clearly one which
greatly attracted Bradley, and he seems never to have noticed the
implicit tension between the metaphysical account of the self as
necessarily social and the moral injunction to realize the self in
society. But he finally acknowledges its inadequacy, pointing out, for
instance, that any actual society may exhibit moral imperfections
requiring reform from the standpoint of an ideal which cannot be
exemplified in the roles available within that society. This leads him
naturally into the next essay's consideration of ideal morality,
where he discusses the scope of morality's demands on the
individual, and, by a further natural extension, into the seventh
essay's discussion of the distinction between the good and the
bad self, a discussion which involves an attempted demonstration that
the bad self is a kind of unrealizable parasite on the good. This is
necessary to his enterprise: without it, he could not hope to make
plausible his suggestion that the aim of morality is self-realization.
But in one way the enterprise still founders: the final essay argues
that morality is ultimately self-contradictory, depending for its
existence on the evil it seeks to overcome. Realization of the ideal
self is thus unattainable through morality, but the book closes by
suggesting that it is still possible in religion.



Some of Bradley's metaphysical ideas are displayed in his
defence of his moral philosophy. An example is his claim that the self
is a concrete universal and that the ethical doctrines he criticizes
are damaged by their reliance upon abstract notions of the self. The
self is *universal* in that it retains its identity over time
and through many different actions, thus collecting together the
series of abstract particulars which make up its history in a way
analogous to that in which the abstract universal *red*
collects together its scattered individual instances (now often called
'tropes'); it is *concrete* in that, unlike
*red* it is a real non-abstract individual. For such claims to
be fully convincing, a developed system in which the underlying
metaphysical ideas are fully worked out is needed, as he himself
admitted. But in this later working out, most of it in *Appearance
and Reality*, the expression 'concrete universal'
almost disappears from Bradley's vocabulary, mainly because he
eventually concludes that there can be only one such thing;
nevertheless, the idea involved remains, reappearing in the form of
the recurring theme that abstraction is falsification, and in this
form is central to his logic and his metaphysics.


## 5. Logic



Bradley's most sustained treatment of logic comes in *The
Principles of Logic*, published contemporaneously with
Frege's *Grundlagen*. The benefit of hindsight provides a
striking contrast between these works, the former apparently looking
back to the nineteenth century, the latter anticipating the twentieth.
While both books eschew formal methods, in Frege's case this
results merely from an attempt to give a readable account of some
applications of mathematical logic. But the absence of formulae
(theorems, axioms, rules of inference) from Bradley's book is
intrinsic to it, expressing an opposition (shared by Mill) to the
formalization of reasoning *in principle*, as detaching
inference from the practical acquisition of scientific knowledge.
This, together with the fact that familiar terms (e.g.
'contradiction') are used in unfamiliar ways, gives the
book an archaic feel. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that
*Principles* would no longer ordinarily be consulted by a
modern logician unless for historical purposes, it focuses on issues
central to logic, and the impression of its being backward-looking is
to some extent misleading: for example, it uses the older vocabulary
of 'ideas' and 'judgments' to express views
which, often through their (selective) impact upon Russell, gave rise
to doctrines subsequently expressed in terms of sentences and
propositions; and it effectively exposed the notions of meaning and
reference to a sceptical scrutiny which has continued long since.



Although the treatment is less rigidly dialectical than that of
*Ethical Studies*, Bradley develops his views through criticism
of others, and alters them as he goes along. One result is that the
book is far from easy to *consult*, and a reader determined to
find out what Bradley thinks must be prepared to follow its argument
through many twists and turns, including occasional incursions into
the fields of epistemology, phenomenology, and metaphysics.



Traditionally, logic books came divided into three parts, dealing
respectively with Conception (usually via *ideas*, the
traditional components of judgments), Judgment and Inference. Bradley
both inherits and transforms this tradition, keeping the three-part
format but devoting the first to Judgment and both second and third
parts to Inference, thus dropping the separate treatment of
Conception. This is significant in that it reflects his rejection of
the standard view that judgments are formed by somehow conjoining
ideas: for example, the Port-Royal *Logic*'s Aristotelian
claim that they are 'necessarily composed of three elements
-- the subject-idea, the attribute, and the joining of these two
ideas'. Bradley attacks such doctrines on more than one
front.



He argues, for instance, that those who, like Hume, think judgments to
consist of separable ideas, fail to identify the sense of
'idea' in which ideas are important to logic: ideas in
this sense are not separate and datable psychological events (such as
my now visualizing a rainbow) but abstract universals. Once ideas are
properly understood, he suggests, they can no longer even plausibly be
thought of as individual and mutually independent entities which can
be put together to create a judgment (as Locke maintains in Chapter
XIV of Book IV of *An Essay Concerning Human Understanding*):
the order of dependence is the opposite, ideas being abstractions from
complete judgments. This theory could be aptly referred to as the
'monistic' theory of judgment, as the parallel with
Bradley's metaphysical views is immediately evident: the
rejection of independent substances held together by relational ties
goes hand in hand with the rejection of independent ideas held
together by the copula. Equally evident is the challenge this poses
for earlier conceptions of analysis as the decomposition of a complex
into its simple constituents, for on this view there are no
constituents to begin with. Here, albeit in his archaic vocabulary,
Bradley identifies in advance the difficulties which Russell was later
to face in trying to reconcile the unity of the proposition with what
he thought to be the mutual independence of its constituents,
difficulties which appeared in another guise for Frege in his attempt
to maintain a strict division between concepts and objects.



Further, given that ideas are universals, accounts like that of
Port-Royal make it impossible to see how judgment can be about
reality, since its ideas represent kinds of things, while those real
things themselves are particular; so long as judgment is confined to
ideas, there can be no unique identification of any item about which
we judge. Bradley applies the point to language, arguing that even
grammatically proper names and demonstratives are disguised general
terms. Even spatial and temporal specifications (X as the object/event
occupying location Z at time Y) fail as unambiguous principles of
individuation; they would indeed be able to successfully individuate
particular objects/events within a given spatiotemporal series, yet
they would not be able to differentiate one spatiotemporal series from
another. The final outcome is that reference cannot be fixed solely in
terms of language and abstract descriptions; it rather presupposes an
immediate encounter in reality through our experience.



These insights appear to anticipate that application of
Russell's Theory of Descriptions in which it is used to
eliminate grammatical names in favour of quantified general sentences.
Whether or not this is actually the origin of that theory, there is no
doubt in another case: Russell, who claimed in correspondence to have
read *Principles* closely, acknowledged openly that he was
convinced by Bradley's argument that the logical form of
universal sentences is hypothetical (so that, e.g., 'All cows
eat grass' is to be understood as saying 'If anything is a
cow then it eats grass'). In this way, Bradley had a
significant, if indirect, impact on predicate calculus. His role as a
precursor of modern logic should not be overemphasized, however, since
he acknowledges that the interpretation of universal sentences as
hypothetical was suggested to him by his reading of Herbart.



Bradley's own account of judgment is that it is 'the act
which refers an ideal content ... to a reality beyond the act',
so that the logical form of every judgment is 'Reality is such
that, if anything is S then it is P'. This formulation makes
intelligible what is superficially paradoxical in Bradley, when he
says: 'All judgments are categorical, for they all do affirm
about the reality, and assert their content of that. Again, all are
hypothetical, for not one of them can ascribe to reality its content
unconditionally' (*Principles*, Bk I, Ch. II, sec. 79,
modified according to Bradley's notes to the Second Edition). It
is not hard to see in this an informal anticipation of the
representation of sentences in terms of a combination of universal
quantifier and object- and predicate-variables. Consider also
Bradley's treatment of sentences about fictional entities, such
as 'There are no ghosts'. On Bradley's analysis,
this turns out to be a condensed form for 'Reality is no place
where ghosts exist'. One sees here the close similarity with
Russell's Theory of Descriptions, where a negative existential
like 'Pegasus does not exist' is not a statement about a
non-existent Pegasus, but simply asserts that the universe of
discourse (now playing the logical function of Bradley's
'Reality') does not contain any individuals that possess
all features ascribed to Pegasus in books of mythology. (Here as
elsewhere the book looks forward as well as back.)



Despite these significant steps in the direction of later logical
theories, it is an exaggeration to claim, as some have done, that
Bradley's strictures on the account of judgment as a combination
of ideas mean that he is straightforwardly opposed to psychologism in
logic, for it is clear that he thinks logic's subject matter to
be mental acts, not sentences or statements. This is already evident
in his definition of judgement as 'the act which refers an ideal
content... to a reality beyond the act' (*Principles*, Bk
I, Ch. I, sec. 10).



Bradley continues to criticize traditional logic when he turns from
judgment to inference. Just as he rejected the Aristotelian account of
judgments as combinations of subject and predicate, he rejects
Aristotelian syllogistic (for the same reason as he later rejects
Mill's canons of induction): it misses the fact that reasoning
can take place only through the generality involved in universals.
Universals are thus essential to inference, and for this reason
Hume's account of inference in terms of the association of ideas
collapses: Humean ideas are particulars, fleeting episodes which
cannot be revived by association. This does not mean that association
of ideas is impossible, but genuine association (which Bradley calls
'redintegration') can involve only universals.



Surprisingly for those who subscribe to the common view, first
broadcast by Russell in 1900 in *A Critical Exposition of the
Philosophy of Leibniz* and much repeated thereafter, that Bradley
thought all judgments to be of subject/predicate form and accordingly
failed to recognize relational judgments as a distinct kind,
Bradley's treatment of inference includes the complaint that the
mathematical logics of his time cannot represent valid relational
inferences. His own initial account of inference is that it is
'ideal experiment': 'ideal' in that these are
thought-experiments which remain in the realm of idea, but
nevertheless experiments in that their results are not guaranteed in
advance by a complete set of logical laws which infallibly determine
their own application (a view reminiscent of Wittgenstein). But later,
after a long and tangled consideration of the question of how it is
possible for a deductive inference to be reflected in reality, he
comes up with a revised account: 'Every inference is the ideal
self-development of an object taken as real'
(*Principles*, Terminal Essay I, p. 598). Bradley seems here to
be following the Humean idea that there are no logical relations
between distinct existences: the reason that valid inference can be
reflected in reality is that it can never take one beyond the original
subject matter.



Much of *The Principles of Logic* is polemical, and it affords
occasional examples of Bradley at his funniest and most acerbic, such
as this note to a short chapter criticizing Herbert Spencer's
view of the nature of inference (Bk II, Pt II, Ch. II, sec. 14, n.
3),



> 
> With regard to Mr. Spencer's view I would suggest, as a
> possibility, that it never was taken from the facts, but was a
> development of or from something about Comparison which he found in
> Hamilton. Reading so few books, Mr. Spencer was naturally more at the
> mercy of those he did read.
> 



and this passing swipe at Hamilton himself (Bk II, Pt II, Ch. I, sec.
9), 



> 
> This may be called the law of Redintegration. For we may take this
> name from Sir W. Hamilton (*Reid*, p. 897), having found
> nothing else that we could well take.
> 



It is clear that much of Bradley's criticism of his predecessors
and contemporaries expresses his hostility to the sort of
psychological atomism evident in extreme form in Hume but equally to
be found presupposed in accounts of judgment like those mentioned
above. What Bradley particularly objected to about such views is that
the particulars (ideas) which they treated as realities in their own
right, and out of which judgments are said to be composed, are
anything but: far from being themselves genuine individuals, they are
abstractions from the continuous whole of psychological life and
incapable of independent existence. This is an early version of a
holism which has since had many adherents. But he then goes on to
point out that judgments too involve abstractions, since the subject
matter of any judgment is necessarily detached from its background
(as, for example, 'Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon'
detaches the river from its location and the general from his army)
and this process inevitably misrepresents the way things really are.
Thus the objections which Bradley deployed against misleading accounts
of logic now begin to pose a threat against logic itself by eroding
the integrity of the judgments which go into its inferences, and he
ends *Principles* in a sceptical vein by suggesting that no
judgment is ever really true nor any inference fully valid.



In addition to his discussion of the nature of ideas, judgment and
reference, the emphasis he gives to the notion of truth is another
main way in which he helped shaping the agenda of later analytic
philosophy. At this point Bradley's attempt to write a book on
logic without getting entangled in metaphysics begins to succumb to
his doubts about the notion of truth. He holds that logic presupposes
a correspondence theory of truth (he calls it the 'copy'
theory), but it is apparent that he thinks this theory metaphysically
inadequate: indeed, he marshals against it counter-examples drawing
on, e.g., disjunctions, counter-examples which had to await the theory
of truth-functions before they could be accommodated. In *Essays on
Truth and Reality* he takes these ideas further, arguing for
'the identity of truth knowledge and reality' (p. 113) and
vehemently rejecting all alternatives, including not solely the
copy-theory, but also any understanding of the concept of truth in
terms of pragmatic success. It could hardly be clearer that Bradley
holds an identity theory of truth, and although he is commonly
believed to have been a supporter of a coherence theory of truth (and
is standardly identified as such in the textbooks), this common belief
is at the very least greatly misleading. However, the combination of
the identity theory and his metaphysical doctrine that reality is a
unified whole enables coherence to be deduced from his views as a
consequence, and he himself thought the *test* of truth to be
'system', a notion under which he included what is
commonly meant by coherence; this explains why he has so often been
thought to be a coherence theorist. It might be thought that his
famous attack on the Hegelian idea that the rational is the real
(*Principles* Bk III, Pt II, Ch. IV, sec. 16) is inconsistent
with his holding an identity theory of truth: but the two are
reconciled through his doctrine of degrees of truth, a doctrine which
has to be understood within the context of his metaphysics.


## 6. Metaphysics



After the completion of *The Principles of Logic*, Bradley
turned to the task of giving a full account of his metaphysics. The
result was *Appearance and Reality* (1893). But Bradley was
philosophically active for a further thirty years thereafter,
continuing to elucidate, defend and refine his views, and engaging
with critics and rivals (notably, and revealingly for both sides, with
Russell). Concentration upon *Appearance and Reality* alone,
therefore, risks placing undue weight upon what turn out to be
temporary features of thought or expression, and this has in fact
contributed to the distorted impressions of his thinking so often to
be found in the textbooks of analytic philosophy.



*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.



Much of Book I involves presentation of familiar suggestions which
make only part of Bradley's case: he alleges, for example, that
motion involves paradoxes, and that primary qualities alone cannot
give us reality, for they are inconceivable without secondary
qualities, and that the notion of the thing-in-itself is
self-contradictory, for if we really know nothing about it, then not
even that it exists. But Chapters II and III -- respectively
entitled 'Substantive and Adjective' and 'Relation
and Quality', are uniquely Bradleian, alarming in the breadth of
their implications, and have caused intermittent controversy ever
since. In generalized form, Bradley's contention is that
relations (such as *greater than*) are unintelligible either
with or without terms, and, likewise, terms unintelligible either with
or without relations. Bradley himself says of the arguments he wields
in support of this contention (p. 29),



> 
> The reader who has followed and has grasped the principle of this
> chapter, will have little need to spend his time on those which
> succeed it. He will have seen that our experience, where relational,
> is not true; and he will have condemned, almost without a hearing, the
> great mass of phenomena.
> 



It is clear that his views on relations are both highly controversial
and central to his thought. In view of this, it would appear a serious
tactical error on Bradley's part to present his arguments so
sketchily and unconvincingly that even sympathetic commentators have
not found it easy to defend him, while C.D. Broad was able to say
later, 'Charity bids us avert our eyes from the pitiable
spectacle of a great philosopher using an argument which would
disgrace a child or a savage' (*Examination*, p. 85).



In spite of Bradley's laconic style, however, the exegetical
errors of his critics are hard to justify. The impression that
Bradley's crucial metaphysical arguments are negligible arises
in part from reading them as designed to prove the doctrine of the
internality of all relations -- that is, either (1) their
reducibility to qualities, or (2) their holding necessarily, depending
on the sense of 'internal', Russell having interpreted the
doctrine in the former way, Moore in the latter. Whichever sense we
take, this is a misreading -- and an impossible one, if we take
'internal' in Russell's sense, because of
Bradley's rejection of the subject/predicate account of judgment
as 'erroneous'. If, however, we use Moore's sense of
'internal', the reading is understandable, albeit still
inexcusable: in Chapter III Bradley confusingly applies this word to
relations in a metaphysically innocent way which has no connection
with the doctrine of internality as this is understood by Moore, while
in other parts of *Appearance and Reality* he openly flirts
with the doctrine of internality, repudiating it clearly only in later
works less often read, such as the important essay
'Relations' left incomplete at his death and published in
his *Collected Essays* of 1935. Further, Bradley does uniformly
reject the reality of external relations, and it is easy, though not
logically inevitable, to interpret this as a commitment to the
doctrine of internality.



Bradley's treatment of relations originates in Chapter II with a
discussion of the problem of what makes the unity of an individual
thing. How can we make sense of the fact that a *single* thing,
such as, say, a lump of sugar, is capable of holding a
*plurality* of different properties into a unity, such as its
sweetness, whiteness and hardness? We cannot postulate the existence
of an underlying substance distinct from its qualities, for this would
commit us to the existence of a naked, bare particular, the absurd
conception of a something devoid of all qualities. Moreover, the
original difficulty as to the unity of the thing is left unsolved by
this move, since it becomes possible to ask what it is that binds the
qualities to their substance. The alternative is to conceive the thing
as a collection of qualities, yet what is the nature of the
ontological tie that binds them into the unity of the thing? We are
left with an *aggregate* of independent, substance-like
qualities, rather than with an *individual* thing. At this
point, the problem of relations emerges in its full ontological
significance, for it now looks as if only a relation could provide the
required *nexus*.



Bradley's considered view in Chapter III is that neither
external nor internal relations possess unifying power and must
therefore be rejected as unreal. This is the proper conclusion of a
set of condensed arguments which he deploys as a team, systematically
excluding the possible positions available to those who would
disagree. One crucial consideration is based upon the insight that a
relation is the 'ground' of its terms as well as
'founded' upon them. 'So far as I can see', he
says, 'relations must depend upon terms, just as much as terms
upon relations' (*Appearance*, p. 26). The relation is
said to 'depend' upon its terms, because it requires at
least two terms in order to exist; and terms 'depend' upon
relations, because they are partly constituted by the relationships in
which they stand to one another (albeit Bradley provides no
illustration, this can be made plausible by considering two different
shades of colour: blue would not be blue, if it were not darker than
yellow). Once this is recognized, Bradley goes on to argue, one sees
that a related term *A* is really made up of two parts, one
functioning as the foundation of the relation, *A1*, and the
other determined by it, *A2*. Thus, each related term turns out
to be a relational complex, in this specific case, *A* turning
out to be the complex *R*(*A1*,*A2*). This
launches a regress, for by the same logic *A1* and *A2*
will have to be made up of two distinct parts, and so on without
end.



The member of Bradley's team of arguments which has attracted
the greatest polemical attention, however, is the one which alleges
that if a relation were a further kind of real thing along with its
terms (as, e.g., Russell later assumed in his multiple relation theory
of judgment), then a further relation would be required to relate it
to its terms, and so on *ad infinitum*. It is clear from this
argument (which is an obvious descendant of *The Principles of
Logic*'s attack on the traditional analysis of judgment), as
well as from his own explanation, that for him 'real' is a
technical term: to be real is to be an individual substance (in the
sense commonly found in Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza). On this
understanding, to deny the reality of relations is to deny that they
are independent existents. It is this argument which explains
reactions like Broad's: in common with others, he took Bradley
to be assuming that relations are a kind of object, when what Bradley
was doing was arguing by a kind of *reductio* against that very
assumption.



These remarks make it clear that Bradley is using the term
'appearance' in an ontological sense, as referring to what
lacks full individuality, rather than in an epistemological sense, as
referring to what is present to a subject. And indeed, he does not
wish to deny the obvious fact that we experience a rich diversity of
things; relations and plurality *in some sense* exist, and
therefore belong to reality. The denial of the reality of relations
does not imply their absolute non-existence; rather, his conclusion is
that relations and terms should be conceived as aspects within an
all-embracing whole. Instead of ascribing to Bradley the doctrine of
internality, it would therefore be better to see him as advocating a
'holistic' theory of relations. As against Russell,
Bradley was wholly explicit on this fundamental point:



> 
> This is the doctrine for which I have now for so many years contended.
> Relations exists only in and through a whole which can not
> [*sic*] in the end be resolved into relations and terms.
> 'And', 'together' and 'between',
> are all in the end senseless apart from such a whole. The opposite
> view is maintained (as I understand) by Mr. Russell... But for myself,
> I am unable to find that Mr. Russell has ever really faced the
> question. (*Principles*, 2nd edn, Ch. II, additional note 50).
> 



Interestingly, one philosopher who faced Bradley's question
squarely was Russell's pupil, Wittgenstein. In his
*Tractatus* he tried to avoid Bradley's regresses by
getting rid of relations. His simple objects do enter into the
formation of unified facts, yet no extraneous connecting principle is
required:'In the atomic fact objects hang one in another, like
the links of a chain.' (2.03). The metaphor of a chain, however,
provides no real answer to the problem raised by Bradley, especially
so in light of the fact that it is all but clear that
Wittgenstein's logico-ontological atoms can be said to possess a
form; surely, they differ from Democritean atoms in that they lack
material properties (cf. 2.0331 and 2.0232). Moreover, Bradley could
still argue that the very idea of two distinct but unrelated objects
makes little sense.



The implications of Bradley's treatment of relations are not
solely metaphysical; they are also epistemological. Some have thought
that the denial of the reality of relations amounts to the assertion
that all relational judgments are false, so that it is, for example,
not true that 7 is greater than 3 or that hydrogen is lighter than
oxygen. Such an interpretation is made credible by Bradley's
account of truth, for on that account no ordinary judgment is ever
perfectly true; in consequence, to one who reads him under the
influence of the later but anachronistic assumption that truth is
two-valued, his claim appears to be that relational judgments are all
false. On Bradley's account of truth, however, while for
ordinary purposes it is true that 7 is greater than 3 and false that
oxygen is lighter than hydrogen, once we try to meet the more exacting
demands of metaphysics we are forced to recognize that truth admits
degrees and that, while the former is undoubtedly more true than the
latter, it is not fully true. The imperfection of even the more true
of these judgments, though, is nothing to do with the its being
relational rather than predicative. For, as was observed above in the
section on Logic, Bradley thought all judgments to be defective in
that representation can proceed only on the basis of separating in
thought what is not separate in reality: when, for example, we say
'These apples are hard and sour', we not only implicitly
abstract the apples from their container but detach the hardness and
sourness from each other and abstract them from the apples themselves.
A perfect truth, one completely faithful to reality, would thus have
to be one which did not abstract from reality at all; and this means
that it would have to be identical with the whole of reality and
accordingly no longer even a judgment. The final truth about reality
is, on Bradley's view, quite literally and in principle
inexpressible. Eventually, it is this mystical conclusion which
explains his forceful rejection of Hegel's *panlogism*;
contrary to Hegel's view in the *Science of Logic*,
Reality is not a system of interrelated logical categories, but
transcends thought altogether.



It is, however, possible to give an outline. The impression of
reality's consisting of a multiplicity of related objects is a
result of the separations imposed by thought; in fact 'the
Absolute is not many; there are no independent reals.' (All
quotations from here on are from *Appearance and Reality*, Ch.
XIV.) Reality is one -- but one what? Experience, he says, in a
wide sense of the term: 'Feeling, thought and volition (any
groups under which we class psychological phenomena) are all the
material of existence, and there is no other material, actual or even
possible.' The immediate argument he gives for this unintuitive
doctrine is brief to the point of offhandedness, merely challenging
the reader to think otherwise without self-contradiction; his greater
concern is to make it quite clear that this experience does not belong
to any individual mind, and his doctrine not a form of solipsism. But
he is not quite as offhand as he appears, for he soon makes clear that
he thinks the whole book to be a best-explanation argument for this
objective (or absolute) idealism: 'This conclusion will, I
trust, at the end of my work bring more conviction to the reader; for
we shall find that it is the one view which will harmonize all
facts.'



So 'the Absolute is one system, and ... its contents are nothing
but sentient experience. It will hence be a single and all-inclusive
experience, which embraces every partial diversity in concord. For it
cannot be less than appearance, and hence no feeling or thought, of
any kind, can fall outside its limits.' But how can we
understand this diversity to be possible, when it cannot be accounted
for through terms and relations? Bradley's answer is that we
cannot understand this in detail, but can get some grasp on what he
means by considering a pre-conceptual state of immediate experience in
which there are differences but no separations, a state from which our
familiar, cognitive, adult human consciousness arises by imposing
conceptual distinctions upon the differences. Reality is like this
primitive state, but not exactly like, for it transcends thought
rather than falls short of it, and everything, even conceptual thought
itself, is included in one comprehensive and harmonious whole.
Appearances thus contribute to Reality in a fashion analogous to the
ways in which segments of a painting contribute to the whole work of
art: detached from their background, they would lose their
significance and might in isolation even be ugly; in context, they can
themselves be beautiful and make an essential contribution to the
beauty and integrity of the whole.



Such limited comparisons are all the help we can get in understanding
the Absolute and its relation to its appearances: Bradley rejects as
impossible the demand for detailed explanations of how phenomena like
error and evil belong to the Absolute, instead trying to shift the
burden of proof to critics who express confidence in their
incompatibility. His general answer is that anything that exists, even
the worst of evils, is somehow real: the Absolute must comprehend both
evil and good. But, just as truth admits of degrees, a judgment being
less true the further it is from comprehending the whole of reality,
so (consistent with 'the identity of truth knowledge and
reality') reality itself admits of degrees, a phenomenon being
the less real the more it is just a fragmentary aspect of the whole.
The Absolute is in such a way further from evil than from good, but is
itself neither, transcending them both as it transcends even religion
-- it is in a sense a Supreme Being, but not a personal God. The
proper object of a complete system of metaphysics should be that of
adjudicating the relative degree of reality of any fragmentary
existent, yet as some critics objected, it is difficult to see how
this could be carried out even in principle, given Bradley's
contention that the Absolute is, strictly speaking, unknowable.



Bradley also devotes some time to a consideration of issues that arise
in the philosophy of nature; albeit it is evident that he feels the
attraction of panpsychism, this is a view he never explicitly
endorses. As T.S. Eliot recognized, a Leibnizian strand pervades
Bradley's philosophy, one which finds expression in his doctrine
of finite centres of experience. On this view, the Absolute
articulates itself in a plurality of lesser sentient wholes, unified
psychical individuals of the nature of the human soul. Bradley thus
comes close to holding something very like a theory of monads, yet
this is incorporated within the general framework of his monistic
metaphysics. Interestingly, the doctrine of the Absolute can be seen
as a solution to the problem of monadic interaction; like
Leibniz's monads, Bradley's finite centres are incapable
of a direct sharing of content (e.g., they are said to be 'not
directly pervious to each other'; *Appearance*, p. 464)
and of causal interaction; however, they are coordinated to one
another in that they are all partial manifestations of the same
overarching Reality. A similar attempt at reconciling Absolute
Idealism and monadism had been made by Lotze, and in both cases it
remains an open question whether this is not pre-established harmony
in disguise. What is clear but usually overlooked is that Bradley
himself saw Leibnizian monadism as the greatest challenge to his own
brand of idealism: 'Monadism', he says, 'on the
whole will increase and will add to the difficulties which already
exist' (*Appearance*, p. 102). He was surely right in
this, as later British metaphysicians -- such as James Ward,
J.M.E. McTaggart, Herbert Wildon Carr, and Alfred North Whitehead
-- preferred Leibniz over Kant and Hegel as their main source of
inspiration.



In Bradley's often rhapsodic descriptions of the Absolute, a
conception of the world based both on his sceptical scrutiny of the
inadequacies of philosophers' accounts of judgment -- and,
it is clear, on a kind of personal experience of a higher unity which
in another context might have made him one of the world's
revered religious mystics --, we can see why, at the start of
this article, his metaphysics was described as 'a striking
combination of the rational and the mystical'. The very
idiosyncrasy of this combination has meant that few subsequent
philosophers have been convinced by it. Nevertheless, in its bold and
direct confrontation of what he called 'the great problem of the
relation between Thought and Reality', it stands in Western
philosophy as a permanent and unsettling challenge to the capacity of
discursive thought to display the world without distortion; unsettling
because it arises, not from the imposition of an external standard
which could be rejected as arbitrary or inappropriate, but from the
demand that our mechanisms of representation meet the standards they
themselves implicitly set.