Idealism, Metaphysics and Community [1. ed.] 9781138733718, 9781315187594

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Introduction: Idealism, Metaphysics and Community in the 20th Century
Part 1 - Idealism
1 Primus inter pares: D.C. Stove among the Idealists
2 F.H. Bradley’s Absolute, or Rationality Transmuted
3 Bradley and Green on Relations
4 F.H. Bradley on Conflict of Interest
5 F.H. Bradley’s Metaphysics of Feeling and the Theory of Relations
Part 2 - Metaphysics
6 Anti Anti-Realism
7 St. Thomas and Infinite Causal Regress
8 Leslie Armour, Spinoza, and Rational Psychology
9 The Suffering Reality of Reason and Love: Kierkegaard’s Attempt to Overcome Epistemological Scepticism
10 On Time and Eternity
Part 3 - Community
11 Radhakrishnan’s Concept of Universal Liberation
12 The Act/Rule Dispute
13 Conceptualizing Community in Order to Realize It
14 Religious Belief and Community
15 Cultural Diversity and National Identity in Canadian Political Philosophy
16 A History of the History of Philosophy in Canada
17 Cows, Wolves, and the Absolute
18 Canadian Nationalism and Canadian Philosophy
Afterword: Beyond Idealism?
Bibliography of the Works of Leslie Armour
Index

Citation preview

IDEALISM, METAPHYSICS AND COMMUNITY Idealism , M etaphysics and Com m unity exam ines the place o f idealism in contemporary philosophy, and its relation to problems o f metaphysics, political thought, and the study of the history of philosophy. Drawing together contributions from philosophers from several distinct traditions, this book presents a range of perspectives - revealing areas of agreement and disagreement, addressing topics of contemporary discussion, and providing new insights into philosophical idealism. Following an extensive introduction by the editor, and drawing on the work of the Canadian idealist, Leslie Armour, the book is divided into three main parts: Part 1 focuses on the British idealist, F.H.Bradley; Part 2 examines metaphysical issues and idealism, such as the realism/anti-realism debate, the relation of classical and idealist metaphysics, rational psychology, time and eternity, and the divine; Part 3 draws on idealism to address contemporary concerns in ethical theory, political philosophy, social philosophy and culture and the history o f philosophy. Presenting new insights into the work of classical authors as well as contemporary philosophers, this book provides a better understanding of classical idealism and addresses important areas o f contemporary philosophical, social and political concern.

ASHGATE NEW CRITICAL THINKING IN PHILOSOPHY The Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Philosophy series aims to bring high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, the international library market, and student, academic and research readers. Headed by an international editorial advisory board o f acclaimed scholars from across the philosophical spectrum , this new monograph series presents cutting-edge research from established as well as exciting new authors in the field; spans the breadth o f philosophy and related disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives; and takes contemporary philosophical research into new directions and debate.

Series Editorial Board: David Cooper, University of Durham, UK Peter Lipton, University of Cambridge, UK Sean Sayers, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK Simon Critchley, University of Essex, UK Simon Glendinning, University of Reading, UK Paul Helm, King’s College London, UK David Lamb, University of Birmingham, UK Stephen Mulhall, University of Oxford, UK Greg McCulloch, University of Birmingham, UK Ernest Sosa, Brown University, Rhode Island, USA John Post, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA Alan Goldman, University of Miami, Florida, USA Joseph Friggieri, University of Malta, Malta Graham Priest, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia Moira Gatens, University of Sydney, Australia Alan Musgrave, University of Otago, New Zealand

Idealism, Metaphysics and Community

E d ite d by

WILLIAM SWEET St F rancis X a v ie r University, C anada

ROUTLEDGE

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2001 by Ashgate Publishing Reissued 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 ThirdAvenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © William Sweet 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Publisher's Note The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent. Disclaimer The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact. A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 00065043 ISBN 13: 978-1-138-73371-8 (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-315-18759-4 (ebk)

Contents Contributors

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Idealism, Metaphysics and Community in the 20th Century William Sweet

1

PA R T I-ID E A L ISM

19

1 Primus inter pares: D.C. Stove among the Idealists Hugo Meynell

25

2 F.H. Bradley’s Absolute, or Rationality Transmuted Lee F. Werth

39

3 Bradley and Green on Relations W.J. Mander

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4 F.H. Bradley on Conflict of Interest Don MacNiven

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5 F.H. Bradley’s Metaphysics of Feeling and the Theory of Relations James Bradley

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PART 2 -METAPHYSICS

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6 Anti Anti-Realism John Leslie

111

7

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St. Thomas and Infinite Causal Regress Lawrence Dewan, o.p.

8 Leslie Armour, Spinoza, and Rational Psychology James Thomas

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The Suffering Reality of Reason and Love: Kierkegaard’s Attempt to Overcome Epistemological Scepticism Vidar Lande

153

10 On Time and Eternity Thomas De Koninck

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PART 3 - COMMUNITY

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11 Radhakrishnan’s Concept of Universal Liberation Kevin Sullivan

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12 The Act/Rule Dispute RichardM. Fox

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13 Conceptualizing Community in Order to Realize It Brenda WirJcus

207

14 Religious Belief and Community William Sweet

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15 Cultural Diversity and National Identity in Canadian Political Philosophy David Lea

235

16 A History of the History of Philosophy in Canada Bradley Russell Munro

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17 Cows, Wolves, and the Absolute Elizabeth Trott

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18 Canadian Nationalism and Canadian Philosophy Robin Mathews

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Afterword: Beyond Idealism? William Sweet

287

Bibliography o f the Works o f Leslie Armour

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Index

303

Contributors James Bradley [“F.H. Bradley’s Metaphysics of Feeling and the Theory of Relations”] is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is editor of Philosophy after F.H. Bradley (Bristol, 1996), and has published in Archives de philosophie, The Heythrop Journal, Etudes maritainiennes, Process Studies, and other journals. Lawrence Dewan, o.p. [“St. Thomas and Infinite Causal Regress”] is Professor of Philosophy at the Dominican College of Philosophy and Theology (Ottawa, Canada) and author of articles in The New Scholasticism, Laval théologique et philosophique, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Proceedings o f the American Catholic Philosophical Association, M odem Schoolman, Dionysius, Dialogue (Canada), and other journals. APast-President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association and of the Canadian Jacques Maritain Association, he has received the distinctions of being named a Master of Sacred Theology by the Dominican Order, and election to The Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, in Rome. Richard M. Fox [“The Act/Rule Dispute”] is Professor of Philosophy at the Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of Moral Reasoning: A Philosophical Approach to Applied Ethics (Fort Worth, TX, 1990) and editor of New Directions in Ethics: the challenge o f applied ethics (New York, 1986). He was editor of the journal Philosophy in Context (1978-86), and has published in The Journal o f Applied Philosophy, The Journal o f Value Inquiry, The Southern Journal o f Philosophy, The Journal o f Religious Studies, and The Proceedings o f the American Catholic Philosophical Association, and other journals. In 1988 he received the Distinguished Service Award of the Ohio Philosophical Association. He completed a PhD in Philosophy under the direction of Leslie Armour, entitled The Presuppositions and Principles o f Moral Inquiry (University of Waterloo, 1967). Thomas De Koninck [“On Time and Eternity”] is Professor of Philosophy at Université Laval, Québec, and author of La Question de Dieu selon Aristote et Hegel (Paris, 1991), Urgence de la philosophie: actes du Colloque du cinquantenaire de la Faculté de philosophie, Université Laval> 1985 (Québec, 1986) and, most recently, De la dignité humaine (Paris, 1995). In 1996 he was named Chevalier de VOrdre des Palmes Académiques de la République française by ministerial decree for his services to French culture, and is also the recipient of the Prix La Bruyère of the Académie française. He is currently President of the Canadian Philosophical Association. Vidar Lande [“The Suffering Reality of Reason and Love: Kierkegaard’s Attempt to Overcome Epistemological Scepticism”] has taught philosophy at Hvam Agricultural College in Jessheim, Norway and is currently teaching at Oslo College, Norway. He

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completed a PhD in Philosophy under the direction of Leslie Armour, entitled A Critical Interpretation o f Kierkegaard's Philosophiske Smuler (University of Ottawa, 1992). David Lea [“Cultural Diversity and National Identity in Canadian Political Philosophy”] is Acting Dean of Humanities and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Papua New Guinea. He is author of Melanesian Land Tenure in a Contemporary and Philosophical Context (Lanham, MD, 1997), and has published in The Journal o f Applied Philosophy, History o f European Ideas, Sophia, Reason Papers, The Journal o f Social Philosophy, Dialéctica: Revista de Filosofia, dentas Sociales, Literatura y Cultura, and other journals. He completed a PhD in Philosophy under the direction of Leslie Armour, entitledA Critical Evaluation o f Two Fundamental Forms o f Liberalism (University of Ottawa, 1990). John Leslie [“Anti Anti-Realism”] is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Guelph (Canada). He is author of M odem Cosmology and Philosophy (Buffalo, NY, 1998), The End o f the World (London, 1996), and Universes (London, 1989), and has published in Philosophia (Israel), American Philosophical Quarterly, Idealistic Studies, The Journal o f Applied Philosophy, Religious Studies, The International Journal o f the Philosophy o f Religion, Mind, Biology and Philosophy, The Philosophical Quarterly, and other journals. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Don MacNiven [“F.H. Bradley on Conflict of Interest”] is Director of the Centre for Practical Ethics and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at York University (Canada). He is the author of F.H. Bradley ’s Moral Psychology (Lewiston, NY, 1987), Moral Expertise (London, 1990) and Creative Morality (London, 1993) and has published in Mind, Dialogue, and other journals. W.J. Mander [“Bradley and Green on Relations”] is Tutor in Philosophy and Senior Tutor at Harris Manchester College, Oxford. He is the author of An Introduction to Bradley's Metaphysics (Oxford, 1994), editor of Perspectives on the Logic and Metaphysics ofFH . Bradley (Bristol, 1996) and Anglo-American Idealism, 1865-1927 (Westport, CT, 2000), co-editor of Collected Works o f F.H. Bradley (Bristol, 1999), and editor of the journal, Bradley Studies. Robin Mathews [“Canadian Nationalism and Canadian Philosophy”] is an adjunct professor in Canadian Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa and Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. His publications include books of poetiy, plays, and short stories as well as books on the universities, library criticism, Canadian identity, Canadian intellectual history, and Canadian cultural ideals. He is author of Canadian Identity: Major Forces Shaping the Life o f a People (1988), The Death o f Socialism & Other Poems (1995), Treason o f the Intellectuals: English Canada in the Post-Modern Period (1995). In 1991 he was named the recipient o f The Award o f Merit o f the Association fo r Canadian Studies. He has lectured in Canada, the US, Britain, France, and Finland.

Contributors

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Hugo Meynell [“Primus inter pares : D.C. Stove among the Idealists”] is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary and author of Is Christianity True? (Washington, DC, 1994), The Nature o f Aesthetic Value (New York, 1986), The Intelligible Universe (London and New York, 1982),A n Introduction to the Philosophy o f Bernard Lonergan (New York, 1976), God and the World (London, 1971), The New Theology and M odem Theologians (London, 1967), and Sense, Nonsense and Christianity (London, 1964). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Bradley Russell Munro [“A History of the History of Philosophy in Canada”] was formerly employed by the Department of the Secretary of State, Canada, and is currently a researcher in human rights policy in Ottawa. He completed a PhD in Philosophy under the direction of Leslie Armour, entitled The Philosophical Significance o f Quine ’s Dthesis (University of Waterloo, 1975). Kevin Sullivan [“Radhakrishnan’s Concept of Universal Liberation”] teaches philosophy at Heritage College, Hull (Québec), Canada. He completed a PhD in Philosophy under the direction of Leslie Armour, entitled Release and Realization: A Study o f the Concept o f Spiritual Liberation in the Philosophy o f Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (University of Ottawa, 1993). William Sweet [“Religious Belief and Community”] is Professor of Philosophy at St Francis Xavier University. He is author of Idealism and Rights (Lanham, MD, 1997), and has edited several collections of scholarly essays, such as La philosophie de la religion à la fin du vingtième siècle (Ottawa, 1993), Religion, Modernity and Post Modernity (Bangalore, 1997), God and Argument (Ottawa, 1999) and, most recently, The Bases o f Ethics (Milwaukee, 2000). He is author of over seventy articles, primarily in the history of idealist political thought and the epistemology of religion, and is editor of The Collected Works o f Bernard Bosanquet, 20 volumes (Bristol, 1999) and of Volume VI of The Collected Works o f Jacques Maritain (Notre Dame). He has served on the executives of the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, the Canadian Philosophical Association, the World Union of Catholic Philosophical Societies, the Canadian Jacques Maritain Association, and the Canadian Society of Christian Philosophers. He completed a PhD in Philosophy under the direction of Leslie Armour, entitled The Foundations o f Rights in the Political Thought o f Bernard Bosanquet (University of Ottawa, 1994). James Thomas [“Leslie Armour, Spinoza, and Rational Psychology”] is author of Intuition and Reality: A Study o f the Attributes o f Substance in the Absolute Idealism o f Spinoza (Aldershot, UK, 1999), and has published in Maritain Studies, Idealistic Studies, Ultimate Reality and Meaning, and Bradley Studies. He completed a PhD in Philosophy under the direction of Leslie Armour, entitled The Identity and Diversity o f Attributes in the Absolute Idealism o f Spinoza (University of Ottawa, 1989).

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Elizabeth Trott [“Cows, Wolves, and the Absolute”] teaches philosophy at the Ryerson Polytechnical University. She is co-author (with Leslie Armour) of The F aces o f Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850-1950 (Waterloo, ON, 1981), co-editor (with Leslie Armour) of The Industrial Kingdom O f G od by John Clark Murray (Ottawa, 1981), and has published in The Journal o f Aesthetics and Education, Dialogue, Philosophy and Culture (ed. Venant Cauchy), and The Canadian Encyclopedia. She completed a PhD in Philosophy under the direction of Leslie Armour, entitled Experience and the Absolute (University of Waterloo, 1971). Lee F. Werth [“F.H. Bradley’s Absolute, or Rationality Transmuted”] is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio. He has published in History o f Philosophy Quarterly, Philosophy in Context, Process Studies, The American Philosophical Quarterly, and other journals. He completed a PhD in Philosophy under the direction of Leslie Armour, entitled Tense and Temporality (University of Waterloo, 1971). Brenda Wirkus [“Conceptualizing Community in Order to Realize It”] is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. She has published in Journal o f the British Society o f Phenomenology and other journals. She completed a PhD in Philosophy under the direction of Leslie Armour, entitled The Philosophical Concept o f Legal Capacity: A Reconceptualization o f the Reason/Will Relationship (University of Ottawa, 1989).

Acknowledgments The preparation of collections of essays can be trying—not only for the editors, but for the contributors whose patience is often tested as the volume goes slowly through the various stages of production, from the initial conception to its appearance in printed form. I would, therefore, like to thank my many fellow authors for their patience as well as their participation in this project. But there are also those whose work does not appear in the collection, but whose efforts were just as indispensable to the finished product. In particular, I want to express my gratitude to Mostafa Faghfoury, for filming an interview with Leslie Armour in December 1997, and to Leslie’s wife Diana, who provided some more subtle help. I must also thank my friends and colleagues, at St Francis Xavier University and elsewhere, who have both provided moral support and tolerated my spending too many hours in the office as I pursued this, and similar, projects. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the assistance of Mr Ken Mackley, Philosophy Librarian at Birkbeck College, London, Ms Angela Hagar, Interlibrary Loan Librarian at St Francis Xavier University (who provided some of the materials required in the preparation of the Bibliography), and Ms Monica MacKinnon, for her help with reading the proofs of this volume. Above all, and along with the contributors and many of his students and colleagues, I wish to acknowledge Leslie Armour—not only for his commitment to pursuing areas of philosophy that have all too often been seen as being on the margin of philosophy, but particularly for the guidance and support that he has consistently given to those who have worked closely with him. The initial impetus for this volume (though he may not yet know this) came from a comment by Armour’s colleague, John Leslie. He once remarked that it was a scandal that Armour’s work had not received a greater recognition in Canada. Other conversations with some of Armour’s colleagues and former students suggested that a volume focusing on the principal themes of his work would be a suitable tribute. As this volume was reaching completion, his own country began, in some measure, to remedy this past neglect. Armour was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the country’s senior academic accolade to which scholars and scientists aspire.

L eslie A rm our philosopher, colleague, teacher, fr ie n d

Introduction: Idealism, Metaphysics and Community in the 20th Century WILLIAM SWEET Contexts and Criticisms Despite their difficult histories through the twentieth century, idealism (particularly AngloAmerican idealism), metaphysics, and the study of community find themselves well-placed at the beginning of a new millennium. At the start of the twentieth century, in the English-speaking world, idealism still flourished—in Britain, but also in Canada, South Africa, India, and even Australia and the United States. Figures such as F.H. Bradley1and Bernard Bosanquet,2 John Watson3 and Rupert Lodge,4 Jan C. Smuts5 and R.F.A. Hoemlé,6 A.G. Hogg7 and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan,8 (Sir) William Mitchell9 and W.R. Boyce-Gibson,10 and Josiah Royce,11 George H. Howison12 and Borden Parker Bowne13 dominated the philosophical scene. Theirs was an idealism whose impact extended beyond the academic sphere, addressing concrete concerns in public policy, religion, and social life. Some of the many issues on which their views were influential include welfare, social legislation, and anti-colonialism (in Britain), the fight for home rule (in India), the ‘race question’ (in South Africa), educational policy (in Australia), and the application of modem critical method to, and the search for unity in, the organisation and practice of religion (in Canada and the United States). But by the 1920s, and for much of the rest of the century, idealism—the philosophical theory that ‘primary reality consists of ideas,’ that ‘reality is capable of rational interpretation,’ and that ‘social relations and institutions are not ultimately material phenomena, but best understood as existing at the level of human consciousness’—fell out of fashion in Anglo-American philosophy. For metaphysics, too, the twentieth century was a difficult period. Although the beginning of the century saw a wide range of metaphysical debates involving authors as diverse as Dilthey, Eucken, Nietzsche, Croce, Husserl, Bradley, McTaggart, Bergson, Sertillanges, Maritain, Royce, Santayana, and Whitehead, by the time of the publication of The Open Society and its Enemies (in 194514)—in which Karl Popper charged that the philosophies of Plato, Hegel, and their ‘disciples’ were grounded on assumptions that were antithetical to human freedom— ‘traditional’ systematic metaphysics had long been out of fashion. Metaphysics, or at least metaphysical system building, was, as Popper, A. J. Ayer,15 and the philosophers of the Vienna Circle had already argued, non-scientific, if not altogether nonsensical. At best, a number of puzzles that might easily be grouped under the philosophy of mind, were still open to discussion, but systematic enquiry had largely been abandoned. At the beginning of the twentieth century, one finds fierce debates among AngloAmerican philosophers concerning ethics, social policy, and theories of the state. But, as

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metaphysics fell under suspicion, there came a corresponding distrust of any systematic normative philosophy, and discussions of moral and political topics in professional philosophical circles soon came to focus on metaethics and analytical political theory. The study of community, by philosophers such as R.M. Maclver (whose seminal work, Community,16was one of the premier theoretical analyses of society of the early part of the century), turned out to be of more interest to those active in the ‘new’ discipline of sociology than to the less ‘practically’ focussed philosophers. By the 1950s, a not uncommon view among many analytic philosophers was that normative political (and social) philosophy was dead.17 In the last decades of the twentieth century, and now at the beginning of the twenty-first, the tide is reversing. Of course, the ‘demise’ of metaphysics and political philosophy was largely exaggerated, and idealism itself (contrary to some impressions) never really disappeared. In the 1960s, when analytic philosophy was certainly dominant in the Englishspeaking world, one could also find influential idealists such as G.R.E. Mure,18 A.C. Ewing,19Brand Blanshard,20 Errol Harris,21 Henry Harris,22 and Nicholas Rescher,23 and J.N. Findlay.24 Perhaps the first sign of this turning of the tide was the dramatic shift to political philosophy and normative ethics, beginning in the 1970s, with questions of rights and freedoms (in the work of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Ronald Dworkin), and extending in the 1980s and 1990s to issues of community and nation (in the writings of Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, Allen Buchanan,25 and Michael Walzer26). And, gradually, such investigations raised the question of whether a satisfactory theory of justice or rights required at least a ‘thin’ metaphysical foundation. Other authors, such as Hilaiy Putnam, Timothy Sprigge,27 John McDowell, and Crispin Wright have taken up the discussion of a number of topics in metaphysics as well. There is clearly a much stronger interest in metaphysics today than even a decade ago, although the field certainly has not regained the stature it had at the beginning of the twentieth century. A second sign of this reversal was the recognition by many philosophers, by the late 1970s, of the public perception of the apparent marginality of their discipline. One popular magazine opined that the recent history of intellectual culture in the United States could be written with scarcely any mention of its philosophers. The abandonment of studies of metaphysics, and the focus on questions of language—a characteristic of Anglo-American philosophy through the middle decades of the twentieth century—resulted in a view of philosophy as turned in on itself, and as engaged simply in rarified intellectual skirmishes. It is perhaps in response that today one notes a return to ‘philosophizing’ in a larger sense. The influence of the long-dominant ‘analytic’ tradition has not only begun to weaken, but there is talk of a ‘post-analytic’ style of doing philosophy. Without eschewing the rigour and attention to argument and language that characterized the analytic movement, many philosophers now attempt both to bring their work to bear on contemporary issues, and to address questions and intellectual concerns that have long been neglected or disregarded. Feminism, literary theory, ethnic and race studies, and (to some extent) religion and spirituality have begun to have a significant impact on the contemporary professional academic study of philosophy.

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This return to many of the traditional concerns of philosophy has included a renewed interest in the work of the British idealists. The attention paid to the writings of F.H. Bradley is particularly revealing here. Though once considered by many Anglo-American philosophers as obscurantist, it is often forgotten that such an opponent of idealist metaphysics as Bertrand Russell held Bradley in great respect,28 and Bradley’s metaphysical work (presented principally in his Appearance and Reality) reveals a singular and powerful analytical mind—as analytical as any of the ‘empiricist’ philosophers who were to follow him. It is, perhaps, no surprise that recently some authors have come to find Bradley’s style of philosophizing more congenial, even if they still demur from his conclusions.29 Again, with the decline of Marxism in the latter part of the twentieth century—both as a political force and as an intellectual resource—many philosophers have been concerned with finding an alternative to liberal, individualist political theoiy that can provide an account of human beings as social and political animals, that recognizes the historical and cultural rootedness of humanity, and that can give an explanation of not only rights, but obligations and responsibilities. By the late 1980s, philosophers began to rediscover the work of T.H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet—texts that had been long abandoned to political scientists and social historians. The writings of Bosanquet and Green, and of those influenced by them (e.g., Michael Oakeshott and Harold Laski), have been seen as providing an alternative to Marxism and individualism that recognises the value of human autonomy and the importance of community. In short, philosophical idealism, particularly that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has much to say about contemporary discussions of metaphysics and social and political philosophy, and it is because of this an increasing number of philosophers have turned to the writings of the British idealists.30 At the beginning of a new millennium, then, even if the term ‘idealism’ is still viewed with some suspicion, several of the insights of idealist philosophy, metaphysics, and accounts of community (under such labels as ‘anti-realism,’ communitarianism, social knowledge, holism, and perfectionism) have come increasingly into fashion.31 We can see more clearly what philosophical idealism has to offer, and how specifically it bears on current debates (e.g., in metaphysics and in social and political thought), by briefly turning to the work of one of today’s leading idealist philosophers, Leslie Armour.

Idealism, Metaphysics and Community in the Philosophy of Leslie Armour Idealism, metaphysics, and community are themes that have long gone together, and we can see how they interrelate by looking at the work of the Canadian philosopher, Leslie Armour. Indeed, Armour’s intellectual itinerary, and the extent of his research, call to mind the breadth and depth of the work of idealists of the beginning of the twentieth century. Armour is the author of a range of books, essays, and articles that have made important contributions to the study of philosophy, from examinations of idealist logic and metaphysics, through ethics and political and legal philosophy, to questions of philosophy and culture, the history of modem philosophy, and the philosophies of non-westem

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cultures. Yet despite the diversity and encyclopaedic character of his interests, underlying his work is a common theme—a theme that one finds in much idealist philosophy—that philosophy is necessary to an understanding of culture and community. Leslie Armour was bom in Canada, in New Westminister (Vancouver), British Columbia, on 9 March 1931. While an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia (1947-52), he was both editor of the university student newspaper and worked for the daily Vancouver Province. It was during his undergraduate studies that—in spite of a philosophical department that was not particularly sympathetic to idealism—he encountered and became intrigued by J.M.E. McTaggart’s The Nature o f Existence. After receiving his B.A. in 1952, he moved to London, England, where he worked as a subeditor for Reuters News Service (1953) and as a reporter and feature writer for the London Express News and Features Service (1953-57), while completing his Ph.D. at Birkbeck College, University of London (1956).32 The University of London had not yet been swept up in the shift towards ‘ordinary language’ philosophy and, according to Armour, his position as a journalist allowed him to have some independence from the dominant philosophical ethos. While in London, Armour studied with C.E.M. Joad and, after Joad’s death on 4 September 1953, with Ruth L. Saw.33 In his doctoral thesis, A Survey o f Some Problems in British Idealist Ontology: a re-examination and attempted reconstruction, Armour’s aim was to challenge both scepticism and the reduction of metaphysics to a branch of science. His defence of ontology involved arguments that focused on the existence of the self, and he argued that his conclusions could be confirmed by an ‘ethical premise.’ Armour’s early interests in political philosophy and ethics were thus clearly in the background. His thesis was not just ‘constructive’; it raised a number of important questions: Why did British idealism come to an apparently sudden halt by the 1920s? What sorts of arguments were taken to ‘refute’ it? And, most importantly, was there a single fundamental position held in common among the idealists?—which, presumably, there would have to be if idealism could be readily ‘refuted.’ Armour found that there were in fact rather significant differences among the idealists—differences of which the philosophers themselves were well aware. Nevertheless, it is fair to say—and Armour would no doubt agree—that, although the British idealists did not hold to a monolithic doctrine, there is a unity or common thread to be found through much of their work. For example, idealism is committed to the traditional philosophical standard of the importance of reason—although ‘reason’ is not to be construed narrowly. There must be, on philosophical questions, a ‘logic of the case’ which different minds could uncover at different times. In many idealist authors we see the view, exemplified in Plato and Hegel, that the real is the rational, and the rational, the real— and, further, that reality requires, depends on, or is in some way inseparable from consciousness or mind. A second feature that one finds in the British idealists, and which again exemplifies a commitment to a traditional philosophical ideal, is a concern with articulating an overview that reveals a coherence or ultimate consistency and unity to reality. This systematic unity, sought for by philosophy, is best described in logic. Such a logic is not that of syllogistic or ‘linear inference,’ but is, rather, one of ‘systematic inference’ which is based on the

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presumption of an essential connection of judgement and inference, and that holds that all knowledge involves knowing the whole. Thus, Bosanquet writes that “truth and reality are to be looked for in the whole of experience, taken as a system.”34 And as reality has a systematic structure, philosophy must be systematic as well. Moreover, since reality does not divide neatly and discretely into subfields, any philosophy that is to be adequate to its task cannot confine itself to just one subfield or another. Finally, the idealists were united, as Armour notes, by an interest in finding not only a principle of metaphysical unity, but one of ethical and political unity. In metaphysics, the idealists eschewed the atomism and empiricism of their predecessors. Reason had a key place in their accounts, but reason was itself something that was characteristic of a system, not of an individual subject. The ultimate principle, the principle of systematic unity that the idealists sought, was variously described as ‘eternal consciousness,’ ‘the Absolute,’ and ‘the concrete universal.’ At the level of social life, we see that Bosanquet spoke of it as the ‘real will,’ the ‘common good,’ and the ‘kingdom of God on earth’; McTaggart said that what is real is a community of interlocking souls, and that the knowledge that reflects this unity requires a supplement—love; Green saw a central role in social life played by the ‘common good,’ which was a reflection of an ‘Eternal Consciousness’ underlying all of reality;35 and Bradley noted the essential role in ethics of the ‘moral organism’36 and the ‘moral universal.’ Such a principle of unity and value is not particularly religious. Still, although as individuals the idealists tended not to hold to orthodox or traditional Christian dogma, they were reluctant to abandon talk of religion or to attempt to establish a ‘secular’ faith. When we look, for example, atBosanquet’s The Civilization o f Christendom (1893), we see a conscious effort to avoid turning to a Comtian civic religion.37 From the time of his early philosophical work, Armour recognised, then, that discerning the similarities and differences among the British idealists is essential not only to understanding their arguments, but also to appreciating better their place in the history of recent philosophy—and it is a matter to which he has periodically returned in his later work. Following his studies in England, Armour moved to the United States, where he taught at Montana State University (now the University of Montana) (1957-61) and at San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University), Northridge (1961-62), before returning to Canada to teach at the University of Waterloo (1962-71 ). Armour’s first three books, The Rational and the Real (1962), The Concept o f Truth (1969), and Logic and Reality (1972), were written during these years. In them, and in some related articles, he attempted to address a number of questions arising out of his Ph.D. thesis: Is it possible to articulate a coherent metaphysical system and a theory of truth that would answer ‘fashionable’ philosophers who were anti-metaphysical? Is there a way of putting together correspondence, coherence, and pragmatist theories of truth? (Here, Armour saw Collingwood’s account of truth and his method of ‘question, answer, and presupposition’ as being especially insightful.) In Logic and Reality, for example, Armour pursued these questions, not by engaging in a straightforward metaphysical investigation, but by looking at the logic of inquiry into truth itself. What he found was that an examination of logic leads one to metaphysics and, ultimately, to the notion of community. As he wrote in his first article published in a philosophy journal,38 the possibility of truth

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implies a duty to search for truth. This entails that one must help others to seek it as well. Thus, the possibility of any rational investigation entails a social dimension, and this, in turn, leads us to the recognition that logic must have, at the very least, a ‘thin’ metaphysics of community. The theme of community has been treated at length in Armour’s studies of Canadian philosophy. Though he had been interested in Canadian philosophy since his undergraduate years, Armour came to explore it in detail in connection with research on the interplay between philosophy and culture. As well, he noted that, if one is to look for relations between the two, one could not ignore the contributions of one of the great philosophers of culture, G.W.F. Hegel. Besides, given Hegel’s influence on the early philosophers of English Canada, an understanding of Canadian culture required looking at how Hegel was received—and adapted—in that context. Armour, and his then graduate student Elizabeth Trott, saw in the example of the early Canadian philosophers that culture has a significant influence on the way in which one pursues philosophy. Armour cites the Canadian idealist, John Watson, making just this point about Watson’s own teacher, Edward Caird. The outer and inner life,” he says, “are at every point in close correlation, and there is no experience of ours, theoretical or practical, in which we have not to do with both. The growth of our inner life is just the development of our knowledge of the outer world and our interests in it.39

Given the interplay between philosophy and culture, Armour also noted that his inquiries into the history of philosophy in Canada provided him with statements by philosophers on what Canada is. For example, Armour found in Watson a plea for a “pluralist federalism”—a federalism where each group or cultural unit mutually recognises all the other groups. This ‘philosophical pluralism,’ found in some of the early Canadian idealists, is a precursor to the theory of multiculturalism that has been of increasing interest to philosophers, particularly in Canada—e.g., in James Tully40 and Charles Taylor.41 Armour argues that an idealist philosophy can carry out the function of articulating a pluralist federalism because it is ‘open.’ As Armour sees it, idealism is not so much a doctrine—though it certainly has canonical principles—as an approach. As such, it can be particularly receptive to the insights of other cultures—and, as we have already seen, one finds philosophers who were influenced by Hegel, not only in the ‘west’ but in India and South Africa and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in China and Japan. In Canada, as in many countries today, people find themselves surrounded by a wide range of cultures. Traditional practices, by themselves, are not sufficient to understand others and to facilitate interaction, and so one is called to replace these practices with reasons. For Armour, because the idealist tradition—which begins with Plato, through the Neo-Platonists, to Berkeley and, much later, to the British idealists—holds that primary reality consists of ideas, and that reality is capable of a rational interpretation, it is the kind of philosophical theory that can provide such reasons, and that is singularly suited to a multicultural, pluralist world. There was a strong reaction to this research—this is detailed in the chapters by Munro, Trott, and Mathews later in this volume—and it led in part to Armour’s accepting a

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position at Cleveland State University, in the United States, in 1971, where he served as Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department. The move provided some professional opportunities—there was a new graduate programme and Armour was offered the editorship of a new journal (Philosophy in Context). It also provided some ‘critical distance’ from the Canadian debates concerning national culture—and concerning national philosophy. But Armour did not leave these debates behind. At this time, his writing focussed on topics relevant to events in Canada—questions of law and the person, sovereignty, and human rights. And as he worked on manuscripts on the history of philosophy in Canada, and on the idea of Canada, he also pursued questions in metaphysics and epistemology. He was particularly interested in the issue of rationality, which eventually culminated in his essays on J.H. Newman and in his book The Conceptualization o f the Inner Life (co-authored with Edward T. Bartlett and completed in 1977, but not published until 1980). In 1977, shortly after the victory of the “indépendantiste” Parti Québécois in the legislative election in the Canadian province of Quebec, Armour returned to Canada to teach at the University of Ottawa. The Philosophy Department there was bilingual and multi-traditional, and it seemed to be an environment suited to reflecting on the possibilities of a pluralistic philosophical federalism. Soon, two books on which he had been working for over a decade appeared—The Faces o f Reason: Philosophy in English Canada, 18501950 (1981, co-authored with Elizabeth Trott) and The Idea o f Canada and the Crisis o f Community ( 1981 ). Though rooted in the history of philosophy, these books discuss a number of issues—federalism, nation building, and multiculturalism. Armour argued in The Idea o f Canada that there are ways in which one can try to make a federalist, pluralist vision of Canada ‘work.’ But Armour’s concerns, like those of the early idealists, Green, Bosanquet, Watson, and John Clark Murray, are not just political, but philosophical. Federalism, multiculturalism, confederation—all provide distinctive views of community, but all can also affect the issues and methods that philosophers engage in. Although some philosophers have shown concern about such issues as globalization and political sovereignty—particularly in the wake of advances in technology, developments in the global economy, and the successes of nationalist, separatist and secessionist movements42—Armour argues that most of them have been reluctant to engage in debates on these topics. Moreover, even when they do, they tend to use a vocabulary ‘imported’ from the United States. For Armour, to abandon philosophical reflection on concrete issues is to abandon one of the central concerns of philosophy. Philosophers should be concerned about such questions as ‘What is the range of possible associations between Quebec and the rest of Canada?’ and ‘What alternatives are open with the advent of globalization and the collapse of social democracy?’ Armour’s own efforts in addressing these issues have led to working with the Canadian Studies programme at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, and being asked to join the Editorial Board of the preeminent Quebec philosophy journal, Laval théologique et philosophique, and to evaluate Laval University’s graduate philosophy programme. It has also influenced him to pursue research on philosophical questions concerning the economy, and for some 15 years

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he has given papers at annual meetings on social economics. It has led, as well, to an interest in cross cultural philosophy. Armour’s research on the relation of community and culture to philosophy and philosophical thinking has brought him to publish more on the history of western philosophy. (Interestingly, one finds an interest in the history of philosophy in many of the British idealists as well. The Oxford tradition of philosophy was one that emphasized the Greek and Roman classics. T.H. Green developed his philosophy out of a discussion of Hume; Russell, a student of McTaggart, wrote on Leibniz; Bosanquet’s The Philosophical Theory o f the State is, in many respects, a reading of the history of western political thought.) Armour’s turn to the history of late mediaeval and early modem philosophy, however, was motivated not so much by a desire to find a way of expressing his philosophical views, as by a wish to locate and identify philosophical and social and political options that may still be available to us. But while these investigations serve to shed light on options open to us in building community today, they also reveal a number of forgotten or neglected features of some of the major philosophical debates of the modem period. Armour notes, for example, that Descartes’s interests included providing a philosophical basis for community—and he claims that this explains in part the early interest in Descartes in Quebec, where Descartes was read as a kind of proto-communitarian, and not as an atomistic liberal.43 Through the late 1980s and 1990s, then, Armour’s work addressed a range of questions in the history of philosophy—and also in ethics, social philosophy, and religion. Passing through the writings of René Rapin, Pierre Lemoine, Eustacius a Sancto Paulo, and Yves de Paris, Armour has produced major studies of Spinoza and Hegel (Being and Idea: Developments o f Some Themes in Spinoza and Hegel, 1992) and of Pascal ( “Infini Rien ” Pascal 's Wager and the Human Paradox, 1993). Sometimes these studies ‘complete’ earlier work; sometimes they signal a deepening of research into a problem or period. Armour retired from the University of Ottawa in 1996, but in 1997 he accepted a post as Research Professor at the Dominican College of Philosophy and Theology, in Ottawa, where he teaches graduate courses every half year. In these courses, Armour continues to pursue the kinds of questions that have always interested him. Dividing his time between residence in London (near the British Library) and Ottawa, he has also been able to work on the theory of the history of philosophy. He is completing a book on scepticism, and has other projects as well—manuscripts on The Metaphysics o f Community, on The Idea o f Idea in the History o f Philosophy, and on McTaggart and Augustine (the latter topic being of special interest since his student days). In addition, he is pursing research into some aspects of the turn of the century idealism-realism debate that involved Samuel Alexander and J.A. Smith. Armour’s intellectual interests are, and always have been, broad and multifaceted. The eclectic character of his work is largely reflective of his commitment to a philosophical idealism that seeks to find unity in diversity, without making that diversity any less real. This comprehensiveness in approach is rooted in a respect for the major philosophers and philosophies of the past Not surprisingly, one finds the influence of several central figures in the history of philosophy in Armour’s work; he specifically acknowledges McTaggart, and one also notes frequent reference to Spinoza, Malbranche, John Henry Newman, and

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(though perhaps misleadingly) F.H. Bradley. The degree of this influence varies, and one should not infer from this that the conclusions of these earlier authors are in any way decisive or make his own reflections any less original. It is also fair to say that the research areas of Armour’s graduate students have influenced him—and that they have also added to the breadth of his philosophical interests. Among the doctoral dissertations he has supervised, one finds theses in metaphysics (on time and tense, on formalism, and on the nature of the self and consciousness), in idealist logic, in the history of philosophy (on Spinoza, Arthur Collier, John Watson, and Kierkegaard), in the philosophy of law (on the concept of law, the concept of legal capacity, and on human rights), on political philosophy (on classical and contemporary liberalism, and on idealist political philosophy), and on comparative philosophy—particularly Indian philosophy (including two theses dealing with the work of Radhakrishnan). Today, Armour continues to direct Ph.D. theses—the more recent have been on Edith Stein, on freedom in the thought of Hannah Arendt, and on liberalism and genocide. As some of the essays in this volume attest, Armour’s graduate students are devoted to, and have a particular affection for him. But he has eschewed the thought of giving birth to a philosophical school. Armour’s current teaching and research at the Dominican College have, it seems, taken him back to his roots. In the ninth grade, he was sent to a Catholic girl’s school, run by the Sisters of Saint Ann, in New Westminister, British Columbia, where he first encountered teachers who spoke of the value of knowledge for its own sake—a heady (and today far from popular) philosophical view. Though he has frequently distanced himself from orthodox Christian religious belief, throughout his life—and particularly since the mid1980s—he has published on questions in ‘natural theology,’ and he has long been an elected member of the Society for the Philosophy of Religion. In 1979 he was a founding member of the Canadian Jacques Maritain Association—an association which, as Armour describes it, “is devoted to keeping open the kinds of philosophical questions which [the French Catholic philosopher, Jacques] Maritain thought important.” He served as its President from 1996 until 1999 and, under its aegis, organised international conferences on ‘The Bases of Ethics,’ ‘God and Argument,’ ‘Theories of the History of Philosophy,’ and ‘The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.’ Perhaps in this Armour is again following a course travelled by many of the British idealists—in particular, McTaggart—who sought to distinguish themselves from traditional Christianity but who in fact held to (as Armour has it) many of the views that a Christian philosopher like Augustine did. Despite the range of his work and his interests, there are three themes that run through Armour’s writings to date. The first is a concern with fundamental questions in metaphysics and epistemology. We can see, beginning with his doctoral dissertation, that Armour has been interested in finding a paradigm of knowledge, distinct from and broader than those employed in the pure and applied sciences, and in articulating a view of reason that is not reducible to scientific reason. For many philosophers in the west, Armour believes, any claim to know must meet the standards of what is deemed necessary for knowledge in the sciences—but such a view excludes, a priori, certain kinds of human interests and activities. There must be, then, some other way of understanding knowledge.

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A second theme present in Armour’s many essays and books is the emphasis on the concept of community and the analysis of the conditions for community. Armour holds that one’s community and culture influences one’s philosophy, how one understands oneself, and how one does philosophy. Idealism is an important tool here because it is open to the differences that characterize other cultures. Armour is also interested in how philosophy can contribute to an understanding of culture. It is this that has directed his work on the Canadian idealists influenced by Hegel. This interest is not based on mere intellectual curiosity. For Armour, the philosopher must be ‘engaged’—which does not necessarily entail political activism, but does require, at the very least, reflecting on substantive issues. Third—something implied in the first two themes—Armour’s work attempts to provide a response to a narrow empiricism and atomism. This, Armour believes, requires articulating a ‘metaphysics of community.’ Like the idealists of the nineteenth century, he holds that the answers to a number of philosophical problems are to be found in a metaphysics that is open, comprehensive, and unifying, but which does not negate or diminish individuality. Leslie Armour’s books and essays show, then, that a serious philosophical reflection on metaphysics, or epistemology, or community will lead—and must lead—to a consideration of each of the others, and that philosophy must, in some way, be systematic. While some of the authors in this volume may not agree with Armour on how such a philosophical reflection might be carried out, they nevertheless acknowledge that Armour’s attempt cannot and should not be ignored.

Exploring Idealism, Metaphysics and Community Today An enquiry into metaphysics and community—determining how they are related to one another but also how they bear on issues in epistemology, logic, religion, and culture—is one that can profit from the insights of the history of philosophy and from philosophical idealism. The contributors to this volume suggest that, in order to do justice to debates on these topics we must ‘resituate’ the classical arguments and texts within their contexts. Thus, while many of the authors take a strong historical approach to these issues, they are also interested in addressing a number of concerns in contemporary philosophy, such as the relation of the individual to community, the debate between anti-realism and realism, the role of culture in philosophy, and the nature of truth. Even though several of the essays that follow do not adopt an explicitly idealist perspective, all reveal an openness to idealist arguments and to an idealist approach. In Part 1, for example, the contributors focus on idealism—particularly that of F.H. Bradley—and on some of the principal criticisms raised against it. Here, just as much of Armour’s recent work has involved uncovering the context and culture that lies behind the arguments of the canonical philosophers, so the contributors invite us to return to Bradley’s texts. While Bradley has been accused of employing arguments that ended only in paradox or scepticism, the force of this charge is diminished if (the authors in this part claim) we understand his discussions in the context of the specific problems that he intended to address, and in relation to his work as a whole. Bradley’s idealism is helpful, then, in a

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number of respects. The idealists argued that a strict realist view, emphasizing the separateness of nature from humanity, cannot explain the possibility of knowledge. Moreover, at a time when atomism and extemalism have come to be challenged, idealism provides a useful alternative—we see this especially in the discussion of ‘internal relations.5 And while contemporary moral philosophers wrangle over whether morality is ultimately rooted in self-interest or altruism, the idealists offer a more holistic and comprehensive alternative—one that has become more popular under the name of ‘perfectionism.’ Far from leading to a tired conventionalism, an idealist ethic requires effort, the development of personal character, and self-sacrifice. At their most benign, idealism’s critics are really doing nothing more than insisting that idealism meet the standards of another approach to philosophy—that of phenomenology or analytic philosophy. And many of these criticisms, the authors in this part point out, simply arise out of a failure to read the idealist arguments attentively, or by taking an argument or a passage out of the intellectual and philosophical context in which it was made. In Part 2, the contributors discuss metaphysical arguments, but also address (explicitly or implicitly) the question of how one might construct a metaphysical argument or defend a metaphysical position. Metaphysical arguments have been faulted or criticized because they are allegedly unverifiable, or compatible with all possible empirical states of affairs, or fly in the face of experience (though it is not clear that they could be accused of all three at the same time). Yet it is far from clear that many contemporary philosophers have adequately addressed debates about time and eternity, or about whether it makes sense to talk of a principle of unity in the world—a causal (God) or a logical principle (the Absolute or what Bosanquet called ‘the principle of value’), or have explored what relation there might be between faith, love, and the passions, and reason. The contributors to this part require us to reexamine some of the standard objections to familiar metaphysical arguments, and to consider responses to them. The authors also present positions that challenge commonly accepted views. Here, too, the history of philosophy, and the importance of tiying to situate arguments in their historical and philosophical context, come to the fore. Discussions of community and culture have a central place in contemporary philosophy. The essays in Part 3 focus on two particular concerns: on how context or culture influences philosophy, and on how that context or culture is itself a product of, or can be affected by, philosophy. Some of the contributors examine how religion, or ethnicity, or national origin, play a role in building community; others focus on concerns that arise—or have arisen—in the Canadian context. Philosophy’s role in building community can range from identifying principles and structures on which the concept of community depends, to the articulation and development of distinctive national philosophies, which both influence and are influenced by national communities. A review of recent literature reveals that while some of these issues have been raised by philosophers, these analyses and solutions fail to go beyond the liberal individualist presuppositions with which the authors begin. In this third part, the contributors show how philosophical idealism can provide some new options here, including the basis for a genuine, international humanism. All this is not to say that the solutions to the problems of metaphysics, values, community, knowledge, and so on, are to be found only in an idealist theory. For many, the

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idealist metaphysical and ethical views still seem to end in paradox or metaphysical extravagance. (In fact, even canonical figures in idealism, such as Bosanquet, came to eschew the term ‘idealist’ to describe his position.) Nevertheless, in the pages that follow, the essays bring three important points to the attention of the reader. First, we should remember that it was not all that long ago that many of the leading philosophers turned to idealism to address questions of metaphysics and community—and these earlier philosophers (e.g., Bradley, Green, McTaggart, and Bosanquet) were certainly no less intelligent than we are. And so, as philosophers today grapple with problems that have much in common with those of 100 years ago, one might ask whether the work of those philosophers might contain usefiil insights or might suggest possible alternatives to contemporary debates. Second, these essays indicate that idealism does address a number of central philosophical problems, and therefore deserves at least a greater hearing than it has had— if not some measure of rehabilitation in determining its place in the history of twentieth centuiy philosophy. Finally, the authors invite us to reconsider the widely-shared view that philosophy can be done in a piecemeal fashion. They insist instead that we pay attention to the relations among the varied questions philosophers discuss, and that we note the importance of ‘situating’ arguments in their contexts, and not uprooting them or attempting to see if they can thrive in alien soil. It is the great merit of scholars and philosophers like Leslie Armour that, by their example and their work, they have given their colleagues, friends, and students good reason to hold that philosophical enquiry on idealism, metaphysics, and the study of community can flourish, and will flourish long into the twenty first centuiy. The essays in this volume should be seen, then, as continuing the ideals and interests one finds in Armour’s work. It is with this goal in mind, but principally to acknowledge and thank Armour for his personal and professional contributions to the study of idealism, metaphysics and community, that the authors have contributed these essays to this collection.

Notes 1. Among Bradley’s most influential works are Ethical Studies (London: Oxford University Press, 1876; second edition, with notes, 1927), The Principles of Logic (London: Oxford University Press, 1883; second edition, revised, with commentary and terminal essays, 1922), Appearance and Reality (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893; second edition, with an appendix, London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1897; ninth impression, corrected, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930). For further references, see the essays in Part 1 of this volume. 2. Bosanquet (1848-1923) was one of the central figures, with Bradley, of British Idealism. His major works include Logic, or the Morphology of Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888; 2nd ed., 1911), A History of Aesthetic (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892; 2d ed., 1904), The Philosophical Theory of the State (London: Macmillan, 1899; 4th ed., 1923), The Principle of Individuality and Value. The Gifford Lectures for 1911 delivered in Edinburgh University (London: Macmillan, 1912), The Value and Destiny of the Individual. The Gifford Lectures for 1912 delivered in Edinburgh University (London: Macmillan, 1913), Science and Philosophy and Other Essays by the Late Bernard Bosanquet, ed. J. H. Muirhead and R. C. Bosanquet (London: Allen and Unwin, 1927). See also William Sweet, Idealism and Rights (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997).

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3. Among Watson’s (1847-1939) major works are Christianity and Idealism : the Christian ideal of life in its relations to the Greek and Jewish ideals and to modem philosophy (London: The Macmillan Co., 1897), Comte, Mill, and Spencer: an outline o f philosophy (Glasgow: J. Maclehose, 1895), The Interpretation of Religious Experience, The Gifford lectures delivered in the University of Glasgow in the years 1910-12.2 vols. (Glasgow: J. Maclehose, 1912), Kant and his English Critics: a comparison of critical and empirical philosophy (Glasgow: J. Maclehose, 1881), The Philosophical Basis of Religion (Glasgow: J. Maclehose and Sons, 1907), and The State in Peace and War (Glasgow: J. Maclehose and Sons, 1919). For more information on Watson and the history of Canadian philosophy, see the essays by Trott, Mathews, and Munro, below. 4. Rupert Clendon Lodge (1886-1961). Among Lodge’s works are The Questioning Mind; a survey o f philosophical tendencies (New York: Dutton, 1937), An Introduction to Modem Logic (Minneapolis: The Perine Book Company, 1920), Philosophy o f Business (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1945), Philosophy of Education (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937), The Philosophy o f Plato (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), and Plato 's Theory o f Art (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953). 5. Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950) is best known for his military and political service in South Africa, but he was also the author of the influential Holism and Evolution (London: The Macmillan Company, 1926; 3rd ed., 1936). 6. R. F. A. [Reinhold Friedrich Alfred] Hoemlé (1880-1943) was Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Witwatersrand and an active liberal in South African politics. He was author of several books, including Studies in Contemporary Metaphysics (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), Idealism as a Philosophy (New York: George H. Doran, 1927), South African Native Policy and the Liberal Spirit (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1939), and (posthumously) Race and Reason (ed. I. D. MacCrone [Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1945]) and Studies in Philosophy (ed. Daniel S. Robinson [London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1952]). 7. A. G. (Alfred George) Hogg (1875-1954) was, for many years, Professor of Philosophy at Madras Christian College (India). His work includes Karma and Redemption: an essay toward the interpretation of Hinduism and the re-statement of Christianity, 2nd ed. (London: Christian Literature Society for India, 1910) and he was active in the early Hindu-Christian dialogue. Hogg taught Radhakrishnan in Madras (1905-1909). 8. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888-1975) taught in India and England, and was, later in life, VicePresident (1952-1962) and President (1962-1967) of India. Among his important philosophical works are his Hibbert lectures for 1929, published as An Idealist View o f Life (London: Macmillan, 1932). For more on Radhakrishnan, see the essay by Sullivan, below. 9. Author of The Place of Minds in the World (Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen, 1924-1926 [London: Macmillan and Co., 1933]), The Quality o f Life (British Academy. Annual philosophical lecture, Henriette Hertz Trust, 1934 [London: H. Milford, 1935]), Structure and Growth o f the Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1907), and Nature and Feeling (Adelaide: The Hassell Press, 1929), Sir William Mitchell (1861-1961) is perhaps best known in Australia for his government service, particularly in the field of education. 10. The personal idealist W.R. [William Ralph] Boyce Gibson (1869-1935) was author of Philosophical Introduction to Ethics; an advocacy o f the spiritual principle in ethics, from the point of view of personal idealism (1904). He had studied at Oxford, but also at Jena, and there been much influenced by the ideas of Rudolf Eucken [see Boyce Gibson’s Rudolf Eucken s philosophy o f life (1906)]. Bernard Bosanquet was one of those who wrote a testimonial (in 1911) for Boyce Gibson’s successful application for the Chair of Mental and Moral Philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

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11. Josiah Royce (1855-1916) is, perhaps, the best known American idealist, and author of a number influential works including The Conception of Immortality (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1900), The World and the Individual (The Gifford lectures delivered before the University of Aberdeen, 2 vols. [New York : Macmillan, 1901]), The Hope o f the Great Community (New York: Macmillan, 1916), and The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York : Macmillan, 1908). 12. George Holmes Howison’s (1834-1917) principal work was The Limits of Evolution: and other essays illustrating the metaphysical theory of personal idealism (London: Macmillan, 1901 ; 2d ed. rev. and enl., 1905). For general information on Howison, see John Wright Buckham and George Malcolm Stratton, George Holmes Howison: philosopher and teacher; a selection from his writings, with a biographical sketch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934). 13. Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910) was the author of Metaphysics: a study infirst principles (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1882; rev. ed. 1898), Personalism (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1908), Philosophy of Theism (New York: Harper, 1887), and The Principles of Ethics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892). 14. 2 vols. (London, G. Routledge & Sons, 1945). Vol. I is subtitled “The Spell of Plato”; Vol. II is subtitled “The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the aftermath.” 15. Alfred J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: V. Gollancz, 1936). 16. Robert M Maclver (1882-1970), Community, a sociological study; being an attempt to set out the nature andfundamental laws of social life (London: Macmillan, 1917). 17. See Peter Laslett, “Introduction,”Philosophy, Politics and Society: a collection, ed. Peter Laslett (New York: Macmillan, 1956), vii. 18. G. R. G. Mure (1893-1979), Idealist Epilogue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), The Philosophy of Hegel (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), A Study ofHegel’s Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), An Introduction to Hegel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). 19. A. C. Ewing (1899-1973) was the author of The Individual, the State and World Government (New York: Macmillan, 1947) and Idealism: a critical survey (London: Methuen, 1961). 20. Brand Blanshard (1892-1987), The Nature of Judgment (Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1921), The Nature of Thought (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1939), Reason and Analysis (La Salle, IL: Open Court Pub. Co., 1962), Reason and Belief (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974), Reason and Goodness (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1961) (based on the Gifford lectures at St. Andrews and the Noble lectures at Harvard). A bibliography of Blanshard’s writings to 1980 may be found in The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1980). 21. See Errol Harris, The Foundations ofMetaphysics in Science (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965), Hypothesis and Perception: The Roots of Scientific Method (London: Allen & Unwin; 1970; repr. Prometheus Books, 1996), Objectivity and Reason: inaugural lecture (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1955), The Survival of Political Man: a study in the principles o f international order (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1950), Revelation through Reason: religion in the light of science and philosophy, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958). 22. SeeH.S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960), HegeVs Development: toward the sunlight, 1770 - 1801 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972), HegeVs Development: night thoughts (Jena 1801-1806) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), Hegel: Phenomenology and System (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1995), HegeVs Ladder, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997). 23. Conceptual Idealism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973). 24. John Niemeyer Findlay (1903-1987), was author of The Orientation of Modem Philosophy: inaugural address, June 17, 1946, Natal University College, Pietermaritzburg, 1946 (Pietermaritzburg : The Natal Witness, Ltd., 1946.), Hegel, a re-examination (London: Allen &

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Unwin, 1958), Language, Mind, and Value: philosophical essays (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), Ascent to the absolute: metaphysical papers and lectures (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970), and of the Gifford lectures given at the University of St. Andrews, 1964-1965, The Discipline of the Cave (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966). 25. See, for example, Mar* and Justice: the radical critique of liberalism (Totowa,NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982). 26. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: a defense ofpluralism and equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983). 27. T. L. S. Sprigge, Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), James and Bradley: American truth and British reality (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1993). 28. See, for example, the letters between Russell and Bradley found in Volumes 4 and 5 of The Collected Works ofF.H. Bradley, ed. W.J. Mander and Carol A. Keene, 12 vols. (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1999). In his last letter to Bradley, dated 20 November 1922, Russell writes “Your [Principles of] Logic was very nearly the first philosophical book that I read carefully, nearly thirty years ago; & the admiration which I felt for it then has never diminished.” Vol. 5, 269. 29. Outside of philosophy—in political theory, for example—it was arguably the interest in T.H. Green that kept idealism 'alive’ in the academy. 30. See, for example, studies by Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant {Philosophy, Politics, and Citizenship: the life and thought of the British idealists [Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1984]), Geoffrey Thomas (The Moral Philosophy ofT. H. Green [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), Peter P. Nicholson (The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists: selected studies [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990]), Alan P. F. Sell (Philosophical Idealism and Christian Belief [Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995]), Sandra M. den Otter (British Idealism and Social Explanation: a study in late Victorian thought [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996]), William Sweet (Idealism and Rights: the social ontology of human rights in the political thought of Bernard Bosanquet [Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997]), Phillip Ferreira (Bradley and the Structure of Knowledge [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999]), and collections of essays edited by James Bradley (Philosophy after F. H. Bradley [Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1996]), Guy Stock (Appearance versus Reality: new essays on Bradley's metaphysics [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998]) and W.J. Mander (Anglo-American Idealism, 1865-1927 [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000]). Current Issues in Idealism, ed. Paul Coates and Daniel D. Hutto (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1996) shows how philosophers like Donald Davidson, Tom Sorrell, and Michele Marsonet have brought this idealism to bear on a number of contemporary concerns. 31. See, for example, Thomas Hurka, Perfectionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Paul Mattick, Jr., Social Knowledge: an essay on the nature and limits o f social science (London: Hutchinson, 1986), H. E. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), Hilary Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987), Harry Settanni, Holism—a philosophyfor today : anticipating the twenty-first century (New York: P. Lang, 1990), and The Communitarian Challenge to Liberalism, ed. Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 32. John Leslie McKenna Armour, A Survey of Some Problems in British Idealist Ontology: a re-examination and attempted reconstruction, Ph.D. in Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London, 1956. In his Abstract, Armour writes: In this thesis, I examine certain arguments put forward by T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet and J. M. E. McTaggart, and make certain suggestions toward a

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satisfactory idealist ontology. After a brief definition of idealist ontology and some tentative suggestions towards a classification of idealist views I endeavour to demonstrate that certain efforts to show either that ontological claims are incapable of justification or that ontology is property regarded as a branch of science have not succeeded. I conclude this part of the thesis by setting forth five types of argument capable of yielding valid ontological conclusions. Examining arguments which purport to establish four variants of idealist ontology, I conclude that a case could be developed for a type of subjective pluralist idealism. I then embark on an attempt to outline a satisfactory idealist ontology. I attempt to prove the existence of selves and than consider the status of other objects of knowledge. Via an argument which seeks to elicit the ontological significance of the seeming clash between our ordinary perceptual world and such systems as that, for instance, presented by physical science; and via an examination of space, time, change and causality, I conclude that all those objects of knowledge dealt with could be classified as selves or the perceptions and introspections of selves. This conclusion is reinforced with arguments based on logical considerations. An independent verification from an argument from an ethical premise follows. Many of the arguments in this latter part of the thesis—with the major exception of those used to demonstrate the existence of selves—are original. They constitute what seems to me the main contribution of this thesis. They establish, I believe, that there is a path along which further progress toward a satisfactory idealist ontology can be made. 33. Ruth Lydia Saw is best known for her Leibniz (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1954) and The Vindication ofMetaphysics: a study in the philosophy of Spinoza (London: Macmillan, 1951). Another of her principal areas of study was aesthetics (see Aesthetics: an introduction [Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1971 ]). 34. See “Logic as the Science of Knowledge” [originally published in Essays in Philosophical Criticism, ed. A. Seth and R. B. Haldane (London: Longmans, 1883) 67-101], The Collected Works of Bernard Bosanquet, ed. William Sweet, 20 vols. (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1999) Vol. 1,297-332. 35. See T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, ed. A.C. Bradley, 5th. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907)78. 36. See F. H. Bradley, Collected Essays, 2 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1935), 158. 37. The Civilization o f Christendom and Other Studies (Collected Works, Vol. 13; originally published London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893). Some of Bosanquet’s views on ‘Comtian’ religion arc alluded to in The Story of Religious Controversy, by Joseph McCabe, ed. and intro. E. Haldeman-Julius (Boston, MA: The Stratford Company, 1929), Ch. XXXI. 38. See “The Duty to Seek Agreement,” Journal of Philosophy, 56 (3 December 1959) 985-991. 39. John Watson, “Edward Caird as a Teacher and Thinker,” Queen’s Quarterly, 17 (1909) 309-310. 40. See Tully, Strange Multiplicity: constitutionalism in an age o f diversity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 41. See, for example, Chartes Taylor,Multiculturalism and “The Politics o f Recognition”: an essay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) and Reconciling the Solitudes: essays on Canadian federalism and nationalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). 42. For example, the 20-22 April 1979 conference, organised by the Canadian Philosophical Association, whose ‘proceedings’ were later published as Philosophers Look at Canadian Confederation—La confédération canadienne: qu ’en pensent les philosophes?, ed. Stanley G. French (Montreal: Canadian Philosophical Association, 1979). For Armour’s contribution to this conference, see “Confederation and the Idea of Sovereignty,” 225-232.

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43. “Descartes and the Ethics of Generosity,” The Bases of Ethics, ed. William Sweet (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000) 79-102.

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Part 1: Idealism

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Introduction This first part focuses on ‘idealism’ and, in particular, on the work of the best known of the British Idealists, F. H. Bradley. Hugo Meynell begins by putting the discussion of idealism in context. He draws our attention to a remark by David Stove—that, a century ago, the vast majority of Englishspeaking philosophers had been idealists, but that nowadays the species is almost wholly extinct, and yet it is not obvious that our contemporaries are any more intelligent or wellinformed than our predecessors.1 One might expect, from such a reminder, that Stove would have it that contemporary opponents of idealism should be a little more humble. Nevertheless, Stove is critical of idealism—and the contributors to this part spell out some of the principal objections to it, particularly as they target Bradley. As noted in the Introduction to this volume, idealists maintain that there is an insepara­ bility of reality and mind and that there is a basic unity or coherence to reality. But this gives rise to a number of questions. What exactly does idealism hold? Do the views of the principal idealists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, and McTaggart—come to much the same conclusions? And where does idealism lead? Does it lead to a denial of orthodox religion, to metaphysical paradox and to epistemological scepticism? Does its ethics result in a tired conventionalism, as one simply waits for reason to realize itself, and all evil to disappear, in something called ‘the Absolute’? In the first essay of this Part, Meynell presents Stove’s claim that idealism was a ‘rest stop’ for philosophers on the way from Christianity to a view of the world more in keeping with science. Stove suggests that the idealists themselves likely did not believe much of what they wrote on such topics as knowledge, metaphysics, and religion. For example, though many argued that there was a place for religion in the modem world, their analysis of religion, for example, eviscerated traditional theism; many denied even the possibility of a personal God.2 But Meynell argues against Stove, noting (as the ‘objective idealists’ Bradley and Bosanquet did, in their respective accounts of the relation of reality and consciousness) that ‘the universe’ cannot be indifferent to us, and in some way must be like us, in order for it to be known. This connaturality of nature and mind, properly drawn out, Meynell adds, does not result in science leading people away from religion but, rather, towards many rather traditional religious views. If the contemporary sceptic and the objective idealist alike are attentive to the idealist theory of knowledge, there may be a basis for natural theology and apologetics after all. Lee Werth recognizes that idealism—particularly Bradelian idealism—leads to a number of paradoxes, and it is this, no doubt, that has led to the movement being ignored. But even if idealist logic and metaphysics appear to undermine themselves, they are surely no less paradoxical in their conclusions than today’s existentialists or Nietzscheans, and they are serious attempts to address real philosophical problems. For Werth, Bradley’s strength—and his weakness—is his rigor, for Bradley tries to provide a rational account of that which goes beyond reason. Werth examines Bradley’s views on relations—particularly

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the relation of ‘time’—showing that all relations dissolve in the ultimate ‘principle’, the Absolute, but that Bradley still thinks of this Absolute as having a structure. Werth then draws on the poetry of Bradley’s disciple, T. S. Eliot, to show that reason can take one only so far, and that it is not Bradley’s idealism, but his rationalist tendencies, that are problem­ atic. W. J. Mander and James Bradley argue that F. H. Bradley actually does recognize the limits of ‘reason’ (in a narrow sense), and that this can be seen in his emphasis on the place of feeling in his metaphysics. Mander begins by discussing Bradley and his teacher and most distinguished predecessor in the Idealist tradition, T. H. Green. Mander shows that both Green and Bradley held that an analysis of relations led to a monistic and idealist conclusion—the Absolute. For Green, relations are fundamentally real, but they are also mind-dependent. To know something is to bring it into relation with mind. Reality, then, was a single unalterable coherent system of relations. According to Mander, Bradley also starts with an analysis of relations, arguing that they are ‘contradictory’ but that their contradictory character can be reconciled by his ‘two level’ metaphysics of ‘appearance’ and ‘reality.’ Green and Bradley agree, then, that there is a basic unity; what differentiates them is whether that unity—the Absolute—can be grasped in thought. Green argues that it can, and that ‘reason’ and ‘feeling’ ultimately come together. Bradley, on the other hand, holds that it is ‘feeling’ that is fundamental. It is just this latter point that James Bradley explores in his essay. He acknowledges the central place of the account of internal relations in Bradley’s thought, but notes that it is often misunderstood because most critics either fail to see it in the context of the controver­ sies F. H. was engaged in, or forget that it depends on the analysis of feeling in Chapter 3 ofAppearance and Reality. Leading us carefully through Chapter 3, James Bradley argues that critics misread F. H. Bradley in several respects—F. H. does not deny relations, just their intelligibility, and external relations are rejected, not because they are contradictory, but because there is no direct knowledge of the atomic particulars relations are said to relate. Relations, however, are not givens in Bradley’s metaphysics; non-relational ‘feelings’ is basic. These first four essays consistently remind us that idealist arguments emphasize unity and coherence. While some of their conclusions seem, at odds with ‘common sense,’ the idealists would argue that, as Bernard Bosanquet writes, their approach “is the spirit of the faith in real reality, and its way of escape from facts as they seem is to go deeper and deeper into the heart of facts as they are.”3 On such a metaphysics, what becomes of evil? Some critics argue that idealism leads to moral passivity—that we need simply wait for reason to realize itself, and all evil will either be justified or disappear. Yet all the principal idealists— Green, Caird Bosanquet, and Bradley—were interested in promoting moral and social action. Don MacNiven looks at Bradley’s ethics and at Bradley’s account of the motives underlying moral activity. Though close to egoism and while opposed to self-sacrifice as such, Bradley holds that neither egoism nor altruism is satisfactory, and that love of self and love of others are mutually dependent. Moreover, and despite Bradley’s hesitations about ‘practical’ ethics, MacNiven holds that Bradley provides some resources for engaging in moral action after all.

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Notes 1. D. C. Stove, The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991 ), 79. “/« 1887 almost every philosopher in the English-speaking countries was an idealist^ (Stove’s italics). 2. See William Sweet, “Bernard Bosanquet and the Nature of Religious Belief,” Anglo-American Idealism: 1865-1927, ed. W. J. Mander (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000) 123-139. 3. “Idealism in Social Work,” The Collected Works of Bernard Bosanquet, ed. William Sweet, (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes, 1999) Vol. 14,149-160 at 151 (Originally published in The Charily Organisation Review, n.s. 111(1898): 122-133.).

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1 Primus inter pares: D.C. Stove among the Idealists HUGO MEYNELL

Introduction It is not the least of the many merits of Professor Leslie Armour, that he has bravely kept the torch of philosophical idealism alight through times when, to say the least of it, it has not been particularly fashionable. My colleague J. J. Macintosh once quoted to me a remarie of the late Australian philosopher David Stove. A century ago, wrote Stove, the vast majority of English-speaking philosophers had been idealists, though nowadays the species was almost wholly extinct; and yet it was not obvious that our contemporaries were any more intelligent or well-informed than their predecessors.11 have been haunted by the remark ever since; having conceived a great respect for Stove as one who was willing to speak his mind on behalf of unpopular causes which he considered had had insufficient justice done to them.2 There is a potted history of human thought which goes something like this. In the old days, human beings thought that they were at the centre of the universe, and of great significance in the overall scheme of things. The sky was peopled with gods made in the human image, who, while they might be exceedingly temperamental and capricious, at least took some interest in the doings of humankind one way or the other. If you thought of an earthquake in terms of the anger of Poseidon, you could reassure yourself with the reflection that people aren’t angry for ever; and that they can be soothed or coaxed into being less angry. The conquest of multitudinous gods and godlings by the one God did not make any fundamental difference; the universe remained a relatively cosy place for human beings to live in. However, the advance of science gives a very different picture. With the revolution of Copernicus, human beings reacted with shock to find themselves no longer at the centre of the universe; now, we know that even the sun at the centre of our system of planets is just one among billions of others in a galaxy which is itself one among billions. We are crawling on the surface of a tiny blue and green speck in an unimaginably vast space; we evolved entirely by chance, through the operation of blind and meaningless physical laws over thousands of millions of years. But human pride, fear and self-esteem revolt against such a conception of our insignificance. Millions still cling pathetically to the old religious beliefs, in accordance with what Freud called the ‘pleasure principle’ as opposed to the ‘reality principle.’ And many of those who saw through the crude delusions of traditional religion have found comfort, at least temporarily, in the more sophisticated delusions of the philosophers. In particular, the idealist philosophy advanced in the ancient world by Plato and his followers, and revived in modern times by Berkeley and the successors of Kant, has provided a half-way house between the comfortable but plainly mistaken older views, and the austere and cheerless modem one to which every honest and clear-sighted human being must nowadays be ineluctably driven.

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I do not think that this overall view of things is very rare among contemporary intellectuals. But I am sure that few people have expounded it with more panache than David Stove. Two chapters of The Plato Cult are devoted to an account of British nineteenth-centuiy idealism, and its role in giving a temporary respite to those who could no longer stomach traditional Christianity, but were not yet prepared for a thoroughly secular outlook. I do not insist that such a view is totally mistaken; however, there are other aspects of the matter to be taken into account, about which I would like to say something in what follows. Briefly, I shall argue that the facts about human consciousness and knowledge to which the idealists drew attention can only be reconciled with the assumptions both of science and of common sense, if something close to certain traditional religious views is true. Berkeley was certainly motivated by considerations of religious apologetics, as Stove remarks (PC ix); but he laid his finger on some problems which are intrinsic to human knowledge as such, without the emotional needs catered to by religious (or irreligious) considerations being relevant one way or the other.

Stove, Idealism, and Religion Why on earth, asks Stove with exasperation, are human beings religious? Nearly everyone knows some human being who is more intelligent or powerful than herself. ‘But no one knows of any such non-human being; or rather, everyone positively knows that there is no such thing in his environment. ’ Yet almost everyone has believed just the opposite as well—that is, that there are gods. Similarly, we all know very well that we must die; but religious persons characteristically believe what is in flat contradiction to this—that somehow we don’t die. If a dog’s human mistress or master is its god, as Charles Darwin and others have suggested, then the dog’s belief in the existence of its god is a credit to its intelligence, since there is a vast amount of evidence which confirms the fact. ‘But where is the evidence for our belief that we are somebody’s cattle?’ While some claim to base their adherence to such a position on science, Stove’s own realism, positivism, materialism, or whatever one chooses to call it, is nothing very abstruse or technical; it amounts in effect just to this. “[H]uman beings are a race of land-mammals, the most intelligent things known to exist, but things which are bom, develop, and die like all other mammals” (PC 83, 98). W herever did the cleverest animal on earth pick up the idea that it was not the cleverest? The main source of the illusion seems to be a kind of deprivation effect. It is well known that human beings have a tendency to hallucinate when their sensory receptors have too little stimulation. But what is systematically and permanently underfed is our longing for care. “It is simply imposible [sic] for us ever to have enough interest taken in us.” And the fact is that we live in an almost totally indifferent universe; like Pascal, we shudder at the vast emptiness of space—for just so long as we let ourselves think about it. Who really takes an interest in us? At best our family, a few friends, and perhaps a dog or a cat; and the odd reader if one is an author. So it is that “[w]e populate the world with superior non-humans who can take an interest in us, precisely because we know there aren’t any, and wish there were.” It may be protested that the gods are

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frequently cruel and capricious; how could they be other, given the unpleasant and often dangerous aspects of our environment? Yet “[e]ven hostile attention is better, beyond all comparison, than no attention at all” (PC 84-6). As Stove sees it, the business of philosophical idealism is just the same at bottom as that of religion, to make the world “reassuring or consoling, or at least kindred.” However superior they may think themselves to the purveyors and consumers of crude beliefs about divine births, wars, adulteries, and so forth, Plotinus, Berkeley, Kant, Bradley, McTaggart and the rest are at one in this respect. And the fact is that philosophical idealism is even more irrational than ordinary religious belief. The idealism of nineteenth-century Britain, which reflected the influence of Kant and Hegel, was essentially part of the religious reaction against the eighteenth-century enlightenment; for the philosophers concerned, idealism was just what drugs are to millions of our contemporaries—an anodyne for the ‘misery of godlessness.’ One can only comment that, while nineteenth-century science is a proper object of reverence, nineteenth-century philosophy in general ought rather to be a source of shame. It is lamentable that some respected contemporary physicists have actually claimed that something like Berkeleyan idealism follows from their theories; thus one has even said that the moon is not there when nobody is looking at it (PC vii, 87, 99, 174). Idealism “provided an important holding-station or decompression chamber, for that century’s vast flood of intellectual refugees from Christianity.” The plight of these people was pitiful indeed; they had exhausted all their mental powers, to no avail, in a futile attempt to ward off the criticisms of the Book of Genesis which were coming out of geology, biology, and sheer logic. The basic problem which faced them was, “how to part with the absurdities of Christianity, while keeping cosmic consolation.” J. H. Newman had the effrontery to maintain that certain Alexandrian bishops in the fourth century had got the relations between the First and Second Persons of the Holy Trinity just right, and that this removed all serious intellectual objections to Christianity. But his proposal was generally and rightly regarded as both ludicrous and unfeeling. Various other ‘solutions’ were of course on offer—spiritualism, Auguste Comte’s ‘religion of humanity,’ ‘the wisdom of the East,’ and so on. But the only one that met the needs of those who combined strong religious feelings with some pretension to intellectual respectability was idealism. “Let the refugees from Christianity be told, on the highest possible authority, that Nature is Thought, that the Universe is Spirit [...], that the dualism of matter and mind, like the related dualism of fact and value, is a superficial one, and ‘ultimately’ (as the Hegelians loved to say) even a self-contradictory one. That should buck them up, as nothing else could” (PC 87-9). The formative years of T.H. Green were spent in an atmosphere of extreme evangelical piety; as a result of which he confessed “parting with the Christian mythology” to be “the rending3 asunder of bones and marrow.” However that might be, Green felt himself entitled to take and retain Anglican orders, and to exert himself to keep the young men of Balliol assiduous in the exercise of their religious duties. This pattern was quite typical of British idealists. Thus the brothers Edward and John Caird were eminent at once in the church and university life of Scotland, providing cosmic consolation for ex-Presbyterians. F. H. Bradley may seem at first sight an exception to the

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rule; in his work, there is little by way of concession to any specifically Christian doctrines or ideas. But if you have demonstrated, as Bradley claimed to have done, that “reality is experience,”4 then you have granted the essential religious premise that the universe is kindred to us. Many people will not then object too much to a few harsh words on the personality of God, or individual human immortality, or any other traditional Christian extravagance (PC 89-91). Still, while former Christians might have gained from such idealists their basic requirement of a congenial universe, otherwise they got nothing at all, at least from any prominent idealist later than Green. “A personal God, a unique historical revelation, miracles, immortality, efficacy of prayer, a divinely inspired ethics [...] all these things were blankly refused them, even rudely [...] by Bradley, and only more politely [...] by Bosanquet.” Since things really seemed to have gone too far at this rate, a form of idealism arose in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century which was less ineluctably monistic, and more compatible with traditional Christianity; among those who followed this path were Andrew Seth and A. E. Taylor. These thinkers have not been historically influential, largely of course because they were adopting again those very intellectual embarrassments which had originally driven people away from Christianity. “But they deserve some credit, both for the comparative sanity of their philosophy, and for the comparative honesty of their religion” (PC 94-5). It follows from what has already been said, that idealism could only flourish as long as there was a popular religion which was in process of being given up by intelligent persons. It had collapsed as a movement by about 1940, largely because “there were simply not enough intelligent people, needing a substitute for Christianity, to keep the business going” (PC 96). What kind of arguments have idealists used to support their curious position? It is fair to say that, since Kant, they have usually not deigned to argue for their position at all (PC 103-4). What arguments there are all seem to amount to some version of what Stove calls “the Gem”—essentially that one cannot have something in mind—say, a tree—when it is at the same time outside the mind. Yet so far from being impossible, this feat is achieved by every bird that alights in a tree! (PC 139-40) The trouble with ‘the Gem,’ which appears in various forms and guises in the work of idealists, is that it depends on a simple equivocation; it is true and indeed trivial when taken in one sense, but has idealist implications only when understood in another. “[T]hat consciousness cannot get outside of itself, can equally well be taken either to mean: ‘Consciousness can reach only what it can reach,’ or to mean: ‘Consciousness can reach only itself.’”5 Kant is relying on the same equivocation when, in the course of criticizing the notion that we can get to know ‘things in themselves,’ he says that real things with their properties cannot “migrate” into our representations of them.6 T.H. Green expresses the thought succinctly in his often-repeated maxim that “outside itself, consciousness cannot get”; Bradley at rather greater length in the following passage from his Ethical Studies:7 “If about any matter we know nothing whatever, can we say anything about it? [...] And, if it is not consciousness, how can we know it? [...] If the ultimate unity were not self or mind, we could not know that it was not mind: that would mean going out of our minds.” You could say that Bradley was trying to scare his readers into idealism here, rather as Malebranche

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was trying to joke them into it when he suggested that non-idealists must believe that, when one was doing astronomy, one’s soul went for a walk among the stars (PC 158-60). As to the ‘objective idealists,’ “half of their object was to put guts back into the world which Berkeley had eviscerated.” But they could only do so at the expense of making their position effectively indistinguishable from materialism. Thus when Bosanquet says that there is nothing but spirit, he does not seem to be implying what any materialist or person of common sense would deny. He was clearly right, that “the extremes of idealism and materialism meet”; it is impossible to say what the real difference is between sandstone which consists of ‘thoughts’ of the Absolute or whatever, and common or garden sandstone as it is encountered by the materialist and the person of common sense. At that rate, all that distinguishes idealism is the pulpit tones in which it talks about a world which is really just the same as everyone else’s (PC 117). What is usually taken to be human thought in its highest reaches is thought gone hopelessly wrong—as can be seen from the Trinitarian theology affected by Christians, the work of idealists like Plotinus or Hegel, and such near-contemporary gurus as Michel Foucault.8 We seem to be faced with a damning verdict on past human thought—excepting only Greek mathematics in antiquity, and natural science since Copernicus. “From an Enlightenment or Positivist point of view, which is Hume’s point of view, and mine, there is simply no avoiding the conclusion that the human race is mad.” Just what, then, is wrong with the vast majority of human thinking? What we need, according to Stove, is a “nosology” of thought, a classification of the diseases to which it is prone. Stove admits that he does not know what such a thing would be; but he does think he knows various things that it would not be. It is connected in some ways with abuse of language; but whatever some logical positivists may have implied, what is wrong with ‘The Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father alone’ has little or nothing in common with what is wrong with ‘Lenin or coffee how.’ It is not ordinary falsity, the misrepresentation of empirical truths; and it is hardly ever logical falsity, at least if this is understood in its usual sense. Defects in character seem to have something to do with it. Thus Epicurus said one should live retired, and avoid public notice; as Plutarch remarked, however, “the author of this injunction hoped to be, and was, famous for it.” If there were only twenty contributions like Plutarch’s to the nosology of thought, we would be much more advanced on the subject than we are now (PC 179,183-4, 187-90).

Philosophy, Idealism and Religion My own view of these matters is more or less the polar opposite of Stove’s. It may be summarized as follows. The questions very properly raised by the idealists, about the relation of the human mind to extra-mental reality, and related questions like the bearing of facts upon values, do indeed lead to a view of things which is repugnant to unreflective common-sense. But when the questions are consistently carried through, the contradictions to common-sense disappear; but only at the cost of a world-view which is at least very suggestive of traditional theistic religion. For Stove, the advance of intellectual enlightenment destroys first religion, and then the idealistic philosophies

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which are in effect a substitute for it. For me, the advance of intellectual enlightenment may at first seem to destroy religion and all philosophy which seems to do any of the work of religion; but when applied rigorously leads to a philosophy which is surprisingly harmonious with much traditional religion—indeed, more so than are most forms of idealism. According to Stove, the idealists said things which were absurd, which they really knew were absurd, and which their whole behaviour implied they knew were absurd. In my view, the absurdities are only at first sight implied by the important things that the idealists had to say; and when the implications of what they were getting at are fully worked out, the absurdities disappear. It must be admitted, however, that we will never see the world in quite the same way again as a result of attending to what they said. We will have moved from the naive realism which merely brushes the considerations that motivated the idealists aside, to a critical realism that takes them fully into account. Stove writes with a great deal of scorn about the underlying motive which he believes to pervade all idealist philosophy, even that which, like F. H. Bradley’s, is at first sight quite inimical to traditional religion; that the world is, after all, ‘kindred’ to us, rather than being, as he thinks is clearly the case in the light of science, wholly indifferent to our purposes, needs and values. Stove is a great champion of modem science, and very rightly so. But what he consistently fails to take into account, though all idealists have done so in their way, is that the world must be in some way kindred to us and our thoughtprocesses for science itself to be possible. For all the disputes which plague or enliven contemporary philosophy of science, I believe that hardly anyone would deny that science is a matter of (1) attending to experience, (2) propounding hypotheses which may account forthat experience, (3) accepting as likely to be the case in each instance the hypothesis which is best corroborated by the experience. For science to be possible, reality must be sufficiently ‘kindred’ to us to be knowable in this way. Stove complains that idealists after Kant hardly ever bothered to argue for their basic position. But Kant’s own main argument for his position, which he got by reflecting on Hume, and which his idealist successors largely took for granted, is surely a serious one. How do we know that ‘every event has a cause,’ when we have not observed every event? To put it in a way that I would prefer, what is the justification for our conviction that the phenomena of the world are subject to explanation? Surely there is nothing incoherent from the point of view of strict logic—as Hume notoriously shows at great length9—in the notion, for example, that the building in which I am working now might suddenly collapse in ten seconds, or that any one of us might instantly drop dead, for no reason that was ever found or could be found.10 Knowledge, and so the world which is to be known, seem very different after one has attended carefully to the nature of knowledge, from the way they seem when one has not done so. Stove, who is nothing if not a very entertaining writer, asks rhetorically what difference there could be between sandstone which consists of ‘thoughts’ in the manner supposed by idealists, and ordinary sandstone as conceived by materialists and persons of common sense (PC 117-8). But however rhetorical the question, there is a perfectly good answer—which is, that sandstone will appear to you one sort of thing before you have reflected on your knowledge of it, but a somewhat different sort of thing after you

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have done so. It is something anyone can see, touch, kick or lean against. But it is also something which, as a result of repeated questions put by the scientific community about sandstone as observed in the field or subject to experiment in laboratories, can be known in terms of the theories of physics and chemistry. It is now notorious that the technical terms of these sciences do not always correspond directly to experience; but are apt to denote entities which are theoretically intelligible and ultimately explanatory of experience. You cannot see electrons; but there are many things you would not be able to see unless there were electrons. It may be ridiculous at first sight to say that sandstone consists of ‘thoughts,’ and it is certainly an odd way of speaking to anyone who is not an idealist; but the fact remains that it does, if one is to take science seriously, consist of intelligibles which are to be conceived by thought, and verified by thought as explaining the relevant data better than other intelligibles which might be postulated. Stove mentions others who have become materialists due to scientific considerations, but says that they were irrelevant in his own case. And he writes of a physicist—evidently not the only one—who has drawn subjective idealist conclusions from his specialty. One would have thought that this might have shaken Stove’s confidence that materialism or positivism was really the metaphysics which consorted best with science. In my view, it follows from the epistemological considerations that I have sketched, that materialism, so far from being implied by natural science, is not even compatible with it. The existence of science depends on autonomous mental acts, of questioning, hypothesizing, marshaling evidence, and judging, which are neither logically reducible to, nor mere ‘epiphenomena’ of, entirely physical processes. The person of common sense has no doubt that the real world is, and is largely as it is, prior to and independently of our thoughts about it. Idealists seem to claim, to the contrary, that the whole of reality is somehow dependent on thought. As Flew’s Dictionary tells us, idealism is “[a] name given to a group of philosophical theories, that have in common the view that what would normally be called ‘the external world’ is somehow created by the mind.”11 Now I agree with Stove that the notion that reality is dependent on your thought or on mine, or even on that of the whole human race, is absurd. No less absurd is the view that each of us has our own ‘reality’ (unless this is just a misleading way of saying that we all have slightly differing beliefs about what is real); or the notion attributable to the sociologist Emile Durkheim, that ‘society’ determines what reality is, or that each society makes up its own reality. What every human individual thinks or feels, and even what the most prestigious members of our own or other societies agree on thinking or feeling, is at best a tiny and very insignificant part of reality or the universe as a whole. And yet reality is nothing other than what is to be known by human individuals and communities, so far as they attend to experience, hypothesize, and judge in the manner that I have sketched. So I heartily agree with Stove that reality is by no means dependent on human thought. But might one not suppose that a reality which is open to and for thought in the way I have sketched, is best explained as being ultimately dependent on some kind of non-human thought—say, that of many angels or godlings, or of one God? (J. M. E. McTaggart thought ‘the Absolute’ was to be compared to a college of many conscious subjects—for which view he is ridiculed by Stove as a “poor demented man” [PC 96].)

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One might say that the overall consistency of the universe suggests that it is ultimately attributable to a single intelligent will, that is, to what everyone calls God. Such an explanation might well seem an improvement on (other forms of) idealism, in that these tend to have difficulty in accounting for the element of contingency in the world.12 The divine intellect accounts for the world’s intelligibility, the fact that it is open to our intellectual probing at all; the divine will for the actual intelligibility that it is progressively found to have—in terms of ninety-four elements rather than four, of evolution rather than special creation, and so on. Given such a traditional view of God, the notions of special revelation, miracles, and the rest—which are repugnant both to positivists and to many idealists—may not be so contrary to reason after all. Might it not be reasonable to anticipate that God as so conceived would provide a special revelation of the divine nature and purposes for humankind; and that a particular section of history, set of writings, community (or whatever) would commend itself as the locus of such special revelation to the most objective and rigorous possible inquiry? And if the section of history concerned appeared to be marked by acts which were at once out of the ordinary, and plausibly taken to be significant of the divine nature and purposes, could not David Hume, many idealists, and all positivists be just wrong in maintaining that miracles can never occur or have occurred?13 Stove treats with surprising, and to me rather commendable, respect, those late idealist philosophers like Andrew Seth and A.E. Taylor, who moved on from idealism to something more like traditional religion; though he says that they did so at the cost of resurrecting all the old embarrassments (PC 95). But if what I have been suggesting in this paragraph is at all on the right lines, the obstacles in the way of such an undertaking are perhaps not insurmountable.14 Stove correctly points out that those idealists who returned to a more literally theistic and Christian position have not proved historically influential (PC 95). In my view, their time may yet come; it may well be that the fascinating but ultimately irrelevant distractions of logical positivism and linguistic philosophy have prevented them from having their due. Logical positivism has after all now been demonstrated to be mistaken (due to the notorious self-destructiveness of its ‘verification principle’), far more convincingly than idealism ever was; and the fashion for a narrowly linguistic philosophy seems to be nearing its end, if not already past it.15 Stove complains that when idealists actually purport to argue for their position—which too frequently they do not deign to do—they come up with some version of the argument which he calls ‘the Gem.’ This is to the effect that one cannot have anything in mind—like oxygen or the Bank of Nova Scotia—which is at the same time outside the mind. He answers contemptuously that of course we can; since a bird performs the feat whenever it succeeds in alighting in that tree. But I wonder whether it is proper to say that a bird has the tree in mind, in quite the same sense as Max Planck might have had the same tree or the Quantum Theory in mind. The bird’s ‘knowledge’ of the tree is presumably a matter of sense-impressions coming from the tree, and an ability to react to the tree in such a way as to be able to alight in it. The knowledge that Planck might have of the tree has a number of other features as well—he could have information about its biological classification, or whether it was good for burning or for

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building sheds. To stick to human examples, it appears that anything whatever can in some sense be ‘in mind’ or ‘in the mind’; physical objects, events, worries, theories, sensations, judgements and so on; but different things are ‘in the mind’ in different ways. Our sensory experiences are ‘in our mind,’ and nowhere else, in the sense that other people cannot perceive them as such, however much they scrutinize the parts of the body which are characteristically affected when we have them, or the part of the brain which is stimulated by the appropriate nerves. Our questioning, feeling of perplexity, coming to understand, marshaling of evidence, judgement, deliberation, and decision are ‘in our mind’ in a slightly different sense still; as it seems odd to say that the sudden feeling that we have forgotten something is in our brain in just the same sense as an itch might be in our left foot. Real shoes, ships, insects and planets, though they can in a sense be ‘in mind,’ are also, at least according to the vast majority of people (including most idealists), external to our minds in the sense that they are in no way dependent on them for their existence. Whatever Stove’s opinion may have been, it does not seem to me an obviously foolish question to ask, how we proceed from apprehension of things which are ‘in our mind’ without being in the public world—like sensation, inquiring, deliberating, judging and the rest of it—to gain knowledge of things which, though they may in another sense be ‘in the mind,’ are also in a plain sense outside the mind, in that they would exist, at least according to the vast majority of people, if human minds had never evolved to think about them. How do we get from experience and thought to knowledge of a real world which exists prior to and independently of our experience and thought? This is the question that Kant is addressing in the passage abusively cited by Stove; and whatever one thinks of Kant’s answer to it, the question does seem to be a real and a serious one.16 That Stove, as he himself admits, is in a position to contribute virtually nothing to a ‘nosology’ of thought is an immediate consequence of what he calls his ‘positivism. ’ One would infer from a strict empiricism, that (apart from uttering tautologies) we cannot talk intelligibly of what we cannot perceive; which of course would rule out statements about the past, about other minds, and about the particles of nuclear physics. ‘But at least,’ it may be protested, ‘such things are required if we are to have an adequate explanation of what is perceived. ’ But this looks liable to let in a much more generous ontology than could be acceptable to any positivist. Many sorts of theist, including myself, would say that something like what everyone calls God is ultimately needed in order to account for the existence and overall nature and structure of the world of our experience. And a fair number of theists think they have reason to believe that God is revealed in a special way through the writings of the New Testament, where we appear to be informed of three divine beings in some way distinct from one another, without monotheism being thereby impugned. Talk of procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father alone, as opposed to from the Father and the Son, concerns the relations between these beings; it is certainly pointless unless there is a God, and unless the New Testament is some sort of special revelation of God; but given these things, its pointlessness is not obvious. And as I mentioned before, if one attends carefully to the nature of knowledge, and then to that of the world to be known—instead of brushing such considerations aside in the manner of positivism—one finds that we inhabit a universe consisting of intelligibles to be known by inquiry into experience; it is to make sense of such a world and of our relations with

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it that the mystical idealism of Plotinus, and the ‘objective idealism’ of Hegel, were developed. Unless one has some inkling of the point of the questions to which they attended, the basis of which I have just sketched, one cannot expect to make any sense of what they wrote. Foucault has done some remarkable work on the means by which knowledge-claims have tended to be devices through which some people—for example, doctors or psychiatrists—may gain power over others; though admittedly he applies his principles in a manner so extreme as at least to verge on the self-destructive (are Foucault’s own knowledge-claims to be interpreted merely as bids for power?). But without some worked-out conception of the nature of knowledge and the means by which it may be acquired, and so of the world to be known in its overall nature and structure, one is in no position to assess either what may be Foucault’s merits or his possible defects. As to the ‘nosology’ of philosophy and of human thought in general, if the truth about things is to be attained by attending to experience, by envisaging possibilities, and by judging to be correct in each case the possibility best supported by the relevant experience, then the defects of thought, at least as a means by which the truth about things is to be reached, are to be classified in accordance with which of these primary elements of the acquisition of knowledge is lacking, and how much it is lacking. One may thus err by lack of attention to evidence; by failure to envisage possibilities; or by inability or refusal to judge strictly in accordance with the evidence. Stove is quite right to note that a significant motive for failing in one or more of these directions is the desire to gain notoriety; and also that abuse of language, or lack of logical consistency, are even together only a small part of the story. He also seems justified in his suggestion that what is apt to go wrong has something to do with badness of human character. Certainly, in matters where one stands to lose by knowing and acknowledging the truth, it is the mark of the virtuous person to attend to the evidence, and to envisage the possibilities, which may lead to the judgement that she or he has made a mistake, or owes someone an apology, or ought to do something about her or his own inconsiderateness or bad temper. Where truth is not directly at issue, the difference between the good and bad use of language and other forms of self-expression is largely a matter of how far they promote, or how far they counteract, the capacity unrestrictedly to attend to evidence and to envisage possibilities. As to philosophical idealism, it has the merit of adverting to the creative role of intelligence, in the sense of envisaging possibilities, which is an essential aspect of our coming to know the truth about things.17But it is apt to underestimate the role of reason, in the sense of the disposition to judge appropriately which of the possibilities envisaged is likely to be true of the world. Idealism is thus an important antidote to naive realism, empiricism, and positivism; but may too easily respond to their crude travesties of objectivity by apparently destroying all basis for objectivity whatever. Friedrich Schiller said that philosophical reflection at first appears to subvert common sense, but finally returns to and supports it. As Stove incessantly complains, idealism seems to destroy the external world, in a manner which is obviously outrageous to common sense. According to a fully critical philosophy which takes into account the epistemological problems raised by idealism, the world is indeed ‘external’ to us in a way somewhat different from what might be supposed on the basis of naive reflection. Reality

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that is external to or other than oneself is that which is to be judged to be such on the basis of certain possibilities envisaged to explain the relevant experience. Such judgement tends to converge on the proposition that I am distinct from the present Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and from anyone who was ever Prime Minister of Great Britain; but that I am one and the same person as a baby who was bom in England in 1936, and was interested as an adolescent in wild birds and classical music. Idealism was vigorously and sarcastically repudiated by Kierkegaard in the name of the human individual, by Marx in view of the independent reality of the material world, by Moore on behalf of common sense. But did these thinkers quite take its measure? By now we may have some reason for believing that they did not. It is sometimes said that the most important single development in twentieth-centuiy philosophy has been what is called ‘the linguistic turn.’ But it is curious how many of the problems which preoccupied idealists about the relation of mind to the world, have turned up again in terms of the relation of language to the world. Does the recasting of these problems in linguistic terms really constitute a philosophical advance? Though I seldom agree with Richard Rorty, I think he is perfectly right in maintaining that it does not.18 It may look better to some people to have two sets of objects to relate (language and that to which language may refer) which are both in the public world; thoughts are proverbially nebulous, whereas spoken language can be heard, and written language seen. But one may envisage language in the following two ways; either as successions of sounds or patterns of marks on paper, or as expressive of thoughts, beliefs, desires and so on. In the former case, the relation between language and what is other than language is clear but unhelpful for the problem at issue; noises and inscriptions are characteristically different from other phenomena which may be heard and seen, and usually easy to recognize with a little practice. But how they refer to what is other than themselves remains totally obscure. In the latter case, language is able to refer to what is other than itself because it is expressive of thought. But in that case, the problem remains exactly where it was before, and the supposed advantage of considering the nature of reference in terms of language rather than thought turns out to be completely illusory. People sometimes try to escape this difficulty by appealing to maps or computers. Evidently a map can refer to the United States, and a computer to the fact that my bank account is overdrawn. But maps and computers refer only by virtue of the fact that they have been deliberately designed by persons to do so. Suppose, if I may use an analogy I have used before in this connection, that someone in a frenzy hurls a lump of mud at a sheet of paper, and, by a strange coincidence, it is found possible to use the result as a map of Hussar, Alberta. In what sense, and in what circumstances, would it be such a map? Only, it seems to me, after someone had hit on the idea of using it for this purpose. And the figure ‘-130’ outside my bank, when I push the appropriate buttons, can mean that my account is $130 overdrawn because the computer with which I have been interacting has been designed by someone for that purpose. Appeals to such models to solve the problem of reference turn out to be mere evasions; they presuppose the very thing they were supposed to explain—the capacity of conscious subjects, through their words, writings or artifacts, to refer to things and events in the world. To sum up the issue of argument of the last few paragraphs, it is an illusion to suppose that one advances

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much towards solving the basic problems of philosophy when one comes to conceive them in terms of the relation of language rather than of mind to the external world. I conclude that, in spite of Stove, the world must be in some ways connatural to our minds for knowledge to be possible, just as idealists and religious persons have supposed. Idealism has in general been contemptuously brushed aside by analytical philosophers for the last sixty years or so; but the basic philosophical problems which concerned the idealists, about the relation of mind to the reality which is in some sense external to it, remain as intractable as ever.

Notes 1. D. C. Stove, The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies [PC] (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991 ) 79. “In 1887 almost every philosopher in the English-speaking countries was an idealist (Stove’s italics). 2. Cf. Stove, “The Scientific Mafia,” in Velikovsky Reconsidered, ed. the editors of Pensée, (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1976). 3. Stove’s text has “rendering”; but presumably this is a misprint. 4. Appearance and Reality, 2nd ed., 9th impression corrected (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930) 129. 5. I have repunctuated this passage in accordance with my own taste. 6. Prolegomenon to Any Future Metaphysics, tr. P. G. Lucas (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1953)38. Stove, PC 160. 7. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1876,323-324n. Stove, PC 158-159. 8. Stove quotes four passages showing what he means. PC 183-4. 9. A Treatise of Human Nature, I, ID, xiv; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, vii. 10. For Kant’s discussion of Hume on causality, see N. Kemp Smith (tr.), Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1978) 44,55,606-607; of Hume’s denial of a priori knowledge, 127,606ff. 11. Anthony Flew, ,4 Dictionary of Philosophy. Revised Second Edition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979) 160. 12. This complaint was made by the mature Schelling about Hegel’s philosophy. 13. On Hume’s arguments against miracles, see Ch. 4 of H. A. Meynell, God and the World (London: SPCK, 1971). 14. This is argued with great force by Richard Swinburne in his series of books on the philosophy of the Christian religion. Cf. also H. Meynell, God and the World, The Intelligible Universe (London: Macmillan, 1982), and 7s Christianity True? (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994). 15. It was a fine remark of J. L. Austin’s, that analysis of language might not be the last word in philosophy, but should be thefirst word. The eternal questions of metaphysics may not be, and in my view certainly are not, dissolved by linguistic analysis, but they are better approached after linguistic confusions have been cleared away. 16. There are no other things in themselves than what we may come to know in terms of judgements based on understanding of experience. Hence they neither consist in experience, as Bradley maintains, nor are unknowable, in accordance with Kant’s notorious doctrine.

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17. It is instructive to see the way in which Stove deals with similar tendencies in contemporary philosophy. He dismisses as nonsensical Nelson Goodman’s description of artists as “world makers” (PC 96). I myself think that this way of looking at art can be illuminating, and consequently view more sympathetically than does Stove, Goodman’s preoccupation with modem art and artists. Artists can surely by their constructions shed light on the world, irradiate the world, and even create possible worlds which may help us to get to know better the actual world. Also, especially in the case of modem art, their work brings out the manner in which we do in a sense ‘construct’ our world, just in the way to which idealists have drawn attention. (On Goodman, see Stove, PC Ch. 2.) 18. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) 8.

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2 F.H. Bradley’s Absolute, or Rationality Transmuted LEE F. WERTH Introduction When a philosopher declares time and space to be unreal, he or she risks being ignored; and when, in addition, relations and qualities are rejected as irrational, the philosopher secures oblivion, at least among those who appreciate logical thinking as a means for achieving truth rather than relying upon intuition or revelation. It is, therefore, ironical that F. H. Bradley, who devoted so much to the study of logic, should be a philosopher who has derived such unhappy conclusions from his logical investigations. And it is regrettable that his arguments have received relatively little attention among contemporary thinkers.1 Perhaps if Bradley had been classified among the existentialists, his apparently absurd conclusions might have been embraced, although Bradley’s analytical style of reasoning dissociates him from the often polemical prose of existentialism. Passages from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche illustrate themes that reveal a kinship with Bradley, even if the respective contexts are not wholly identical. [...] The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think. What then is the Unknown? It is the limit to which the Reason repeatedly comes [...] Reason cannot even conceive an absolute unlikeness. The Reason cannot negate itself absolutely, but uses itself for the purpose, and thus conceives only such an unlikeness within itself as it can conceive by means of itself; it cannot absolutely transcend itself, and hence conceives only such superiority over itself as it can conceive by means of itself.2 An existential system cannot be formulated. Does this mean that no such system exists? By no means; nor is this implied in our assertion. Reality itself is a system-for God; but it cannot be a system for any existing spirit [...] It may be seen, from a purely abstract view, that system and existence arc incapable of being thought together, because in order to think at all systematic thought must think it as abrogated, and hence as not existing.3

Bradley speaks of the Absolute and employs the metaphor of harmony, but Kierkegaard’s conclusion, if not his terminology, is clearly in keeping with Bradley’s claims. Nietzsche’s atheism is antithetical to Kierkegaard’s claim that reality is a system for God, not us. Yet Nietzsche’s pragmatic account of the utility of reason displays insights which are consonant with Bradley’s: Intellect has produced nothing but errors; some of them proved to be useful and preservative of the species: he who fell in with them, or inherited them, waged battle for himself and his offspring with better success. Those erroneous articles of faith (include) [...]

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However, it will be argued subsequently that Bradley’s view has far more in common with themes from Asian philosophy than with existentialism or any form of objective idealism of the continental sort of Bradley’s time. The contradictions of a Hegelian dialectic, the moral order which is Fichte’s Absolute, Schopenhauer’s will as thing in itself, are all rejected by Bradley whose Absolute is an ineffable harmony inclusive of seemingly incompatible elements. Yet Bradley attempts to arrive at his conclusion rationally, not by appeal to intuition, mystical enlightenment, or an act of will. His methodology is one of logical analysis. How is it then that logic seems to undermine itself? How does Bradley rationally reinstate into the harmony which is the Absolute, the qualities and relations he rejects as mere appearances? Isn’t scepticism the conclusion Bradley actually derives? In what sense is the metaphorical harmony intelligible? It will be explicated how Bradley’s account can be understood as being both rational and viable.

The Nature of Questioning Philosophers in their search for answers sometimes forget that much is to be revealed, even answered, by an examination of the questions asked and the logical form imposed upon alleged answers by those questions. Bradley’s investigation of the subject-predicate form showed that a proposition involves asserting ‘what’ some ‘that’ is. Indeed our colloquial, ‘What’s that?’ displays the mind-set underlying our interrogations. The predicate logic of Russell ’s Principia Mathematica does nothing to alter Bradley’s point; indeed, the use of quantifiers and predicate functions highlights the ultimately arbitrary character of our parsing of reality, i.e., our cutting off and singling out some ‘that’ which we predicate in terms of ‘what’ it is. Such parsing reflects our purposes and needs; the objects we describe may have no more ontological autonomy nor separate existence than a handful of water in a swimmer’s palm against which propulsion becomes possible. Parsing reality, as the earlier quotation from Nietzsche reveals, is useful but, perhaps, no more than that. It would be beyond the scope of this paper to offer detailed criticisms of Bradley’s analysis of relations and judgements. Yet the main ideas might be paraphrased as a preface to an explication of Bradley’s rejection of the reality of time. Any assertion or judgement divorces the ‘what’ from the ‘that,’ otherwise an assertion is impossible. Yet the subject (‘that’) is richer than the word or term that symbolizes it. The attenuation of the subject is inescapable both because language must make the same words work for different instances and because the ‘that’ relates to reality in ways either not relevant, not known, or not knowable. The predicate (‘what’), in being divorced from the subject (‘that’), becomes ‘ideal’; it acts as an adjective or universal and lacks ontological autonomy. But doesn’t judging attempt to join predicate to subject, not to divorce them? Yes, but prior to the attempt at union and what Bradley speaks of as “healing,” we must conceptually isolate the ‘that’ and ‘what’ before even imperfect union

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can be achieved. And why must the union be imperfect? The demands of a judgement require the rending of the ‘what* from the ‘that’ before we can determine whether the predicate is correctly attributed to the subject, which, as already stated, must be artificially attenuated or treated as a sort of variable. The divorce of the ‘what’ and ‘that’ requires characteristics to be related to the subject. The word ‘is’ is a relational bond, or an attempt to marry what is divorced. What does this ‘is’ achieve? Certainly, to be informative, it is not the tautological ‘is’ of identity. But if, e.g., sugar is sweet, we have a judgement which reflects our interests more than it describes reality. Sugar as a subject is more than sweet. Sweetness as a predicate has no ontological autonomy as a universal. The synthesis of ‘what’ and ‘that’ is serviceable for some purposes, but even the relational bridge or ‘is’ cries out for clarification.5 Since the subject and predicate cannot exist independently (a ‘that’ must be a ‘what’ and conversely), and since the divorce is a conceptual byproduct not an ontological reality, we may ask about the reality of the alleged relation which heals the gash between subject and predicate (between ‘that’ and ‘what’). Yet the relation, if it is to unify the respective terms, must bear some relation to each, i.e., a relation must be related to its terms. This leads to an infinite regression, a regression which is more correctly understood as a byproduct of our having torn the ‘what’ from the ‘that’ in the first instance, and having arbitrarily tom off a ‘that’-’what’ as our conceptual focal point when all of reality can lay equal claim to our attention. Of course the above is an oversimplification of Bradley’s arguments. (Some might consider it nonsense.) It is admittedly more phenomenological than logical, but it is hoped that it is serviceable for present purposes. If the argument that a relation leads to an infinite regression seems untenable, that is, if it is argued that relations do not need relations in order to relate the terms, then this is tantamount to claiming that relations are irreducible.6Even so, clearly what we choose from the many possible relations to which we might attend illustrates the arbitrary manner of our reality parsing. Yet some relations are essential, others not. A table, to be a table, need not be blue, but it must be serviceable as a table. But here are we not speaking of characteristics, not relations? However, Bradley has shown the mutual dependence of relations and qualities (AR 21 29). He calls our attention to a nominalistic predisposition to carve out objects, to ‘thingify’ a reality, which, according to Bradley, is not per se divided even if it admits of distinctions. Perhaps another way of indicating the significance of Bradley’s analysis, even if some might reject his supporting arguments, is to specify other ways we might have parsed reality, thereby illustrating the sense in which the ‘what’-‘that’ attribution is arbitrary. Phenomenalists will have no difficulty understanding how the collections of sense data which constitute an object might have been bound up differently. Rather than define an orange in terms of its color, taste, texture, etc., we might have a rule prohibiting us from making one ‘object’ from diverse senses. Rather, vision might give us visual objects, touch the tangible, and no object could be both touched and seen. For that matter, we might organize reality in terms of amplitude: the bright, loud, sharp, hot ‘that’ would be our object rather than something edible, such as an orange. Of course, our objects are those that aided our survival (Nietzsche’s point, i.e., conceptual

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Darwinism). The orange is a more useful ‘that’-cwhat’ than the bright-loud-sharp ‘that.’ Nor need an object have a location and be movable, such as a cup. Why isn’t the cup simply part of the table upon which it rests? Regarding the cup as simply a lump of the table lacks utility. The cup is a separate object. It needn’t be. Nor need objects to have a specific place and time. An object might be constituted from yesterday’s coffee and tomorrow’s scrambled eggs, not by mixing coffee and eggs at some particular time, but by defining the object as the ‘that’ which is yesterday’s coffee and tomorrow’s scrambled eggs. And is there utility in doing this? —Only for purposes of explicating philosophical ideas. However, we do, in fact, do this (although not with coffee and eggs). The objects so constituted are called events! Indeed, any object said to endure can be thought of as an event. This brings us closer to an examination of temporality. In addition to asking, ‘What’s that?,’ we ask, ‘What happened?’ or ‘What’s happening?’ The arbitrary parsing of reality into events is more apparent than that of rendering objects. The termini of events are ‘soft’ in many cases, unlike the edges of physical objects. Moreover, the spatial edges of physical objects appear coexistent (at least with objects that can be taken in at a glance), whereas the termini of events are not seen as we see or touch the boundaries of a cup. Perhaps a car accident might be a single speciously present experience; but normally, events are understood in terms of their successive components and serially experienced. A mountain, even if experienced serially as we circumambulate it, is understood as composed of coexistent parts similar to Euclidean objects. The mountain is not an event, at least not with respect to ordinary discourse. But why not? It seems not fleeting, and so we make a thing of it. Our brains, as biologically-evolved computers, ‘thingify’ and ‘eventify’ in a manner which, in general, is most conducive to our survival. The biological programme was written by necessity, pragmatic necessity, not by reality. Any science fiction writer can create alternative mindscapes that dwarf the imaginations of most philosophers mired in conventional space and time. Bradley was different. He saw the possibilities and problems others overlooked. And what is possible must somehow be accommodated by reality. Possibilities are real. The following quotations from Bradley exemplify the foregoing remarks. It is not simply the concepts of space, time, and causation which Bradley sees as problematic. Any judgement presents epistemological difficulty. But reality is not a connection of adjectives, nor can it so be represented. Its essence is to be substantial and individual. But can we reach self-existence and individual character by manipulating adjectives and putting universais together?7 But if judgment is the union of two ideas, we have not so escaped. And this is a point we should clearly recognize. Ideas are universal, and, no matter what it is that we try to say and dimly mean, what we really express, and succeed in asserting, is nothing individual. For take the analyticjudgment of sense. The fact given us is singular, it is quite unique; but our terms are all general, and state a truth which may apply as well to many other cases. In ‘I have a toothache’ both the I and the toothache are mere generalities [...] It is in vain that we add to the original assertion ‘this,’ ‘here,’ and ‘now,’ for they are all universais. They are symbols whose meaning extends to and covers innumerable instances.

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Thus the judgment will be true of any case whatsoever of a certain sort; but, if so, it can not be true of the reality; for that is unique, and is a fact, not a sort. (PL 49) We may take the familiar instance of a lump of sugar. This is a thing, and it has properties, adjectives which qualify it. It is, for example, white, and hard, and sweet. The sugar we say, is all that; but what the is can really mean seems doubtful [...] Sugar is obviously not mere whiteness, mere hardness, and mere sweetness; for its reality lies somehow in its unity. But if, on the other hand, we inquire what there can be in the thing beside its several qualities, we are baffled once more. We can discover no real unity existing outside these qualities, or, again, existing within them. (AR 16) The immediate unity, in which facts come to us, has been broken up by experience, and later by reflection. (AR 19-20)

Bradley addresses a likely suggestion, that is: The distinctions taken in the thing are to be held only [...] as the ways in which we regard it. The thing itself maintains its unity, and the aspects of adjective and substantive are only our points of view. Hence they do no injury to the real. But this defence is futile, since the question is how without error we may think of reality. (AR 20)

Underlying the difficulty concerning the unity of a fact and our attempt at judgement is that: The arrangement of given facts into relations and qualities may be necessary in practice, but is theoretically unintelligible. The reality, so characterized, is not true reality, but is appearance [...] [...] Our conclusion briefly will be this. Relation presupposes quality, and quality relation. Each can be something neither together with, nor apart from, the other, and the vicious circle in which they turn is not the truth about reality. (AR 21)

The General Nature of Reality Irrespective of whether one accepts the arguments Bradley offers in support of his claim that all qualities and relations are unintelligible, the concept of time at least has traditionally presented perplexities. There is the further question: If Bradley finds relations and qualities to be unintelligible, isn’t he rather at a loss for words when characterizing the nature of reality? What is there left to say? How can he speak of a harmony even metaphorically? Is reality truly rational—perhaps non-rational? In fact, Bradley argues that logic demands us to regard reality as rational. Inconsistency entails that something belongs to appearance only and not reality. Reality must be consistent and rational. But, of course, consistency or its lack is a kind of relationship. Can reality correctly be characterized as consistent? We must remember that Bradley, the logician, uses reason to reach his conclusions. He is not one to fall into the trap of arguing that logic logically entails that logic is

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illogical. And, yet, doesn’t he have the option of arguing that consistency or its lack applies only to our descriptions and that reality is ultimately neither consistent nor inconsistent, rational nor irrational? In a sense, he does seem to adopt this strategy, even if not explicitly. Why else would he employ the metaphor of harmony (and write so profoundly and poetically as to have sown the seeds of T.S. Eliot’s poetry)? Clearly, Bradley realizes that his discourse on the general nature of reality must be taken as a less than literal presentation, after having argued for the unintelligibility of qualities and relations. Subsequently, a model of sorts will be offered in terms of which Bradley’s harmony is intelligible, and space, time, causation, and things will be seen as logically derivative and not the fundamental features of reality. It is hoped that the model in capturing Bradley’s central claims will have the effect of unpacking Bradley’s metaphor, so as to reveal that the Absolute as he construes it is, indeed, rational even if ineffable per se. Initially, however, quotations from Bradley concerning reality will be helpful. Then the nature of time can be addressed properly. [...] We may say that everything, which appears, is somehow real in such a way as to be self-consistent. The character of the real is to possess everything phenomenal in a harmonious form. [...] Reality is one in this sense that it has a positive nature exclusive of discord, a nature which must hold throughout everything that is to be real [...] the real is individual. It is one in the sense that its positive character embraces all differences in an inclusive harmony. (AR 123) Our result so far is this. Everything phenomenal is somehow real; and the Absolute must be at least as rich as the relative [...] Hence the Absolute is, so far, an individual and a system [...]. (AR 127) What we discover rather is a whole in which distinctions can be made, but in which divisions do not exist. (AR 128)

We have already considered that manner in which judgements distort reality by tearing from it a ‘that’ which is predicated as being a ‘what. ’ Error is inescapable. [...] in qualifying this reality, thought consents to a partial abnegation. It has to recognize the division of the ‘what’ from the ‘that’, and it cannot so join these aspects as to get rid of mere ideas and arrive at actual reality. For it is in and by ideas only that thought moves and has life. The content it applies to the reality has, as applied, no genuine existence. It is an adjective divorced from its ‘that’, and never in judgement, even when judgement is complete, restored to solid unity. Thus the truth belongs to existence, but it does not as such exist. (AR 147)

If the Absolute seems rather formal and alien, an ineffable harmony beyond finite comprehension, we should attend to Bradley’s answer to materialism, that is, to what plays the role of matter in Bradley’s idealism:

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When we ask as to the matter which fills up the empty outline, we can reply in one word, that this matter is experience [...] Sentient experience, in short, is reality, and what is not this is not real [...] Feeling, thought, and volition [...] are all the material of existence, and there is no other material, actual or even possible [...] I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced. Anything, in no sense felt or perceived, becomes to me quite unmeaning. (AR 127-128)

The argument is more subtle than it first appears. Bradley is saying that to think that reality might be beyond thought or experience is to relate reality to thinking in order even to make the assertion. Therefore, reality is based upon sentient experience, but we must understand such experience to embrace more than thought as it is employed in judgement. And, moreover, there is “no self-contradiction in its (thoughts) own judgement that it is less than the universe” (AR 148). The Absolute still seems somehow remote, even if “indissolubly one thing with sentience” (AR 128). Bradley provides intimations of reality in passages which would appear to have inspired the poet, T. S. Eliot: And what I repudiate is the separation of feeling from the felt, or of the desired from the desire, or of what is thought from thinking, or the division—I might add—of anything from anything else [...] to be utterly indivisible from feeling or perception, to be an integral element in a whole which is experienced, this surely is itself to be experience. Being and reality are, in brief, one thing with sentience; they can neither be opposed to nor even in the end distinguished from it [...]. (AR 129)

To be real “is to be something which comes as a feature and aspect within one whole of feeling [...] an integral element of such sentience.” It may be understood that if we are in touch with our feelings (to use a still current expression), we know an element or aspect of reality; but we must not suppose that reality itself is divided, and as soon as we interpret the ‘what’ and ‘that’ of our feelings, we plunge into error, although with respect to ordinary activities, a useful sort of error. We do not survive by abstaining from judgement. Bradley argues on behalf of his account of the Absolute, yet the extrapolations from ordinary feelings and thoughts to the unity of feeling which is the Absolute seem more a product of speculation than argument. (Remember, qualities and relations were said to be unreal. Hence, the relationships which constitute valid argument forms have also been impugned.) With respect to ultimate reality, Bradley as poet provides more insight than Bradley as philosopher and logician. His logical analysis would seem to lead to scepticism once the relationships we understand as validity have been cast aside along with all other relations. Even if reality is somehow self-consistent, its harmony and unity can be only metaphorically expressed if Bradley is not to violate his own canons. Yet the following passage is powerful, although it seems more a product of revelation than of reason: [...] both truth and fact are to be there [...] in the Absolute we must keep every item of our experience. We cannot have less [...] we may have much more [...] in the whole they may become transformed [...] And feeling and will must also be transmuted in this whole, into

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And time would also be there in harmony, transmuted, of course.

Temporality ‘Transmuted’ Bradley revives some rather old arguments against the reality of time, while also adding some novel insights concerning the ‘direction’ of time, and the possibility of separate unrelated time series (parallel times, in the slang of science fiction). Among the perplexities are questions concerning the parts of time and space, respectively. Is a part of time divisible? If so the parts must coexist but hardly can coexist simultaneously. But if the parts of a time (of a duration) are earlier or later than one another, then each ‘part’ only occupies a durationless instant. How can duration be constituted from even an infinity of durationless instants? Although the parts of space might be said to coexist, unlike the parts of time, the problem remains: each point of space is without extension. How then do we constitute a space? In practice, there is no problem, e.g., we can navigate well enough. But success in practical matters hardly entails that we understand reality. Considering time: Augustine recognized the problem long before Bradley, who like Augustine refused to ignore the difficulty by appeal to pragmatism. The future doesn’t yet exist, the past no longer exists, and the present is a boundary without duration which divides the no longer from the not yet. How can anything be in time?8 Yet our lives are temporal; we are immersed in flux. If our present is somehow specious, then what is the reality which allows for the appearance of the present as we experience it? For purposes of science we need not speak of the present but of state descriptions at respectively different serially-ordered times. However, to ‘detense’ the discourse about our lives as lived, as opposed to our lives as chronicled, would be to arrest the passage of time’s arrow. Novels bring to life a long lost ‘now’; art does not detense time as does a nautical almanac. Moreover, the metaphorical arrow of time not only passes, but as Bradley recognized, it might fly in a multitude of other directions from the perspective of other sentient creatures (AR 189-92). Bradley was too sober a thinker to allow himself the pleasures associated with writing science (speculative) fiction, but the concepts upon which such fiction is based were anticipated by Bradley prior to our century in which the concepts of parallel universes and counterdirected times are the raw material of many a plot.

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Bradley recognized that the timescape of a dream or fantasy is not to be integrated in the time series of ordinary life as we would include the flowers blooming in our garden. We can, of course, indicate how long we were dreaming, e.g., in terms of clock time it was a five-minute dream. But the temporality of the dream might well have encompassed several hours. Moreover, if T. S. Eliot is correct, we can sometimes be lost in a distraction fit in which we might perhaps be said to have intimated the timelessness of eternity (Bradley’s Absolute?). The point of intersection of the timeless With time, is an occupation for the saint(T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” Lines 206-207) For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, (Lines 210-212)

Does time pass? Does it take two hours for two hours to pass? Things come and go; events ‘take’ time; time does not take time. Nor should we confuse those things we employ to record time or to measure time, with time. The points in a coordinate system may coexist. If we call one coordinate ‘time,’ we ought not confuse the coordinate with the time it indicates or serializes. And, as Bradley understood, other coordinates now called ‘spatial’ might, with justification, also be called ‘temporal.’ Why are we to believe time is one dimensional, or that the series we experience as temporal is the only one to be so experienced? Our spatial dimensions might constitute some other creature’s time. As Bradley recognized, if indeed there are occult or paranormal phenomena, such considerations might render them intelligible. With respect to mundane time, it might be that precognition is simply having a different perspective than the ‘now’ in which one is usually entrenched. We see what we do because of where we are, but also because of when we are. As to tim e’s passage in which we seem to be floating down the stream of time, Bradley understood the defects of the metaphor and substituted his own version of the stream of time: Let us fancy ourselves in total darkness hung over a stream and looking down on it. The stream has no banks, and its current is covered and filled continuously with floating things. Right under our faces is a brilliant illuminated spot on the water, which ceaselessly widens and narrows its area, and shows us what passes away on the current. And this spot that is light is our now, our present. [...] There is a paler light which, both up and down stream, is shed on what comes before and after our now. [...] What we know is, that our now is the source of the light that falls on the past and future. Through it alone do we know there exists a stream of floating things, and without its reflection past and future would vanish [...] There is a difference between the brightness of the now, and the paler revelation of past and future. But, despite this difference, we see the stream and what floats in it as one. (PL 1,54-55)

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Subsequently, Bradley’s light will be employed in terms of a motion picture analogy, one which affords a better model of Bradley’s Absolute than does the stream metaphor, even as improved. The current still is merely unidirectional; moreover, does it truly matter whether we float upon the stream successively spotlighting its banks, or whether we hover over a current with our spotlight pointing downwards? Relative motion metaphors still have the effect of spatializing time, to use H. Bergson’s expression for models that distort duration’s nature. And yet, the observer and stream metaphors do suggest that time might be thought of as a relation between two more fundamental realities that are not themselves to be confused with time. That is, it is a mistake to equate time with the stream. Time is logically derivative, not a primitive feature of reality. Both stream metaphors, if correctly understood, use relative motion to illustrate temporality. Since motion involves spatial relations, the metaphorical stream is mistakenly identified as being time. Let us see how motion picture analogies might clarify the underlying truth in the stream metaphors. Bradley’s metaphorical light reveals that our perspective (temporal and spatial) is limited. The limitations allow for relations of successive order which are features of our series of experiences. Reality need not be temporally ordered. We do not say that Chicago is earlier than Philadelphia when driving east. Yet with respect to much of our experiencing, we attribute the temporal order of our experience to that which we experience. What if the whole ‘stream’ should be brightly illuminated? We are reminded of Plato’s cave allegory: such light would no doubt be more dazzling than informative. Poetry might be a fitting prelude to the cinematic musings to follow. T. S. Eliot writes in “East Coker”: [...] There is, it seems to us, at best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies. (Lines 82-85) Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment. (Lines 192-196)

And there is the familiar poem by William Blake: To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.

With respect to the same theme, Alfred, Lord Tennyson contemplates:

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Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here root and ail, in my hand, Little flower-but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.

Returning to water metaphors and T. S. Eliot, we have: The river is within us, the sea is all about us; (“The Dry Salvages,” Line 15)

The sea is often used as a metaphor of the Absolute, the river as a metaphor of the stream of time which is our lives. (Of course Eliot’s metaphors serve several purposes, e.g., we evolved from the sea, our blood stream is a product of that evolution, i.e., the river within us.) We should not forget that Bradley presents his view as allegedly the product of reasoning, not revelation. Should we disagree with that reasoning and believe his discussion of the Absolute as a harmony bears more kinship with poetry than philosophical analysis, we ought, nevertheless, to render that account as intelligible as possible. The poetry is included if only to show that ‘something’ is likely to be behind the respective poetic insights. Consider a reel of film, perhaps a film of someone’s life. All the frames coexist as information or possibilities to be projected on the screen. The frames, p er se, are not earlier or later than one another. Only upon projection does the temporal ordering arise. First our character is an infant, a child, a man. But wait, perhaps the film has a flashback, or a flash forward—perhaps a superimposition in which the old man is contemplating his childhood happiness while playing with a sled named ‘Rosebud,’ and the audience sees two separate streams of events simultaneously. The film analogy clarifies how information, or possibilities for experience,9 might exist independently of any particular time series or direction of time. The film might be projected backwards. We might even have a forking film and a projector with switches allowing the audience to choose alternative endings for the film (or alternative beginnings). Whatever the order of projection, or the number of superimposed sequences, or the number of branches and options for beginnings and endings, the important fact not to be overlooked concerns the frames perse. All the information must already be ‘there’ in order for various sequences (temporal streams) to be possible. The frames do not change nor engage in causal relations. Only on being projected do we experience a motion picture and the seemingly causal orders associated with the apparent changes. A moment’s deliberation reveals that the motion picture analogy captures many claims about the Absolute as Bradley construes it. The Absolute is intelligible with respect to the analogy. However, analogies break down. The frames are spatially separate and exist at the same time rather than coexist in some timeless manner. And, not everything is included in a film about one man’s life. No matter, if the analogy has served its purpose, we can stretch it with a thought experiment, and thought experiments do not rest upon poetic or

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mystical revelation. We must consider that consciousness is the screen of our motion picture and that time is meaningful only upon projection of the film. The projector, screen, and film are not in time. Time arises as a result of the changing relation of projector and frames on the reel. Consciousness (screen) experiences the frames temporally ordered. Time is logically derivative and not a feature or relationship of the projector or film if these are considered independently. (John is not tall unless compared to shorter people. Tallness has no independent existence, nor do time series.) However, the thought experiment requires more. We must imagine that all information is somehow captured in the film frames; moreover, the film is self-projecting. What it projects is not one frame at a time. Rather, it projects every frame, a sort of ultimate superimposition of all information. Now, if all frames are ‘always’ being projected, this is tantamount to nothing happening and no change occurring. It is a sort of activity without temporality. Yet by negation or limitation of perspective, i.e., if we can only attend to one frame at a time, we will have a temporally-ordered experience even if the film itself (the Absolute) does not itself change or have its own indigenous temporal order. Different sorts of limitations of perspective constitute different experiencing subjects; some are human beings and others might be creatures whose time series is counterdirected to ours. Our capacity to illuminate frames is limited; we seem obliged to illuminate successively different things. We observe the clouds passing over the mountains. But we can also drift into a reveiy unrelated to the mountains. Yet, our lights are dim for we have only the fire of the cave, and we see only shadows. With respect to the film analogy, the poems quoted become intelligible. We can in principle understand ‘a lifetime burning in every moment’ and how mutually incompatible events can coexist as elements included as frames of the superimposition. The Absolute or superimposition is a system, all inclusive, a whole in which distinctions can be made, but they result only as a consequence of our limited perspective which produces the reality parsing o f ‘what’ and ‘that’ and ‘where’ and ‘when.’ But can we hear the harmony? T. S. Eliot tells us there is: [...] music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. (“The Dry Salvages,” Part V)

Reality being itself undifferentiated, yet manifesting itself in terms of particulars in space and time to those of limited perspective, is a theme we find in Asian philosophies. Ignorance and striving chain us to our limited perspectives, and we must be bom and reborn innumerable times; or in terms of the analogy, we get to play many roles of those included in the superimposition. Occasionally, a mystic or poet catches a glimpse of ‘more’ and recognizes ordinary reality for the fiction it is. However, it would be a mistake to characterize Bradley’s Absolute as identical to that of Buddhist idealism, for example. Bradley speaks of a system and of pleasure when characterizing the Absolute. There seems more structure than the non-rational Absolute of a Buddhist nirvana. Every desire, chaste or otherwise, is said to be somehow in the system which is Bradley’s Absolute. The film superimposition allows the information an ontological status as a possibility for

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projection in someone’s experience, i.e., temporal sequencing. Finite minds (perspectives) explain the genesis of a ‘that’ which is seen as a ‘what.’ The Absolute, itself, is somehow self-projecting but not as an ultimate subject aware of itself. We do not have a Hegelian Spirit “make eyes at itself in a mirror” (AR 152). Bradley’s reality does not contemplate itself as an object. The Absolute is a sentience or feeling not divisible into feeler and felt. There is no celestial musician; the harmony is ‘one’ and all inclusive.

Comparing Absolutes A question arises, one which exists in some form in any metaphysical system which makes a claim about absolute reality. (Metaphysical schemes which stop at some form of scepticism might escape the problem.) If absolute reality is a timeless harmony without discord, what has given rise to the finitude of our own perspective in which discord certainly seems real enough? This question might be called the ‘Fall from Grace’ problem. Bradley’s Absolute seems to have no seeds within it, or instability, which would lead to those appearances which are our lives. It is not that Bradley’s account is in greater difficulty than Schopenhauer’s or Kierkegaard’s, for example. Indeed, the latter’s expression, ‘leap of faith,’ highlights the chasm between a perfect ultimate reality and our lives. Schopenhauer’s thing-in-itself is Will, which is objectified as the phenomena we see. But why should the Will fragment itself into a phenomenal plethora? Schopenhauer claims ultimately the galaxies and stars are simply nothing.10 Whether it is Schopenhauer’s nothing or Bradley’s harmonious everything, the chasm between the ultimate and us remains. Nietzsche’s refusal to provide a metaphysical ultimate, or God surrogate, seems unburdened by the ‘Fall from Grace’ problem, but then the ‘brute facts’ of our places in nature, that is, of an evolutionary process which might have proceeded in innumerable alternative ways, seems to demand explanation. Moreover, Nietzsche rejects the “prejudices of philosophers,”11 which include atoms, causation, substance, etc., thereby eliminating scientific materialism as an alternative to some form of absolute idealism. Even scientific materialism can’t explain why there are these laws of nature (uniformities), rather than others that are at least logically possible (or appear to be so, given present scientific knowledge). Moreover, the claim that nature is somehow uniform cannot be supported in a noncircular argument. Allegedly brute facts cry out for explanation; and the explanations offered are all too very much in need of explanation. Process philosophy, in terms of which ultimate reality is neither perfect nor simply a brute fact, might seem a happy alternative to some all too perfect ‘Absolutes,’ and also an alternative to the blatant refusal to provide speculative answers to philosophical questions (a refusal which currently is common enough). Charles S. Peirce and Alfred N. Whitehead12both argue for a finite God who interacts with us to the betterment of reality by means of an evolutionary process guided ultimately by a sort of mutual love: ideas spread; societies constitute themselves from simpler entities; higher (thinking) organisms come about whose behaviour is capable of novelty rather than nature’s habits (e.g., the motion of planets would be a habit of nature). Nature is not to be understood as composed

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of mind independent matter; rather, as Peirce claims: “[...] matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.”13 God’s finitude helps us to understand how things might be less than perfect (and indeed are). God’s relation to the universe changes; in process philosophy, there is no nontemporal perspective in which God knows all ‘while’ timelessly seated upon his epistemic throne. God, too, is in time and is part of the process. Free will is not compromised by God’s foreknowledge; neither man nor God can know a future free act prior to its happening. The future doesn’t yet exist, hence God need not know what is not yet real, and thereby God’s omniscience is protected by process philosophy. All acts, whether they be the habits of planets moving in their elliptical orbits or J. S. Bach’s composing cantatas, are acts of minds; all efficacy is mental. In this ultimate ‘becoming,’ mind and matter are substantially the same, and God is with us in time. As is usually the case with metaphysical solutions, one difficulty is removed by creating another. With respect to the process God, we ask: Why is God finite? Why does God need us? The question becomes one of God’s ‘Fall from Grace’ rather than of ours. Does the process begin? Why then? Why should the process have had only that duration rather than having begun earlier? Did the process always exist? Why aren’t matters more wonderful, given an infinity of past time? And how are we to understand the ‘present’ state of the process in a universe in which simultaneity is observer dependent? Is the real present God’s time (rather like nautical time is Greenwich time)? Process views require a sort of Bergsonian intuition of “real duration.” They do not escape reliance upon some form of transrational revelation. Otherwise, time and the process have parts, and we have Augustinian difficulties. In a sense, Kierkegaard saw something Bradley failed to see. Reason will take one only so far; at a certain point, Bradley ceased being an epistemologist and began being a poet. The harmony he so eloquently describes is not demonstrated to exist after Bradley undermines all possibility of a logical demonstration by his rejection of relations. A ‘leap of faith’ is required. There is always the option to endure allegedly brute facts and to abstain from philosophical questions. Admittedly, they can only be answered speculatively in language more akin to poetry14than scientific discourse (which begins to approximate precision only when numerical). But a failure to speculate is a choice to refuse any sort of leap of faith. The failure of the courage to leap is not “all too human”; it is somehow less than human. (No doubt, even Zarathustra on his mountain had to leap from time to time.) In our present post-romantic age, Bradley’s fondness for the Absolute might seem silly, even disingenuous. August Comte would claim Bradley’s metaphysical harmony to be just a step away from the personal Judeo-Christian God; it is a metaphysics designed to recapture what scientific sophistication lost for us.15 Scientific philosophy, Comte would argue, will have no need for an ineffable harmony as ultimately remote and unintelligible as Kant’s thing-in-itself, despite Bradley’s protestation to the contrary (AR Ch. 12, Ch. 15, 147-9). And yet, as T. S. Eliot observes, “you are the music while the music lasts” and not just the music but the dancer and the dance.16—Dancers leap!

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Notes 1. Bradley’s arguments do receive some attention, even if not that which is deserved. A relatively recent popular book includes Bradley’s argument that relations lead to an infinite regression: Rudy Rucker, Infinity and the Mind (New York: Bantam Books, 1982) 155-157,161-162. Bradley’s views are not studied only by historians of philosophy. 2. Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments (originally published in 1844) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962) 46-57. 3. Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (originally published in 1846) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941) 107. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (originally published in 1882), tr. T. Common (Edinburgh & London, 1910) 151-164, see aphorism 110. 5. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 2nd ed., 9th impression, corrected (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1930) Ch. 15, 143-152 (1st ed. 1893). 6. See A.C. Ewing, Idealism, A Critical Survey (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1974) 443 (notes added in third edition), original edition published 1934. Ewing’s note for chapter four is significant: “I have spoken on p. 147 as if Bradley himself assumed that a relation was a sort of third term, when in fact what he is doing is criticizing this very view as one of the alternatives to his own. Thus interpreted, it seems to me that his argument must succeed unless we admit, as I should, that the notion of relation is unique and irreducible. For his argument consists in showing that a relation cannot be reduced to anything else, either to a third term or to some quality or qualities, for if so it would not relate, and then assuming that this destroys the chance of giving any defence of the concept of relation at all.” 7. F. H. Bradley, The Principles of Logic [PL] (1st ed. 1883) 2nd ed., corrected impression (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928) Vol. I, Ch. 2,46. 8. William G.T. Shedd, ed., Confessions of Augustine (Boston: Draper and Halliday, 1867) Book 11,300-333 (originally written circa 400). The present Big Bang cosmology lends itself to an Augustinian analysis, as does any cosmology in which the universe has a beginning. Bradley’s universal harmony is not ‘in’ time, nor can it begin or end. 9. The expression “possibilities for experience” can be found in Leslie Armour, The Rational and the Real (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962). Possibilities for experience would encompass more than John Stuart Mill’s permanent possibilities for sensation, or what plays the role of matter for Mill. See An Examination of Sir William Hamilton ’s Philosophy (originally published in 1865) (London, 1889) 225-239. Possibilities for experience would seem to allow for any sort of information. As to the actualities which allow for the respective possibilities, Armour seems to invite us to ask: why must actualities be logically prior to possibilities; possibilities could be ontologically autonomous, as indeed Mill argued on behalf of his permanent possibilities for sensation. Bradley’s Absolute avoids “free floating” possibilities, however. 10. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I (originally appearing in 1818) (New York: Dover Publications, 1969). Schopenhauer’s nihilism is clear in the following passages (411-412): “We must not even evade it, as the Indians do, by myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahman, or the Nirvana of the Buddhists. On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is—nothing.”

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11. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886), The Philosophy of Nietzsche (New York: Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1927) 381-407. After claiming the utility of falsehoods with respect to our self-preservation, i.e., after offering a fictionalist account of our philosophical and scientific concepts, Nietzsche states (section 21): “It is we alone who have devised cause, sequence, reciprocity, relativity, constraint, number, law, freedom, motive, and purpose; and when we interpret and intermix this symbol-world, as ‘being in itself with things, we act once more as we have always acted-mythologically.” One wonders if Nietzsche’s account is part of the myth, and if so, it would seem self-stultifying. In “Twilight of the Idols” (1889), Nietzsche observes: “Even the opponents of the Eleatics still succumbed to the seduction of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom. ‘Reason’ in language-oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I am afraid we are not rid of god because we still have faith in grammar” (The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann [New York: The Viking Press, 1967] 483). Nietzsche, himself, writes grammatically enough-is his view self-stultifying? 12. Alfred N. Whitehead’s process philosophy, in which a “becoming of continuity” replaces absolute immutable being, employs process concepts from H. Bergson, C. S. Peirce and William James (see Process and Reality [New York: The Free Press, 1978; originally published in 1929]. Peirce contributes a view of matter as a form of habitual activity of mind, hence the uniformities of nature; Bergson’s refusal to “spatialize” time, and James’s “stream of consciousness” have influenced Whitehead’s view. Peirce’s “finite” God is offered in C. S. Peirce, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,” Hibbert Journal, 1 (1908), reprinted in Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings, ed. P.P. Wiener (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1958) 358-379. 13. C. S. Peirce, “The Architecture of Theories,” The Monist, 1 (1891), partially reprinted in Justus Buchlerphilosophical Writings of Peirce (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955) 322. See also 350 and 358-9. 14. “The difficulty of philosophy is the expression of what is self-evident.” Alfred N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought (originally published in 1938) (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958) 68-69. 15. August Comte claims: “each [...] branch of knowledge, passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive [...] The first is the necessary point of departure of the human understanding; and the third is its fixed and definitive state. The second is merely a state of transition.” (The Positive Philosophy, 1853) excerpts included in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Patrick Gardiner (New York: The Free Press, 1969) 133. 16. The allusion is to William Butler Yeats’ poem, “Among School Children,” the last two lines are “O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Irrespective of music and dance metaphors, there is Bradley’s incredibly moving statement about written language and the spoken word: “The paper and ink cut the throats of men, and the sound of a breath may shake the world” (The Principles of Logic, Vol. I, 4). Bradley’s words shook the world more than many realize.

3 Bradley and Green on Relations W. J. MANDER

Introduction The two central figures of the British school of idealism were T. H. Green (1836-1882) andF. H. Bradley (1846-1924),1and of central importance to each of their philosophies was the subject of relations. Both held that a consideration of relations, properly carried through, leads inevitably to a monistic and idealistic conclusion, which they called ‘The Absolute.’ This coincidence has received surprisingly little attention from commentators, and in this paper I attempt to make good that gap by offering a comparative analysis. The similarities and differences uncovered will, I hope, help to clarify their two positions. Both Oxford philosophers of about the same period, this coincidence of focus naturally raises the question of what influence, if any, there was between them. In 1865, when Bradley first came up to Oxford, Green had already been lecturing at Balliol for five years, and in 1878 he was appointed Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, a post he held until his death four years later. We know that Bradley attended some of Green’s lectures2and it is certain that he would have been familiar with Green’s published work.3 In view of these facts, and of the philosophical relationships between their views which we shall consider below, it seems to me very likely that Green was an important influence on Bradley’s thought. But such matters are, of course, hard to establish.4 Bradley’s own work on relations, I should add, appeared too late for there to be any influence the other way.5 Since neither of these philosophical systems are as well known as once they were I shall begin with a brief summary of each, before going on to draw out the central points of comparison between them.

Green In order to understand Green’s doctrine of relations we need first to remind ourselves of what Locke had to say on this subject, for Green’s philosophy was formed in large part as a reaction against the prevailing empiricist orthodoxy of his day, which in essentials at least had advanced little over the previous century. Locke’s basic stance, it will be remembered, is that we derive our ideas of relation from the mental act of comparing other ideas, simple or complex. But unlike most other things of which we form ideas, he thinks, relations are “not contained in the real existence of Things, but something extraneous and superinduced.” They have, Locke says, “no other reality, but what they have in the minds of men.” Thus there seems to be, in Locke’s mind, no real difference between ‘relations’ and ‘ideas of relations. ’ For Locke (and, it must be admitted, for most other philosophers) ‘not real, but mental’ are two charges which in effect come to the same thing. But Green wishes to challenge this assumption of equivalence. In the case of relations, he rejects the first

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whilst accepting the second, and thus, as he puts it in his Lectures on Logic, his fundamental position may be summarized in the twin claims “that all reality lies in relations, and that only for a thinking consciousness do relations exist” (L 177). That is to say, he thinks that relations are real, but that they are no less mental for that. The Reality o f Relations Green has no doubt that relations are real. Indeed, so sure is he of this fact, that he uses their reality to ground that of absolutely everything else. That is to say, for Green, the appropriate criterion for declaring something real is precisely a relational one. Without relations there would be no reality at all. In support of his claim that relations have this role Green offers one very general argument together with a connected series of more particular ones. We may look at these in turn. The general nature o f reality Beginning with the general argument, we can reflect on the fact that philosophers often dismiss things as unreal. Unicorns, pink rats, phenomenal smells and colours, sometimes even such categories as causality or substance, have all at one time or another by some philosopher or another been denied their place in the ranks of fundamental reality. But what is objective reality? To call something unreal is not to say that it belongs to the class of unreal things. For there is no such class (PE 26). The object of some wholly false experience, such as a dream or an hallucination, presents itself to us in the same manner and just as undeniably as does that of the most clearly veridical experience. To call something unreal is rather, suggests Green, to say that it does not ‘fit’ in with, that it does not bare the appropriate relations to, those other things already deemed to be ‘real. ’ There is no room for such items in the world because they cannot, except on the most absurd and extravagant hypotheses, be reconciled with what we understand about everything else; they lack the permanence, stability, intersubjective availability, or causal efficacy of what we paradigmatically consider to be real. In this sense, for Green, the contrast between real and unreal is not, as we sometimes and unreflectively suppose, the difference between what exists and what does not, but more properly the contrast between the permanent or unalterable order of things and their temporary or changeable order. Thus reality, for Green, is to be defined as “a single and unalterable system of relations” (PE 26). Things are real precisely insofar as they can be fitted into the one enduring systematic relational matrix, and reality extends just as far as does that integrated and permanent complex of relations. Once something is recognised as being our own contribution to experience we tend, in virtue of that fact alone, to think of it as unreal. But, as Green notes, one important corollary of the definition he offers is that this attitude is justifiable only where that contribution is transient or otherwise irreconcilable with its context. Where our own constructions are as, or more, stable than any external reality, they must be held to be as, or more, real. Says Green, “It is not the work of the mind, as such, that we instinctively oppose to the real, but the work of the mind as assumed to be arbitrary and irregularly

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changeable” (PE 26). It is unreal because of its current relation to everything else, not in virtue of its historical or metaphysical origins. The relational nature o f all things In addition to such general argumentation about the concept of reality itself, Green thinks it possible to reach the same overall result by following a series of more specific considerations. Take any individual thing, he claims, what so ever you please and however non-relational it first may seem, and its reality will be revealed ultimately to consist in relations to other things, at very least to the consciousness that knows it. Upon analysis, everything is found, in the end, to be so thoroughly relational that if you take away the relations you take away the thing itself. The basic drift of Green’s reasoning in this respect is that our thought and language are both essentially general so that we are unable to pick out atomic individuals through isolated acts of pointing, but have rather to catch them in more or less expansive frameworks of general concepts, and that that is essentially to relate them to other things. For our concepts are neither simple in their structure, nor isolated in their opperation. On analysis everything turns out to be relational, and reality proves to be nothing but “an inexhaustible complex of relations” (I 39). It is common, for example, to identify reality with what is material. But if we ask what is meant by matter, claims Green, the answer is always a statement of some relation or other (L 178). Be it mere extension, solidity (the power to exclude other bodies), the support of qualities, the unknown cause of our sensation, or the origin of all life and consciousness, its reality is still constituted by its relations. And how could it be otherwise? In itself, unrelated to anything else, matter would be as nothing to us. We might attempt to escape this conclusion by thinking instead of reality as whatever it is that is given to us in feeling or sensation. But really this is no advance, argues Green, for a sensation is something equally relational, determined by the conditions of its production and its place among other sensations. “[A] sensation can only form an object of experience in being determined by an intelligent subject which distinguishes it from itself and contemplates it in relation to other sensations” (PE 50), he claims, and hence Locke’s so-called simple idea “is already, at its minimum the judgement, ‘I have an idea different from other ideas which I did not make for myself” (I 19) and, as such, not simple at all. Qualities are what they are through their relations to others and hence, without relations, thinks Green, any quality would be indistinguishable from any other (PE 20).6 But surely it is possible to pick things out as real without bringing in their relational context? At very least can we not just point them out using the simple demonstratives, ‘this,’ ‘that,’ ‘here’ and ‘now’? Green thinks not. Even here, he argues, our attempt to locate a given thing is implicitly relational; “if we say that it is the mere ‘this’ or ‘that’—the simple ‘here’ and ‘now’—the very ‘this’ in being mentioned or judged of, becomes related to other things which we have called this,’ and the ‘now’ to other ‘nows’” (136).7In thus claiming that even the most ostensibly particular form of thought turns out to be implicitly general, Green is, of course, closely following Hegel’s treatment of what he called sense-certainty in the Phenomenology o f Spirit. But he, thinks Green,

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is simply repeating “what Plato long ago taught [... that] a consistent sensationalism must be speechless” (I 36). In this way Green argues that analysis demonstrates the reality of things to consist in nothing but the relations that bind them together and allows us to recognize “relations as constituting the very essence of reality” (PE 25). The Mentality o f Relations If Green champions the reality of relations, he none the less finds them thoroughly minddependent, products of our own intellectual activity. While all reality lies in relations, “it is not that first there are relations and then they are conceived” he says, rather “Every relation is constituted by an act of conception” (L 179). This second thesis is the source of Green’s idealism. For clearly if reality consists in relations, and those relations are judged ideal, then reality as a whole must share the same fate. Nature in its reality, or in order to be what it is, implies a principle which is not natural but spiritual (PE 61). It must be confessed that Green’s defence of this thesis is somewhat lacking. In going beyond Kant, who had only argued that some relations were ideal (such as those of space and time or causation), Green seems at times unduly impressed by the authority of Locke on this point. But the claim does not go wholly undefended. Indeed, as in the case of the previous thesis, we find two arguments for this position, which we may consider in turn. The perception o f relations Green objects to the thesis that relations might have an existence independent of the mind principally on the grounds that, were that the case, we would be unable to perceive them, and thus to acquire the very idea of a relation, which of course we have. Our idea of relation is something quite inexplicable in empirical terms, he thinks, and hence it could only spring from the original work of mind, as something that we add to our own experience. The problem, as Green sees it, is that no mere series of perceptions could ever explain our consciousness of the series perceived, and thus that there can be no (Humean) impression from which we might derive the idea of a relation; a relation is “neither a feeling nor felt” (1149). For consciousness of events as related is not at all the same thing as a series of related events of consciousness (PE 21). As he says “Of two successive feelings, one over before the next begins, neither can be consciousness of time as a relation between the two” (L 170). Even if the relation in question be one of succession, it will be no help for our ideas to succeed one another. “In order to constitute the relation they must be present together” (PE 41) says Green. Yet that is impossible.8 The lesson Green drew from his long study of empiricism was precisely its inability to deal with relations; atomic in both metaphysics and epistemology, ultimately it leaves us with nothing but an aggregate of unrelated particulars. For the merely receptive consciousness, he urges, there are no relations between feelings, merely a series of feelings. As an element of independent reality a relation is something that we could simply never come to know.

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It might be objected that, even if correct, this argument merely demonstrates the unperceivability of mind-independent relations, not their impossibility. But this is to appeal to a third way with which Green has absolutely no patience at all. The notion of unknowable reality is, for him, quite simply, an absurd contradiction; unless we say something about it, it is literally nothing to us, but whatever we say about it can only bring it into relation with the knowing consciousness (L 184, PE 47). In this basic anti-realism, he is in agreement with Bradley (AR 111, 114), and all of the other British Idealists. The mystery o f relations Green’s second argument about relations can be most clearly expressed using his own words. Relation is to us such a familiar fact that we are apt to forget that it involves all the mystery, if it be a mystery, of the existence of many in one. [...] But a plurality of things cannot of themselves unite in one relation, nor can a single thing of itself bring itself into a multitude of relations. [...] There must, then, be something other than the manifold things themselves, which combines them without effacing their severalty. [...] if it were not for the action of something which is not either of them or both together, there would be no alternative between their separateness and their fusion. [...] we must recognise as the condition of this reality the action of some unifying principle analogous to that of our understanding (PE 33-34). A relational whole combines unity and diversity—though containing several components, it is yet one whole—but this is something strange that needs further explanation, for a single thing cannot on its own become many, nor many things become one. There must be something else that helps the relational structure to achieve this result, and the only thing which we know that is able to do this is mind. Our own minds, claims Green, holding, as they do, many ideas in one thought and many thoughts in one conscious experience, are examples of precisely such unity in diversity. In consequence, he concludes, we need to recognize as the underlying condition that makes nature itself possible, the ground of its relationality, something analogous to our own minds.9 Since quite clearly it is not yours, or mine, or any other finite mind that underlies the relations that constitute nature, Green postulates a higher experience to undertake the task, which sharing in the unalterable character of the relations it grounds he calls the “Eternal Consciousness” (PE 78). As the underlying ground of all reality, including our own finite experience, it is also the Absolute.

Bradley Bradley’s philosophical position on the subject of relations is, of course, much better known than Green’s. I shall here summarize it in three sections.

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The Inter-relatedness o f All Things In opposition to the atomic pluralism that characterized the prevailing philosophy of his day, the primary direction of Bradley’s thought is holistic. Whatever is, is part of a single systematic whole in which everything is related to everything else. To consider anything in any kind of isolation is to abstract it out from its surrounding background in a manner that can only distort and mislead. The way to a truer view is to bring into our understanding of anything more and more of the inexhaustible context which crowds behind it, a process which leads us ultimately to the conclusion that we cannot really know anything until we know everything. In Bradley’s early work the primaiy impetus towards this holism comes from his antiatomistic conception of logic, a conception from which he derives a correspondingly antiatomistic metaphysics. We may consider three illustrations of this movement. First, he attacks the separation of one idea from another that is involved in subject-predicate thought. Instead of dividing a judgement into several discreet ideas each with a different role to play, he urges us to treat its elements as symbolically on a par (PL 11 ) and to group all its content together as one idea which our very act of judgement then attributes indifferently to reality as a whole (PL 10, 630). Second, he argues that any finite judgement, in so far as it deals with abstractions, functions subject to a series of implicit conditions concerning those background factors not explicitly mentioned. But strictly speaking, if it is not to be regarded as false, these need to be spelled out explicitly, and thus “The growth of knowledge consists” he says “in getting the conditions of the predicate into the subject. The more conditions you are able to include, the greater is the truth” (ETR 233). The net result is that the judgement expands indefinitely from within until it becomes a statement of everything. Third and last, Bradley follows Hegel in a specific view about the nature of human thought. He claims that two things separated without any point of connection between them is as unthinkable a notion for us as any logical contradiction. Indeed it is precisely what is meant by logical contradiction (AR 505). Consequently, he thinks, in principle at least, that “you could start internally from any one character in the Universe, and you could pass from that to the rest” (AR 520). In his later thinking Bradley became more preoccupied with the psychological background which he believed this position to imply. He emphasized more and more the role of what he called our immediate experience s a wholly pre-conceptual encounter with reality, which, though far from homogeneous, is scarred by no division or distinction, and which grounds all our mental life (ETR 160). He argues that to concentrate on any individual item is to distort it by pulling it to the fore from this continuous felt background. The Contradiction o f Relations Nothing is separate or without relation to its context, but as necessary and all-pervasive as Bradley holds relations to be, he nonetheless goes on to argue that they are incoherent and a mark of appearance, not reality. We uncritically employ relations all the time, he argues, but if we once stop and think just what we mean by a relation, the concept

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crumbles in our hands. Only two basic possibilities for understanding present themselves to us, but neither can satisfy.10 An initial idea would be to suppose that relations are nothing more than a façon de parler, a different way of talking about individual things and their characters—for what more is there to Sam’s being taller than Alex than Sam and Alex and their respective heights? Despite its intuitive appeal, Bradley holds this line of thinking unable to really account for relations. For it only works where there exists a common frame (such as space) within which the two predicates may be located, which is as much as to say that it already presupposes the concept of a relation. This is particularly clear if we think of cases where any such frame is absent, as in the problem of mind-body interaction. We might perhaps do better to think of a relation as an extra item in any fact somehow bringing together its two terms, but on reflection this turns out to be no better. It falls afoul of Bradley’s notorious ‘chain argument’ (AR 17-18, 28). If two terms, a and b, require a relation R to connect them, what, asks Bradley, connects R itself to a and b l We would appear to need two new relations, but if that is conceded, our problem arises again—how are we to connect the new relations to their terms?— and clearly we are launched on an infinite regress. This argument has been much abused, but many of its critics have simply failed to recognize that it forms, together with the argument of the paragraph above, but one part of an either-or case. Bradley’s point is that if neither treating relations as integral to their terms nor treating them as separate elements make any real sense, and if all attempts to understand them come down in the end to variants of one or other of these strategies, then it would seem as though we must conclude that relations don’t make any real sense either. And that is precisely what Bradley does. “The conclusion to which I am brought” he says “is that a relational way of thought—any one that moves by the machinery of terms and relations—must give appearance and not truth. It is a makeshift, a devise, a mere practical compromise, most necessary, but in the end most indefensible” (AR 28). He is not denying that they do appear to us, only that they are ultimately real, that they figure in any final account of the way things are. The Supra-relational Whole We find ourselves with a strange pair of theses; everything is inter-related, but relations are unreal. Bradley reconciles these positions by adopting a two-level metaphysics—any final account of the world, he argues, must make room both for the level of reality and the level of appearance. If relations and whatever involves them are unreal, then there must be such a thing as reality. This realm of being, which Bradley called the Absolute, is characterized in terms precisely opposite to those used to describe ordinary experience; where the latter separates and distinguishes, the former unites and relates, and where the latter isolates, the former reconnects us to our unending context. The Absolute is a holistic realm in which everything is internally connected to everything else; it is, in that phrase much loved by the British Idealists, an identity-in-difference. A foretaste of this is given to us

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in immediate feeling, thinks Bradley, but in its fullness it is something that transcends all thought or finite experience. The level of the Absolute must be distinguished from the level of appearance, the level of everyday life. Bradley argues that it belongs to the very nature of immediate experience to break up and produce a pluralistic realm of relations. The resulting world is governed by abstract identity and connections which remain merely external to their terms, and viewed in such a manner, relations, far from being a mark of truth, become an impossibility, and the world thus produced a distortion of the truth (ETR 231 -2). Bradley was a determined critic of this world, and the first book of his metaphysical treatise Appearance and Reality consists in a sustained attack on its categories—space, time, thing, property, action, cause, self, God and so on. All are declared unreal.

Comparisons With these two basic expositions behind us, let us go on and make a few comparisons between Green and Bradley’s positions with respect to relations. I shall begin with two points of agreement and then go on to consider two differences. (1) Both philosophers agree about the central place that needs must be given to relations in any attempt to understand our everyday experience, for both recognize the thoroughly relational character of that experience. The world we know is saturated by a complex of relational linkages. Green finds relations at the heart of everything, while Bradley, in identifying what he calls the ‘relational way of thought,’ brings out the manner in which all our basic categories are in one way or another relational. To condemn relations is to condemn at the same time “almost without a hearing, the great mass of phenomena” (AR 29). But not only do they consider relations equally pervasive, they take them equally seriously. They are agreed that no attempt to understand reality could succeed in which relations were treated as somehow secondary or an afterthought. For both philosophers, unity is as important and basic as distinction. In this insight they join together in attacking the atomism of their empiricist predecessors. If everything is connected to everything else, they argue, nothing is wholly or ultimately separate from anything else, and the more you probe the more relations you uncover. This relational holism is one source of their common monism.11 (2) There is a second very important point of agreement between Green and Bradley. They concur, not just in the views they hold of their importance, but also in the accounts that they give of the origin of relations. Although their reasons for thinking this differ, and that difference will be considered below, both thinkers agree that relations come from us not external reality; they are our own mental creations not pre-existing realities awaiting discovery by us. Indeed both philosophers hold, not simply that thought relates, but that the essence of thinking is to relate. To relate is the key function of thinking. This is, of course, a common debt to Kant who emphasises the distinctive work of the mind as one of synthesis.

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If relations are mental, but integral to the world we experience, it follows that that world is something through and through ideal, that is to say, something constructed by mind.12This result is endorsed by both Green and Bradley, placing them squarely in that long idealist tradition which sees the work of the mind in everything we experience; in which our concepts and categories are seen one by one to flow, not from the world, but from us. This further Kantian debt is very clearly acknowledged in Green,13 but rather more hidden in Bradley where the critical implications of this contribution tend to shout so much louder than its constructive significance. (3) These major similarities between Green and Bradley are partnered by some equally major dissimilarities. The most important of these can be very simply put: Green accepts relations while Bradley rejects them. For Green relations are real. For Bradley they are unreal. Green has no worries about the possibility or coherence of relations, he just tends to take them as something ultimate and unproblematic. Indeed far from worrying about them, he holds up relationality as the very mark of reality itself. Reality is precisely the fixed and unalterable order of relations. Bradley, by contrast, worries deeply about relations and, looking at them from all angles, in the end judges them incoherent and impossible. Relationality, for Bradley, however permanent or pervasive it may be, far from being a badge of reality, is an incurable defect and a sign that we are dealing merely with appearance. For Bradley, in the last analysis, ultimate reality is something wholly non-relational (or as he prefers to put it, ‘supra-relational’). Behind this ontological disagreement about ultimate reality lies a difference, not just in what is found acceptable, but also in the role that relations are seen to be playing. For Green, relational thought unifies and binds together what would otherwise be distinct, it is the glue that holds the world together. Bradley, by contrast, sees relational thought as something disruptive and destructive, something that pulls apart what was originally together in a whole, the hammer that smashes the world apart. Bradley’s point of view may seem perverse, but the idea behind it is not difficult. He does not want to deny that relations unify, but asks us to reflect more deeply on what that entails. You can only unify what is already disunified, he argues, and so relations, with their machinery of distinct terms and connecting links, are as much agents of disintegration as combination. They perversely offer to stitch back together what they at the same time pull apart. This difference in their attitude towards relations connects interestingly with their relational holism that we considered above. At one level they are both monists because they believe that everything is related to everything else, and that nothing is so isolated as to be unaffected by its relations to its neighbours. But at a deeper level the picture changes. Green persists in thinking reality a unity because of its relational character. For Bradley, by contrast, reality is a unity precisely despite its relations. Notwithstanding the attempts by our relational concepts to tear it asunder, it remains at bottom a non-relational unity. Two qualifications are in order here. To say, as I did above, that Green accepts relations while Bradley rejects them is to draw the difference between them a little too sharply. Although he attacks the apparatus of terms and relations, Bradley accepts that beyond thought, in the Absolute, there does exist some kind of (non-relational) coming together of unity and diversity. Green, on the other hand, accepts that the unity in

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difference which relations claim to create for us is something thoroughly mysterious. In this way the difference between the two philosophers closes, and the issue becomes not whether differences can be brought together (which they both hold possible), nor whether this is mysterious (which they both accept it is), but whether this can in any sense be thought or not. Bradley thinks it a union forever beyond intelligible thought, something which we can see must be the case, but which we can never hope to grasp. Green, on the other hand, together with most of the other British Idealists, thinks it something we can intelligibly conceive because it is something uniquely revealed to us in our own selfconsciousness. For Green, human self-consciousness, which he explicitly identifies with Kant’s ‘unity of apperception’ (PE 37) provides the key to understanding the fundamental nature of reality, for Bradley, on the other hand, it is just one more contradiction that separates us from that reality (AR Ch. X).14 The second qualification concerns the use of relations as a criterion for reality. Whilst disagreeing, in the final analysis, with Green’s idea that a thing’s reality lies precisely in its relations, Bradley does see a limited role for this idea. Bradley’s universe is a veiy democratic and full one, offering at least a degree of reality, to the worlds of myth, fiction, dreaming and so forth. But how, within this crowd, can he pick out that subset which we commonly call the ‘real world’? For this task he appeals, like Green, to relations, defining it as the universe of those things which are continuous in space with my body. It earns its place of preeminence because of its superior relational integrity; “The order of things which I can construct from the basis of my waking body, is far more consistent and comprehensive than any other possible arrangement” (ETR 462). Bradley and Green’s methods of picking out ‘reality’ here are identical, the difference simply that what Bradley thinks he has captured in this net is smaller in scope and less fundamental in significance than what Green claims to have caught. (4) I turn now to draw an important contrast between their views regarding the relative roles of reason and experience in our investigation of reality. The reason why Bradley agrees with Green that relations are mental, is because he finds them contradictory or impossible. “Reality is such that it does not contradict itself,” he tells us (AR 120). Thus, for him, their being mental is indicative of their unreality. But Green, it will be remembered, was trying to undermine precisely this traditional association of ‘work of the mind’ and ‘that which is unreal. ’ Thus, far from following in his footsteps, Bradley is undoing all Green’s efforts in this direction, and in a very real sense going back to Locke. ‘Created by us’ is once again contrasted with ‘really there,’ and ‘ultimate reality’ to be thought of as the residue remaining once all input or contamination by ‘us’ has been removed. As an anti-realist, Green accepts that we can know only what knowing itself has created, but he insists that what we know is none the less real for that. Moreover, as itself a product of our thought, the universe is rationally intelligible and may be uncovered through the use of our reason. For the world is relational, and relations are something of which the knowing subject is conscious only because he thinks (L 171).15For Bradley, on the other hand, ultimate reality is unknowable or beyond thought, and intellect is consequently engaged on a hopeless quest, attempting to recover what it has already destroyed. With a gap opening up in this way between thought and reality, Bradley argues

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that our only true contact with uncontaminated being is in feeling or immediate experience, and hence that it is through feeling not reason that we come closest to knowing how things really are. Ultimate reality turns out to be a matter of feeling or experience, rather than thought. Green differs from Bradley, not so much by taking the opposite line, as by refusing to accept the sharp distinctions which Bradley here (and perhaps rather untypically) insists on. “We deny that there is really such a thing as ‘mere feeling’ or ‘mere thought’,” he says. “We hold that these phrases represent abstractions to which no reality corresponds” (PE 57), while, with respect to the Absolute, he holds that “It is one and the same living world of experience which, considered as the manifold object presented by a self-distinguishing subject to itself, may be called feeling, and, considered as the subject presenting such an object to itself, may be called thought” (PE 55). Looked at another way, the difference between Bradley and Green here could be put like this. While Bradley operates with a very strong nominalist intuition of reality as something particular or individual, for Green universality is an eliminable aspect of what it is to be real.

Conclusion The value of any comparative study consists in the light that it throws upon the positions compared, that is, upon its ability to pick out illuminating similarities or contrasts that might otherwise go unnoticed. Such has been the case here with respect to Green and Bradley. The initial impression is one of great similarity between them. Both systems take their starting point and inspiration from Kant and Hegel, both find their first principles in which we might call the metaphysics of our own experience—the question of how that experience relates to the world of which it is part—and both end up with a similarly holistic and idealistic result: Green’s Eternal Consciousness and Bradley’s Absolute. But if we look through this superficial similarity we find at the deeper levels a very great difference between them. Bradley is often thought of as an anti-realist, but what the comparison with Green brings out most clearly, is the strength of his realist convictions—thought for Green is the very mark of reality, while for Bradley it is a kind of barrier to be passed over before reality may be reached. It is almost as though they had arrived at the same position from completely opposed starting points. Certainly we see that it would be a great mistake to think of Bradley as belonging in any simple sense to ‘the school of Green.’16 Bradley’s philosophical system is in many respects a development of Green’s. He strengthens Green’s admittedly weak arguments for the mind-dependence of relations, he realizes that the power of relations to unite presupposes a prior function of dissolution on their part, and he sees that if we are to criticize the data of experience for their conceptual or relational contamination we may not simply halt this critique where it suits us, but must press on to include the data of our own self-consciousness. But for each of these ‘advances’ there is a price to pay, and as a whole they tend to take his position in an antiintellectualist, even a somewhat mystical, direction. Thus in the end it remains an open

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question whether we should view Bradley’s philosophy as a legitimate and natural development of Green’s or as its reductio ad absurdum.

Notes 1. Abbreviated page references to Green’s works are as follows: Prolegomena to Ethics [PE] [1883] 5th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907); “General Introduction to Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature” [I] [1874], in The Works of Thomas Hill Green, ed. R. L. Nettleship (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1886) Vol. 1,1-299; “Lectures on Logic” [L] [1874-1875], in The Works of Thomas Hill Green, Vol. II, 158-306; “Faith” [F] [1877], in The Works of Thomas Hill Green, Vol. IH, 253-267; “Review of J. Caird: Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion” [C] [1880], in The Works of Thomas Hill Green, Vol. HI, 138-46. Abbreviated page reference to Bradley’s works are as follows: The Principles of Logic [1883] [PL] 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922); Appearance and Reality [AR] [1893] 2nd ed., 9th impression, corrected (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930); Essays on Truth and Reality [ETR] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915). 2. Bradley’s unpublished remains at Merton College, Oxford contain notes on Green’s lectures on ethics. In the same place see also a letter from A.C. Bradley to his sister, Mrs de Glehn, 29 August 1927: “He heard some (I don’t remember which) of Green’s lectures.” See also comments in the obituaries by A. E. Taylor in Proceedings of the British Academy, 11 (19241925) 464, and by Bernard Bosanquet in the Times, 20 September 1924. There is also evidence that in 1872 or 1873 Bradley, along with some others, asked Green to join a philosophical essay society that they had formed; it is not known whether Green did join (see M. Richter, The Politics of Conscience [Bristol: Thoemmes Press reprint, 1996] 159-161). 3. Green’s General Introduction to his and Grose’s edition of the works of David Hume was published in 1874, eight years before Bradley’s The Principles of Logic, while his posthumous Prolegomena to Ethics appeared in 1883, ten years before Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. 4. An alternative possibility worth exploring is that their common interest in relations stems less from Green’s influence on Bradley than from their common interest in Lotze. 5. Although Bradley’s Ethical Studies was published in 1876, seven years before Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics, in the first place, he largely avoids discussion of the metaphysics of relations there, and in the second place, the material from Green’s book had already been used for some time in his professorial lectures. 6. Bradley too argues that qualitative diversity is only possible in the presence of relations. “Their plurality depends on relation” he says “and, without that relation, they are not distinct” (AR 24). 7. In his own discussion of this matter, Bradley takes a very similar line. “The self-transcendent character of the ‘this’ is,” he claims, “on all sides, open and plain. Appearing as immediate, it, on the other side, has contents which are not consistent with themselves, and which refer themselves beyond. Hence the inner nature of the ‘this’ leads it to pass outside itself towards a higher totality” (AR 201-202). 8. The doctrine of the specious present was introduced to overcome this problem. But that is another story. 9. This argument has been used also by Herman Lotze (Metaphysics [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1884] Bk. I, Ch. 6,80) and Hastings Rashdall (Philosophy and Religion [London: Duckworth, 1909] 10-11). 10. In other terminology, these are the options that relations be either internal or external to their terms. Bradley’s main discussion of relations occurs at AR Ch. HI.

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11. For an important qualification of this claim see Section (3) on p. 65, below. 12. The question of just whose mind it is that performs this construction is a difficult one. Green and Bradley would both agree that it is not the ordinary finite mind—yours or mine. For Green the principal point of describing as “unalterable” the system of relations that constitutes reality is that it is unalterable by us, not subject to our individual wills, while for Bradley the finite self, because irredeemably relational, has no ultimate reality at all and hence could not perform this function. Yet neither would they say, with Berkeley, that the world is the creation of some mind wholly external to us. In effect what Green and Bradley try to do is to find a path between these two positions, and argue that it is the Absolute through us that thinks or creates the world. This is no doubt a difficult idea, but it is not an optional extra. The notion of an Absolute mind in which we ‘participate’ and which ‘reproduces’ itself through us (Green’s terms) is central to both of their systems. 13. Kant’s error for Green was simply that he did not go far enough in thinking through the consequences of the principles he established (PE 48). 14. Their differing attitudes towards self-consciousness have other consequences as well. Both philosophers reach idealist and monistic conclusions, inasmuch as Bradley’s Absolute is parallel to Green’s eternal consciousness. But Green (albeit tentatively) identifies his with God, something that Bradley’s attitude toward the self absolutely precludes. 15. “Reason is self-consciousness” argues Green, and “It is only as taken into our selfconsciousness, and so presented to us as an object, that anything is known to us” (F 267). This point should not be overemphasized, however, for he is far from slavish in his Hegelianism insisting that “If thought and reality are to be identified, if the statement that God is thought is to be more than a presumptuous paradox, thought must be other than the discursive activity exhibited in our inferences and analyses” (C 142). 16. In this connection the fact that Bradley did not contribute to Essays in Philosophical Criticism (ed. Andrew Seth and R. B. Haldane; pref. Edward Caird [London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1883]), the memorial volume for T. H. Green, is perhaps significant (although, of course, we cannot be sure of this).

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4 F.H. Bradley on Conflict of Interest DON M acNIVEN

One of the main issues which F. H. Bradley addresses in his analysis of the concept of “Goodness,’ in Chapter 25 of Appearance and Reality, is the conflict between duties to the self and duties to others.1This may appear surprising for a philosopher who repudi­ ated radical individualism and made social norms the pivot of his moral philosophy. Why should he dwell on this topic while developing a metaphysical account of morality? Certainly the enigma of self-sacrifice had always puzzled Bradley. The conflict between duty and self-interest is a recurring theme throughout Bradley’s moral philosophy. His moral psychology was first presented in the context of a discussion of selfishness and selfsacrifice in Chapter 7 of Ethical Studies ? Bradley had argued there, that human beings developed from an early stage of egoistic hedonism into one of social conformity where moral agency proper first appeared. He was concerned to explain how this transition from selfish to unselfish, and disinterested, conduct was possible. Morality seemed to require some genuine acts of self-sacrifice. But how could self-sacrifice be made to square with personal self-realization which controlled the dynamics of moral development? How can we realize ourselves by sacrificing ourselves? He dealt with the same theme in his article, “The Limits of Individualism and National Self-Sacrifice,” in 1879, and again in another article, “Is Self-Sacrifice an Evil?,” in 1883. He had also intended to add a further note on the topic for the second edition of Ethical Studies but he failed to do so.3 In these articles, and in Appearance and Reality, Bradley argued that genuine self-sacrifice must involve some real cost to the agent. If selfsacrifice always furthered the agent’s well-being there would be no true self-sacrifice. We can act benevolently, if doing so would involve no cost to ourselves, or if it furthered our own well-being. We can even sacrifice some things if the cost is little. But when a major loss of well-being is involved, how can this be justified on moral grounds? For example: Someone sacrifices their life to save the life of another. What we laud as the supreme sacrifice. The sacrifice involves the agent’s premature death. Premature death is surely an evil, hence the sacrifice was evil. Since all genuine sacrifices involve evil they cannot be justified on moral grounds. Self-sacrifice violates the Pauline Principle of never doing evil in order to do good. Ordinary morality accepts both a duty to the self to strive for perfection, and a duty of benevolence towards others. But when self-interest and benevolence conflict it normally requires self-sacrifice and condemns selfishness, and this appears inconsistent. The paradox of self-sacrifice presents a serious problem for a theory like Bradley’s which holds that the supreme principle of morality is self-realization or the harmonious development of the self. So too does self-assertion. When we act selfishly, our selfassertion often involves some real cost to others and this is also morally unacceptable. It is morally permissible to pursue our own good, provided it costs others, little, or nothing. But if we take some person’s life in order to further our own ends this is clearly evil, and morally unacceptable. Selfishness, like self-sacrifice, violates the Pauline Principle of never doing evil in order to do good. If we cannot reconcile personal self-development

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with our social responsibilities, as self-sacrifice, and selfishness, suggest, then the principle of self-realization is self-defeating, and untenable. As we mature morally we recognize that morality is not exhausted by living simply in terms of community values. It also involves a commitment to social progress and personal self-development. The adult moral agent tries to harmonize his social and personal life into a single whole which is as rich and integrated as possible. The higher stages (Personalism and Religious/Metaphysical stages) in our moral development are marked by tension between duties to the self and duties to others, in which self-sacrifice can no longer automatically take precedence. The principle of self-realization commits us both to self-development and self-sacrifice. As Bradley says: An individual system, aimed at in one’s self, and again the subordination of one’s own development to a wide-embracing end, are each an aspect of the moral principle. So far as they are discrepant, these two pursuits may be called, the one self-assertion, and the other self-sacrifice. And, however much these diverge, you cannot say that one is better than the other. (AR 367)

Bradley doesn’t think that our duties to ourselves and our duties to others always conflict. Normally they don’t. To a large extent, by pursuing the good of others, with no thought of the ourselves, we can secure our own welfare, and by pursuing our own good, with no thought of others, we can secure the general welfare. We can realize ourselves through the development of both the social and personal virtues and normally these compliment each other, but there are occasions when they conflict. As Bradley says: To a very large extent by taking no thought about his individual perfection, and by aiming at that which seems to promise no personal advantage, a man secures his private welfare. We may, perhaps, even say that in the main there is no collision between self-sacrifice and self-assertion, and that on the whole neither of these, in the proper sense, exists for morality. But while admitting or asserting to the full the general identity of these aspects, I am here insisting on the fact of their partial divergence. And that, at least in some aspects and with some persons, these two ideals seem hostile no sane observer can deny. (AR 367)

Still self-development does not always mean living for the self with no thought of others. Nor does self-sacrifice always mean living for others with no thought of the self. Not unlike some Egoists, Bradley believed that the best way to promote the public good is to pursue one’s own good. He also believed, unlike some Egoists, that the best way to promote our self-interest is to promote the public good. As Bradley says: The whole is furthered most by the self-seeking of its parts, for in these alone can it appear and be real. And the part again is individually bettered by its action for the whole, since thus it gains the supply of that common substance which is necessary to fill it. (AR 370)

Bradley, like many Egoists, holds that ultimately there can be no real conflict of interest. The principle of self-realization implies that there can be no genuine conflict of interest. The principle requires the moral agent to pursue a life which is as rich and harmonious as possible both at the personal and social level. This would be impossible

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if our duties to ourselves and others were truly incompatible. If the moral universe is rational then there cannot be any incommensurable moral dilemmas. Bradley is commit­ ted to the view that the moral universe is rational. As Bradley says: “Now that this divergence ceases, and is brought together in the end is most certain. For nothing is outside the Absolute, and in the Absolute there is nothing imperfect” (AR 371 ). There cannot be any ultimate conflict of interest. Again like many Egoists, Bradley held that what we perceive as conflicts between the public good and private interests are appearance and not reality. The Egoist, of course, is defending the principle of universal egoism, i.e. everyone ought to act in their own self-interest, and not the principle of selfrealization. Universal egoism would be incoherent, and thus untenable, if conflicts of interest really existed. Consider a chess game. If one player A, makes a move X, he will checkmate his opponent B, and win the championship, and the money and fame which accompany it. Move X is clearly in A ’s interest but not in B ’s interest. So both players cannot sincerely assent to the proposition that “B ought to make move X.” One way to save universal egoism is to deny that there are any real conflicts of interest. This is the strategy many Egoists adopt. They argue that each person in pursuing their own self-interest, indirectly and unwittingly, promote the public interest. Thus an unintended consequence of everyone pursuing their own good is the promotion of the public good. The defence depends on the claim that in practice any conflict of interest can be shown to be apparent rather than real. We might be able to show that this is true in some cases. For example we could argue that playing chess at a championship level is perhaps more important than winning a competition in which both competitors are trying their best to win. Its the game, not winning which really matters. But Bradley does not think that in practice we can always do so. He says: “But, on the other hand, this general coincidence is only general, and assuredly there are points at which it ceases. And here self-assertion and self-sacrifice begin to diverge, and each acquires its distinctive character” (AR 370). Can someone who gives their life to benefit others be said to be acting in their own self-interest? Here Bradley parts company with the Egoist. Theoretically there can still be no genuine conflict of interest for Bradley, but in practice we encounter moral dilemmas which cannot be resolved by human agents. Bradley holds that the conflict between self-assertion and self-sacrifice can never be completely resolved by morality alone. Humans are finite creatures with limited power and understanding so they can never reach perfection. And all societies are imperfect as well. The fact that societies and social institutions require self-sacrifice from the individuals which compose them to reach their goals is proof of this. If societies were perfect, no sacrifice would be required. The conflict can only be resolved by going beyond morality proper (Stage Three: Personalism) and transforming it into a religious or metaphysical problem. Morality must develop beyond itself to a religious / metaphysical perspective in which the moral agent comes to terms with human finitude (Stage Four: Religious / Metaphysical). Here we have reached the supererogatoiy world of saints and heroes, where self-sacrifice appears to be accepted as a duty. As Bradley says: “The problem can be solved only when the various stages and appearance of morality are all included and subordinated in a higher form of being” (AR 386).4

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From the religious / metaphysical perspective goodness and evil are seen as mutually dependent. Everything in the universe is sacred. Even evil must paradoxically be good. Good and evil are recognized as different aspects of the same process of individual development. There can be no goodness without evil because evil is discord, and it is discord which fuels the process of moral growth, creating the desire for harmonious being. Human beings abhor chaos as nature abhors a vacuum! As Bradley says: “If goodness as such is to remain, the contradiction cannot quite cease, since a discord, we saw, was essential to goodness” (AR 388).5 Similarly there can be no evil without goodness, because discord possesses no ordering principle. “The content of the bad self has no principle, and forms no system, and is relative to no end” (ES 280). Evil is essentially anarchical, and is parasitic on good. The relation between goodness and evil is asymmetrical rather than symmetrical. Goodness is a necessary condition of the existence of evil, but evil, although it is a necessary condition of moral development, is not a necessary condition of goodness as such. The religious/ metaphysical perspective alters our understanding of morality and provides a potential intellectual solution to the paradox of self-sacrifice but it does not alter moral practice in any fundamental way. At the practical level the problem of the conflict between duty and self-interest remains. From the moral point of view we must always try to get rid of evil hence we must strive to eliminate self-sacrifice, as well as selfishness. As Bradley says: “From the moral point of view, evil and with it self-sacrificing virtue are both undesirable; we must look at them as things which ought not to be.”6 Conflicts between duties to the self and duties to others must be solved by appeal to the principle of self-realization. If acting benevolently produces self development, creates a richer more integrated personality, then it is right to act benevolently. If acting prudently produces self-development, then it is morally right to act self-interestedly. To repeat the principle of self-realization commits us to the view that moral universe is rational. In a rational moral universe there can be no real conflict of interest. Bradley accepts the Egoist’s doctrine of harmony at the theoretical if not the practical level. Bradley’s analysis of conflict of interest has important consequences for both theoretical and practical ethics. It provides a way for harmonizing Ethical Egoism and Ethical Altruism and produces a methodology which helps resolve conflicts of interest. Ethical Egoism and Ethical Altruism are often used to resolve conflict of interest dilemmas. We can legitimately maintain that these theories represent the abstract expression of what Bradley identified in our moral experience as “self-assertion” and “self-sacrifice.” These theories have been developed in different ways in recent moral philosophy but there is no agreement among professional moral philosophers as to which form is the best Without further argument I shall assume that the universal forms of these theories are the most defensible.7 Briefly, Ethical Egoism maintains that everyone ought to act selfishly, while the Ethical Altruist maintains that everyone ought to act altruistically. The egoist believes that we ought to be solely concerned with our own well-being and not with the well-being of others. Whether we are accommodating, hostile, or indifferent to others will depend on whether doing so will further our interests. We have no obligations to others, even those in need, unless it can be shown that acting benevolently will further our own interests or

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the interest of those close to us on which our well-being depends. For the egoist, the agent’s well-being is the sole intrinsic good. The well-being of others is only instrumentally good. Others are not ends-in-themselves but are merely means to the agent’s good. The central virtue of the Egoist is self-reliance. Let each one look after themselves and the devil take the hindmost. On the other hand the altruist holds that we ought to be primarily concerned with the well-being of others rather than with our own well-being. Whether we are accommodat­ ing or indifferent to ourselves will depend on whether doing so will further the interests of others. For the altruist the well-being of others is the sole intrinsic good, the well-being of the agent is largely instrumentally good. The moral agent is a means to the good of others and not an end-in-itself. Most of us recognize a natural obligation to help others in need, when there is little or no cost to the self. A child drops her ball into a pool of water in a public park. The pool is too deep for her to retrieve her ball, so she asks someone to help. He refuses to do so because he does not want to get his shoes muddy and wet, and walks off leaving the little girl in her distress. Normally we would be outraged if we had witnessed such mean behaviour. But for the altruist the obligation of benevolence holds even when the cost to the agent is very high. Hence the supreme sacrifice, giving one’s life for another’s well being, The central virtue of the altruist is self-sacrifice. Ethical Egoism is open to several obvious objections, which the Ethical Altruist is quick to point out8First it implies that we must be totally self-reliant, however no one can be totally self-reliant because no one is omnipotent. We all need the help of others to some degree. Secondly in a purely selfish society in which we care little or nothing for the well-being of others, human relationships become essentially manipulative. We use each other as mere means to our own ends. There would be no true concern or respect for others. Nor of course no real respect or concern for ourselves. Ethical Altruism is also open to several obvious objections, which the Ethical Egoist is quick to point out.9 First it implies that self-interested action is evil. Few of us would be willing to accept the view that we have no duties to ourselves or no responsibility for our own well-being. Secondly, Ethical Altruism implies Paternalism. It holds that we have to be totally dependent on others for our own happiness. People are too stupid or weak to be trusted with the responsibility of looking after themselves. Paternalism is self­ destructive because it robs human agents of the self-confidence which is required to act responsibly. Altruism is also incoherent because self-reliance is a necessary condition of acting benevolently, as it is of acting self-interestedly. In order to act benevolently we need to have some self-confidence in ourselves. Persons with low self-esteem will find it as difficult to act benevolently as they would to act selfishly. From Bradley’s Idealist perspective both theories are even more inadequate than these criticisms suggest, because in each values which ought to be respected fail to find adequate expression in our personal and social lives. Ethical Egoism abandons benevo­ lence, and respect for others, while Ethical Altruism abandons self-development, and selfrespect Both theories then are deficient in significant ways. In each case important values are sacrificed and our lives would be less morally rich than we would want if we adopted either of them as our ethical guide. This should not surprise us because for both theories

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duties to the self and duties to others are seen as externally, rather than internally, related to each other. There is no intrinsic relationship between our well-being and the well­ being of others. For the Egoist the well-being of others is only accidentally related to their own. Their good has no intrinsic merit, it is only a means to our good. For the Altruist our own well-being is only accidentally related to the well-being of others. Our good has no intrinsic merit, it is only a means to the good of others. For Bradley, on the other hand, the good of self and the good of others are intrinsi­ cally related. The love of self and the love of others are mutually dependent. One who is unable to love others is not very likely to be able to love themselves. One who does not love themselves will not likely be able to love others. Self-respect and respect for others are also intrinsically related and mutually dependent, for Bradley. One who has no selfrespect will not likely respect others, and one who is unable to respect others will not likely be capable of self-respect. Benevolence, self-development and respect for persons, must all be taken seriously in any comprehensive moral theory. This is clearly possible within the theoretical framework of Bradley’s Idealism but clearly impossible within the framework of either Ethical Egoism or Ethical Altruism. Although Bradley was sceptical about the relevance of ethical theory for ethical practice, I would argue that his theory has an important contribution to make to practical ethics.10It provides us with a methodology for resolving conflicts of interest. If the moral universe is rational then it follows that ultimately there can be no incommensurable moral dilemmas. That they exist is a function of our finite existence, as Bradley rightly points out. But in practice we must act as if there were rational solutions to all our moral dilemmas. The presence of a conflict of interest is an indication that we have failed to develop the appropriate personal and/or social structures which would resolve the dilemma. Adopting Bradley’s Idealist approach the moral agent is required to try and express the conflicting interests of the self and others in more complex personality and social structures. To resolve conflicts of interest we need to restructure our experience into richer and more highly integrated states of affairs. This may not always be possible but at least we know what to search for and what a solution would look like if we found one.11 Of course the methodology might not always lead to a resolution of the dilemma, but at least it represents a more imaginative approach to our moral dilemmas than the selfcentred approach of Egoism, which negates the value of others, or the self-sacrificial, selfrighteous approach of Altruism, which negates the value of self. Even after using all the creative thought and energy we can muster to resolve our moral problems, we may still be faced with the prospect of self-sacrifice or the sacrifice of others. In these cases we must do the lesser evil. Here we would be entering into the little understood world of supererogation, which Bradley correctly recognized as the natural extension of the moral world. And now we would be trying to understand the tragedy of our finite existence and no longer trying to fully solve the dilemma from the moral point of view. For, as Bradley noted, self-sacrifice is always an admission of moral failure. No existing social organism secures to its individuals any more than imperfect good, and in all of them self-sacrifice marks the fact of a failure in principle. (AR 373)

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Notes 1. F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality [AR], 2nd ed., 9th impression, corrected (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930) 355-402. Bradley also developed a definition of good, and discussed the principle of self-realization and the stages of moral development in the chapter. 2. F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies [ES], 2nd ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927) 251-312. The transition referred to was from Stage One (Egotistic Hedonism) to Stage Two (Institutionalism), which Bradley argued could not be accounted for by Utilitarian Association Psychology. For a full account of Bradley’s developmental psychology see my Bradley ’s Moral Psychology (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 1987) 147-199 and 246-249. 3. F.H. Bradley, “The Limits of Individualism and National Self-Sacrifice,” and “Is Self-Sacrifice an Evil?,” Collected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935); ES 309. In AR (footnote 1, 356), Bradley says that the theory of morality developed in Ethical Studies in the main still expresses his opinions. He does think, however, that in the earlier work he had misrepresented the truth, by arguing that all virtue is social virtue (AR 368). For this implies, falsely, that any development of the individual which does not increase the welfare of society cannot be moral. In AR, he admits that there are personal goals which sometimes involve the sacrifice of social for private good. The claim that all virtue is social virtue is valid for Stage Two morality (Institutionalism) but not for Stage Three morality (Personalism). This might have been the modification he intended but failed to add to the second edition of ES. 4. See also my discussion of Bradley’s religious/ metaphysical stage of morality in Bradley’s Moral Psychology, 173-179,234-241, and 248. 5. See also Bradley’s discussion o f“ Evil” in AR 175-180, and his discussion of the “bad self’ in ES 276-308. 6. Bradley, “The Limits of Individualism and National Self-Sacrifice,” Collected Essays, 131. 7. For a fuller discussion of Ethical Egoism and Ethical Altruism, see my Ethical Theory (Toronto: TV Ontario, 1982) 16-23. 8. Ethical Theory 18-19. 9. Ethical Theory 20-21. 10. See Bradley, “Some Remarks on Punishment,” Collected Essays 163, and ES 193. See also my Bradley ’s Moral Psychology, Ch. 1,20-36. 11. See my “Towards a Unified Theory of Ethics,” in Ethics and Justification, ed. D. Odegard (Edmonton: Academic Printing & Publishing, 1988) 173. See also my Creative Morality (London: Routledge, 1993).

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5 F.H. Bradley’s Metaphysics of Feeling and the Theory of Relations1 JAMES BRADLEY

Introduction It is of course Chapters II and III of Appearance and Reality1which offer the classical expression of Bradley’s doctrine of relations and which, for some ninety years, have been the centre of critical attention—the point from which the rest of that work, and indeed the whole of Bradley’s metaphysics, is usually approached. But without denying the text its due importance, my general concern here will be to argue that such a weight of emphasis is seriously misplaced. To be sure, to misinterpret Bradley here is to misunderstand much of what follows in AR. Yet it is equally the case that commentators and critics alike have been singularly myopic in their handling of these chapters. Not only have they overlooked the fact that throughout Bradley closely engages the views of contemporary thinkers, but, above all, they have ignored the presence there and elsewhere in Bradley’s work of his theory of feeling or immediate experience. In his theory of feeling Bradley denies that sensation is atomistic in nature. He maintains, rather, that it is a non-discrete continuum of sense-contents. And this allows him to agree with idealists such as T. H. Green at least on the negative point that there is no such thing as the immediate apprehension or direct knowledge of particulars. So understood, I shall refer to this aspect of Bradley’s theory as his ‘epistemic’ account of feeling; as we shall see, it plays an important role in Section 1 of AR Ch. III. Bradley does not, however, regard feeling as the merely indeterminate starting-point of thought; unlike Bosanquet, for instance, he does not hold it to be completely assimila­ ble in the process of cognition. Instead, he maintains feeling to be a precognitive and hence nonrelational unity of subject and object, in which idea and existence, the ‘what’ and the ‘that,’ are as yet undifferentiated and form “one integral whole” (AR 156), “a knowing and being in one” (ETR 159). By thus endowing feeling with a complex unity of its own as a “many-in-one” (cf. ETR 174), Bradley attempts to secure the distinction of thought and existence against the rationalist idealism of his contemporaries.3 As such a unity, feeling is an actual level of experience for Bradley, but not in any psychological sense.4 Far from being an event or stage in the history of the mind, the actuality of feeling resides in the fact that it is the permanent “background” (AR 199, 461) or “condition” (ETR 176) of identifiable events and as such does not itself occur or exist.5Hence feeling is not for Bradley a mental or psychological or subjective entity; as the common root of all the contents of the objective world, it is neither subjective nor objective in nature (cf. AR 128). So understood, Bradley expresses the nonrelational unity of feeling in different ways: either in terms of the “presented subject” (AR 155), i.e. the distinguishable particular taken as a given ‘this’ or term or quality prior to its relational differentiation, or in terms of the general character of experience prior to its relational differentiation. Indeed,

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Bradley will sometimes use the ‘this’ in both senses at once (cf. AR 199,201,405; PL 659). But whichever mode of expression he employs depends—as we shall see—on the nature of the argument in which he is engaged. In what follows I shall distinguish these two modes of expression as, respectively, Bradley’s “metaphysical given” and his “metaphysical substratum”; and we will find that in both guises feeling plays a fundamen­ tal role in his treatment of relations. After all, as he himself says, whatever the difficulties the theory of feeling might bring with it, in his view the relational form “would cease to be” unacceptable “only if the immediacy of feeling could be shown to be merely rela­ tional” (ETR 190). Once we recognize it is exactly that point which Bradley is making in his critique of relations—both in AR and elsewhere—then, I believe, it will at long last be possible to recover the real nature and purport of his metaphysics, even if, so dense has the overlay of critical discussion become, only the major areas of confusion can here be taken into account.

Internal Relations One term is internally related to another if in the absence of the relation it could not be what it is. One term is externally related to another if the relation could equally be present or absent while the term remains the same. And in respect of Bradley’s treatment of this distinction in AR II and ID, two very different views prevail. On the one hand we are told that there Bradley is bent mainly on providing a proof for the doctrine of internal relations; or, more specifically, that he is trying to secure the view that all relations are internal relations by means of a logically undeniable argument, i.e. one which is inde­ pendent of any particular metaphysical premise.6 On the other hand it is said that he merely assumes that doctrine.7 Such a divergence of opinion suggests that neither party has got to the bottom of the matter. And this is indeed the case. For in Bradley’s view the doctrine of internal relations neither requires independent proof of its own, nor is it an axiom which he takes for granted at the outset. Rather, we shall find that it is a consequence of the epistemic account of feeling and in Ch. Ill, Section 1 is expounded as such, in terms that make it quite clear that Bradley regards the main issue as having already been decided in the post-Kantian tradition, particularly as represented in England by T.H. Green. In any case, Bradley is quite unequivocal as to what his central concern is in these chapters: namely, to show that relations are “theoretically unintelligible” (AR 21 ), i.e. that no “intelligible” (AR 16) account is possible of the nature of the connections we find in the world. Now in Chapters II and ID, admittedly, Bradley neither explicitly lays out his general view of what intelligibility or intellectual satisfaction consists of, nor does he offer any justification of it as a legitimate concern in philosophy. Those few pages—it needs to be said—do not constitute the whole of his work and have to be viewed (as will emerge) in the light of considerations he deals with elsewhere. Nevertheless, it is sufficiently obvious that Bradley is seeking for a theory of relations which will provide an adequate account of the nature of the bond between terms and relations. So for present purposes let us accept that the question of intelligibility or satisfaction is legitimate at least as a general

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philosophical question. In the context of AR II and III, and in view of the veritable babel of interpretation that has grown up around those chapters, the more pressing task is to determine what the question means there and whether or not it should be there at all.

Internal Relations and AR II As will become evident, it is of some importance that the ways Bradley puts the question of intelligibility in AR II and III be carefully distinguished. Here, indeed, Chapters I and II of AR are best regarded as critical preliminaries, clearing a way to the question as it will be put in Chapter III. Bradley’s procedure in AR I and II can be defined as typological in nature; in other words, he provides a brief and highly selective reading of philosophical debate on the nature of objects and their characters or qualities up to his own day. He does not attempt to treat his topics exhaustively, nor on the whole does he seem to be anticipating disagreement with the points he makes. So having “easily” (cf. AR 9) dealt with the theory of primary and secondary qualities in Chapter I, he moves on in Chapter II to deal with “Substantive and Adjective.” Bradley begins with a discussion of the Lockean notion of a substance and its adjectives or properties (AR 16). And having made the familiar objection—that when “we inquire what there can be in the thing besides its qualities we are baffled” (AR 16)—he moves on to consider the phenomenalist view of things as properties-without-substances (AR 17). Here he again remains on conventional ground; the properties cannot be “identical with the thing” in the sense that they cannot, as properties, merely be identical with their relations to one another. Bradley then considers the notion of attributes, and rejects it on the grounds that to substitute ‘has’ for ‘is’ is of no help here. Admittedly, he has at this point been accused of conflating the ‘is’ of predication with the ‘is’ of identity. But whatever merits such a charge may have in relation to his metaphysics as a whole—and it will become evident it has none—as leveled at this particular chapter in AR it is mere over-interpretation. For he says only that the notion of attribution is merely a metaphor for, and not an explanation of, the relational unity, i.e. the question of the unity of the different attributes remains, and hence the ‘old dilemma’ of the Lockean substance still stands. And if this is not already enough to suggest that Bradley is not making any unusual moves here, it should be noted that he now goes on to present a contemporary empiricist account of the connection between a thing and its properties precisely as an attempt to avoid the Lockean ‘dilemma.’ So it would hardly seem likely that at this point he would regard himself as doing anything more than stating generally acknowledged difficulties. The doctrine which Bradley proceeds to discuss he calls that of “independent” relations. From this point onwards in AR II the extent to which his treatment of relations is embedded in contemporary debates could not be more evident. For this doctrine was advanced by two of the most eminent philosophical thinkers of the day—Herbert Spencer and T. H. Huxley. Moreover, it was based on a theory of sensation diametrically opposed to Bradley’s own.

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In his Principles o f Psychology Spencer maintains that a relation is “itself a kind of feeling—the momentary feeling accompanying the transition from one conspicuous feeling to an adjacent conspicuous feeling.” He claims that as such qualitative character is “appreciable.”8 He is supported in this view by T. H. Huxley in his Hume, who, with characteristic bravado, proclaims it to be a proper clarification of (what he thinks is) Kant’s objection to Hume, viz., that discrete sensations are not the only “materials of thought.” On this basis he sets about amending Hume’s “geography of the mind,” and adds to the “primary elements of consciousness” what he calls “impressions of relations.”9 Bradley first discusses this position in PL Chapter II (96) where he refers explicitly to Huxley’s Hume. What he says in PL is more or less identical with his remarks in AR: namely, that to take relations as independent feelings or qualities is to ignore their nature as relations, with the result that they contradictorily require other relations to relate them to their terms. With reference to Spencer and Huxley the objection is, I think, irrefragable. But it is presented in AR II in a way that is not without significance. For there Bradley draws on Lotze’s critique of relations. Lotze claims that taken as “third ideas” which stand “between” their terms, relations fail to render intelligible the actual connectedness of their terms. He concludes that relations subsist “not between a and b [...] but rather in them, as an influence which they reciprocally exert upon and receive from each other” (author’s italics).10Now not only does Bradley himself employ Lotze’s spatial metaphor of ‘between,’ but he also agrees that a relation “must be something which appears in its terms” (AR 18) and so cannot be treated as an independ­ ent, term-like entity alongside the thing that it relates. Moreover, Bradley goes on to draw the same conclusion as Lotze: “A relation between^ and B implies really a substantial foundation within them” (AR 18). Just what Bradley understands this foundation to be he will shortly make clear. But he does so by way of a critique of Lotze’s account of its nature. For Lotze, the fact that relations must somehow subsist ‘in’ their terms and cannot be ‘between’ them implies that “the thought of an objective connection between things is altogether impossible, and that what we used to call by this name is in all cases some state or action in things themselves.”11 All relations, in other words, are nothing more than the “appearance” which the world “assumes for each of its parts which is capable of having anything whatever presented to it.”12 The reality of which relations are the appearance is in fact nothing else than the states or inner conditions of monad-like beings, which states “as soon as they exist, are the direct producing cause of some fresh inner condition in a second being” in virtue of “an Infinite that unites them as one substance.”13 At least one reason for Bradley’s rejection of Lotze’s uneasy combination of monadism and monism is made clear in AR II: Bradley regards Lotze’s all-containing monads or wholes of qualities and relations as no more than an unsatisfactory compound of both substantialism and phenomenalism; “It consists in saying to the outside world, ‘I am the owner of these my adjectives,’ and to the properties, ‘I am but a relation, which leaves you at your liberty’” (AR 19). Having thus put aside the most recent theory of relation in the German tradition, Bradley states his own view of the “substantial foundation” or “whole” (AR 18) or “real unity” (AR 19) which, at least at the initial stage of experience,

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binds terms and their qualities together; it is not the Lotzean monad or Infinite, but the “immediate unity” (AR 19) of feeling. The significance of Bradley’s reference to the theory of feeling at this point becomes apparent in Chapter ID. It is worth noting here, however, that having given Lotze’s ‘third idea’ critique a restricted bearing in terms of the Spencer-Huxley theory of feeling, it seems unlikely (contrary to the usual views on the matter) that Bradley will mount a Lotze-type critique of the intelligibility of relations in the following chapter. But let us turn to AR III itself.

Chapter III of Appearance and Reality Previous Views C. D. Broad has no doubts as to the meaning of the question which Bradley puts to relations in AR III. “Is there any valid objection to there being relations?” he asks, and considers the chapter in that light.14 But of course the question is not Bradley’s. For Bradley does not deny that there are such things as relations. Rather, he regards relations—for reasons which will emerge—as the essential character of ideal or reflective experience. His question concerns only the intelligibility of relations. Broad would however reply that this is only apparently the case; that in fact there is more going on in his discussion of relations than Bradley would like to admit. For Broad claims that in AR III Bradley treats relations “as if they were particulars like the terms they relate”15and that only on these grounds is he able to go on to maintain that a relation requires another relation to relate it to its terms, thus engendering the infinite regress. In other words, Broad holds that Bradley can deny the existence of relations only because he does not consider them as relations but as independent entities. And this is clearly an argument “which would disgrace a child or a savage.”16 Broad’s account is, however, but a variant of a particular interpretation of AR III that has achieved almost canonical status. For a whole line of critics of various philosophical persuasions maintain that the objections which Bradley brings against the intelligibility of relations would be valid only if relations did not fulfil the fonction of relating—in which case they would not be relations. Some, although they do not suggest with Broad that Bradley denies the existence of relations, nevertheless agree that he can treat relations as unintelligible only because he supposes them to be separate, independent qualities or third terms.17 They maintain that while Bradley indeed eschews the (sensationalist) theory of independent relations, the question of the intelligibility of relations—which by their very nature relate—can only result from treating them as independent term-like entities whose relational form consequently requires justification. Of course, they do not deny that the fact of relation, or some given phenomenon of attachment, might be held to require explanation and might be explained in different ways. It could be claimed, for instance, that what is needed is a theory of specific attachments which will tell us what can be attached to what. Yet such a theory would not query the fact of relation, but provide an account of it. It would not

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illegitimately put the relatedness of relations to the question but, accepting relations to be such, would try to show what kind of attachments a term is capable of forming.18 In contrast, Bradley’s denial of independent relations in AR II merely serves to hide the fact that the contradictions generated in AR III rest on the tacit assumption that relations are qualities and do not of themselves fulfil the function of relating. Independent relations may be formally denied in AR II, but they are in fact the basis of Bradley’s critique of relations in AR ID. Only by means of this illegitimate ploy is the question of intelligibility as addressed to relations given any purchase in AR III. Other critics either deny or do not consider the view that Bradley’s position is a result of taking relations as independent of their terms. Nevertheless, they concur in maintaining that relations relate whatever their nature; in other words, that both internal and external relations are patent facts for which no justification is required. A relation that is such needs no further grounding as a relation. Thus, from the start, they maintain that the inherent relatedness of relations rules out of court the question of intelligibility; any relational fact is as such satisfactory.19 In consequence, all parties would maintain that Bradley’s formal rejection of independent relations in AR II does not leave the theory of internal relations discussed in AR III as the sole remaining alternative, and that Bradley’s argument in these chapters is in fact based on a false or non-exclusive disjunction.20For Bradley nowhere considers external relations in their proper sense, i.e. as relations which are not independent, third terms precisely because as relations they do relate. Rather, he identifies them with independent relations. And he can do this only because he overlooks the fact that the objections he brings against relations are valid only if they are not treated as relations. In short, he can condemn relations as unintelligible because he treats them as if, absurdly, they had no relating power. Hence AR Chapter HI is generally regarded as a nest of unwarranted assumptions and gratuitous confusion; Bradley denies the theory of independent relations while tacitly treating relations as independent throughout and thus rendering them unintelligible in any form The only reason he has for putting the question of intelligibility to relations is that he ignores their nature as relations. But nothing could be further from the truth. The sport of accusing Bradley of making assumptions in AR III owes its immense popularity among commentators to their own assumption that in a brief chapter of eight-and-a-half pages he lays the foundation of his entire metaphysic. To be sure, it must be admitted that by placing Chapter III at the outset of AR, Bradley invited such misapprehension. But even so, an accurate reading of Chapter III indicates that Bradley’s assumptions are at least not those of which he is accused. That the organization of AR does not reflect the order of thought which sustains that work is clearly indicated in the text itself. AR Chapter III, Section 1 At the very outset of AR III Bradley leaves us in no doubt as to how, in his view, the question of intelligibility arises in respect of relations taken as other than independent. For relations, as AR II has shown, cannot be treated as atomistic ‘givens’: the given is the

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immediate unity of nonrelational feeling. In consequence, the relational form is not “a unique way of being which the reality possesses and which we have got merely to receive. For it most evidently has ceased to be something quite immediate” (AR 21). Thus relations cannot merely be assumed to be endowed with relating power. Though that assumption may be necessary “in practise” (AR 21 ), in metaphysics it has to be justified. As Bradley later puts the same point: “A thing, for example, with its adjectives can never be simply given [...] We have an intellectual product, to be logically justified if indeed that could be possible, and most certainly we have not a genuine datum” (AR 503). To be sure, it is possible to grant what might be called the formal legitimacy of the question ‘How do relations relate?,’ and yet also maintain that the question immediately answers itself: relations relate in virtue of their nature as relations. In this respect, indeed, Green or Blanshard, for example, would be at one with Russell or Moore; the relating power of relations is held to be an entailment of the fact that there are relations insofar as the obvious connectedness of things would otherwise remain inexplicable, i.e. insofar as experience is not thought to afford any other form of connectedness. But this is not the case with Bradley; he maintains that in feeling we have the experience of unity. And this renders the question ‘How do relations relate?' much more than merely formal. For once granted that we experience another form of unity besides the relational, then the fact that there are relations no longer entails that the relational form relates in virtue of any relating power of its own. That has now to be demonstrated. For Bradley, therefore, any recourse to the entailment argument merely begs the question at issue. At the same time, however, he will attempt in AR III to show that the nature of the relational form is itself such that it lacks any relating power. In order to see how he does this, the contexts in which Bradley sets his argument, and the way he goes about establishing the terms of reference in which he will work, have to be specified. So let us turn to AR III, Section 1, where Bradley presents his own account of relations as internal. Throughout Section 1 Bradley keeps two things firmly in view: the monadism of Herb art and Lotze and the role played by the ‘given’ in any doctrine of relations (cf. 289n.). The latter concern is evident from the start. For we now discover that qualities as well as relations are not directly known as such. After proposing the thesis that there are no such things as “qualities without relations,” Bradley goes on: “In the field of con­ sciousness, even when we abstract from the relations of identity and difference, they are never independent” (AR 22). In other words, even apart from any special considerations drawn from metaphysics, he would maintain that “One quality is together with, and related to, one other, at the least—in fact, always to more than one” (AR 22). There is of course nothing in this statement which an externalist would deny, for it is no more than an empirical claim about the contents of consciousness. Nevertheless, it has a sting in its tail. For Bradley immediately proceeds to counter a possible objection based upon “an appeal to a lower and undistinguished state of mind”; he points out that in feeling as such there are no “qualities proper,” i.e. discrete and independent terms which are given as such. He is, in other words, referring to his epistemic account of feeling as a non-discrete whole or continuum—feeling as “mere unbroken feeling” (AR 22).21 So at this juncture it is evident that while Bradley’s theory of feeling is anti-atomistic, he at

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least agrees with idealists such as Green that there is no such thing as the direct knowl­ edge of given particulars. That this is indeed the case becomes even clearer in the course of Bradley’s next move, when the argument shifts from the empirical to the metaphysical level. He begins (AR 22-3) by innocently noting that no-one will deny that the distinction of qualities or terms involves relations, at least the relation of difference. In itself this is doubtless an unexceptionable point; all parties to the relations debate would at least agree that concepts are essentially contrastive in nature. After all, as Bradley emphasizes, it can still be claimed that “the relation has existence only for us, and as a way of our getting to know” (AR 23). Here Bradley is referring not only to Lotze, but also to Herbart, who, while maintain­ ing like Lotze that there is a plurality of monadic qualities outside of our relational mode of apprehension, nevertheless holds that these qualities are absolutely simple and self-identical, and, in consequence, that their differences are not relations at all. For Herbart, different terms are actually different without relations or any relational activity of thought, their differences being reducible to the simple natures of the terms. In his view, that is, the world is composed of a plurality of simple and unchanging entities or substances, which he calls “reals” (Realen’, cf. AR 25).22 There is little here which either Green or Bradley could endorse. This is made clear by the way Bradley continues. For he responds with his notorious “process and product” passage (AR 23). This is certainly no more than a largely negative series of assertions. But what Bradley is asserting is that the question of the nature of qualities or relations cannot be settled except in terms of a theory of the ‘given.’ That is, he asserts his view that qualities or terms are not given as such; that therefore there are no identifiable qualities or terms which are independent of our relational process of apprehension; and that therefore all identifiable qualities or terms are relational in nature. The idealist denial of immediate knowledge is, in other words, the position Bradley is expressing throughout. The extent to which at this point he wants to be seen as standing alongside Green is indicated by his insistence that, in the defence of any contrary position, “the burden lies wholly on the assertor” (AR 23). Here he is almost quoting Green, who writes “But at any rate one should think that the burden of proof lies with those who hold that relations exist otherwise than as we know them to exist.”23 At this stage, then, Bradley is clearly stressing his point of agreement with Green—that there is no such thing as the direct knowledge of particulars. Here he is content, like Green, to defend the position nega­ tively. By now, then, the central issue is clear: “our question is really whether relation is essential to differences” (AR 24). Bradley proceeds to argue that the differences between terms cannot be treated as “absolute,” i.e. that they cannot be identified with the natures of terms as by Herbart. For either the relation of difference between terms is distinct from them and so cannot be identified with them (which Herbart would deny); or, if the relation of difference be made wholly internal to the terms, then, inside these monadic terms we now have to distinguish “their own quality and their otherness” (AR 24), i.e. they are no longer monads. Here Bradley is clearly assuming that, there being no direct knowledge of particulars, differences are constituted as such only by means of the relational mode of

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apprehension. His endorsement of the idealist position in this respect is driven home when, in the face of the objection that, while a plurality of qualities may well be relational in nature, this is not true of any particular quality taken as such, he insists to the contrary “if there is any difference, then that implies a relation” (AR 25), i.e. that there are no identifiable qualities or terms outside our relational mode of apprehension. As I see it, then, the doctrine of internal relations is for Bradley a consequence of the view that there is no such thing as direct knowledge of given, atomic particulars. It is this denial which gives the otherwise harmless point that we apprehend qualities or terms relationally its especial sting. For if there is no direct knowledge of atomic data, then any identifiable quality or term is an ideal construction, i.e. its identifiability or particularity is not a matter of mere existence but of ideal differentiation. In consequence, all relations are internal to their terms, for the terms—as ideal products—are nothing apart from any of their relational differentiations. As this position makes apparent, the doctrine of internal relations is for Bradley neither an axiom which he takes for granted, nor is he attempting to offer a purely “logical” proof of it. Rather, he defends it negatively, in terms of the idealist denial of direct knowledge of particulars. Hence it cannot be said that Bradley is working in AR IE in terms of a false or non-inclusive disjunction between relations taken as independent and relations taken as internal. For once the doctrine of relational feelings is denied, Bradley deploys the epistemic account of feeling; and it is this which excludes the notion of external relations. In this light, indeed, it would hardly seem likely that in Sections 2 and 3 following in Chapter III, when Bradley develops his critique of the intelligibility of internal relations, he might be guilty there of regarding relations as independent third terms. For as Section 1 makes clear enough, Bradley does not deny the fact that there are relations. Nor again does he deny the fact that terms are related and indeed related internally. This is not only his argument in Section 1, but he himself reiterates at the end of Chapter m that terms or qualities “certainly in some way are related” (AR 28; author’s italics). It might be expected, then, that Bradley’s critique of relations will turn out to be something different from what it is normally taken to be. But let us look closely at these Sections themselves before deciding the issue. AR Chapter 111\ Sections 2 and 3 In the course of his critique of internal relations in Sections 2 and 3 of AR III, Bradley rejects not only Green’s rationalist identification of relations with Reality, but also Hegel’s dialectic. Strangely, this latter move has caused no puzzlement among either Bradley’s critics or his sympathizers—presumably on the grounds that, Hegel’s dialectic being what it is, negative comments are only to be expected. So they quite happily see Bradley as offering an Hegelian critique of the realm of Understanding, even while refusing the possibility of any dialectical movement into Hegel’s realm of Reason. In consequence, while it would be granted on all sides that Bradley maintains a supra-relational conception of Reality, rather oddly his means of getting there is univer­ sally regarded as unequivocally Hegelian or ‘intellectualist’ in character, i.e. the critique of relations which entails that conception is held to rest on a metaphysically

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presuppositionless, purely logical analysis of the deficiencies in our concepts—and to be defective as such.24 It has, then, gone completely unnoticed that in Sections 2 and 3 Bradley deploys the anti-rationalist and more empiricist oriented aspects of his thought—aspects which, once recognized, will allow us to distinguish his critique of relations from anything that might be described as Hegelian or ‘intellectualist. ’ What Bradley is about in Section 2 could hardly be made more evident (pace the commentators) than in the opening paragraph (AR 25-6). To the idealists Bradley grants that in cognition “without distinction no difference is left”; indeed, he insists that “for thought what is not relative is nothing.” But he nevertheless maintains: “for all that, the differences will not disappear into the distinction,” i.e. the terms cannot be said to be “constituted” by their ideal or relational distinction, or to be nothing outside of it. The grounds on which he distinguishes between terms and their relational distinction is quite explicit:25“They [the different terms] must come to it [the relational distinction], and they cannot wholly be made by it.” Or elsewhere: “Thought cannot do without differences, but on the other hand it cannot make them” (AR 501 ). In other words, Bradley grants that no firm line (‘more or less’) can be drawn between what is ‘given’ and what is ‘made. ’ Yet while on the one side a term can be known or identified only as it is relationally distin­ guished or differentiated, on the other side it “cannot wholly be made by” but “must come to” its ideal or relational differentiation. Or, as he puts it a little later on when speaking of “relational perception”: “It has the feature of immediacy or self-dependence; for the terms are given to it and not constituted by it” (AR 159). Clearly, then, Bradley regards the term qua given as not itself relational in nature and hence as irreducible to the relational form of thought. It is on this basis that he refrises to move with Hegel from the realm of Understanding to that of Reason. Whether or not Bradley has his own good grounds for suggesting (AR 25) that in Hegel’s dialectic terms are reduced to their relations, can for the moment be left as an open question. The fact that a term has a “double character”(AR 26) as both ‘given’ and ‘made’ in itself disbars the reconciliation of these two aspects in any higher synthesis of dialectical logic, and rules out the possibility of any identification of the rational with the Real. For the term is “at once condition and result” (AR 26) as double-natured, i.e. it is at once the ground of its relational differentiation qua ‘given’ and the consequence of its relational differentiation qua object of knowledge. In the nature of the case,, the term qua ‘given’ can never be assimilated to, or identified with, the term qua object of knowledge. Or, more specifically: as the term qua ‘given’ is nonrelational in nature, then the connection between it and the term qua object of knowledge can never be rendered intelligible because it cannot be rendered as a relation.26 As Bradley puts it, if our term is A(a - a \ with a as the term qua ‘given’ and a as the term qua object of knowledge, then not only has our term A turned out itself to be a diversity “somehow together as A(a - a),” but, further, if we attempt to relate a to a—as we must if we are to render their connection intelligible—then “We have got against our will, not a mere aspect, but a new quality a, which itself stands in a relation; and hence (as we saw before with A) its content must be manifold. As going into the relation [i. e. as ‘given’] it itself is a2, and, as resulting from the relation it itself is a2 [i.e. as object of knowledge]” (AR 26).

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In this fashion the search for an intelligible account of the bond between terms and relations gets under way; and it is condemned to infinite regress because of the nonrelational nature of the terms qua ‘given. ’ For the connection of the term qua object of knowledge to the term qua ‘given’ can only be thought as a relation; but the term qua ‘given,’ as nonrelational, cannot in the nature of the case be connected to its possibilities of relation by means of a relation; each aspect lies, so to speak, on the far side of the other. It is this ‘diversity’ which is “fatal to the internal unity of each” (AR 27) and, as we shall see, it is this ‘diversity’ which later in AR will be elaborated as the distinction between ‘existence’ and ‘idea.’ As might be expected, in Section 3 Bradley has little trouble in reaching “the same dilemma” (AR 27; my italics) from the side of relations as well as of terms. As he puts it: “a relation without terms seems mere verbiage; and terms appear, therefore, to be something beyond their relation,” (AR 27), i.e. to be more or other than their possibilities of relation. Moreover, as all parties to the relations debate would agree, a relation is ‘something itself,’ i.e. it cannot be reduced either to an adjective or to a common property of its terms. Yet a relation cannot itself be the bond which connects it to terms which are more or other than their possibilities of relation, so “clearly we now shall require a new connecting relation.” However, any attempt to determine the connection to that which is more or other than relational by means of a relation would necessarily engender in the relation the regress already elaborated from the side of the terms. Hence, while terms are related, and related internally, we can only say that “in some way” (AR 28) are they so related; for what has eluded us and must necessarily remain unintelligible is the bond that connects the possibilities of relation. As Bradley later puts it: “the relation of sensible qualities to their arrangements, the connexion of matter with form” remains “entirely inexplicable” (AR 422; cf, 415). Metaphysical Presuppositions and Bradley's Critique o f Relations At this point I will not distract the reader with any elaborate analysis of the multifarious criticisms which have been levelled at AR III, Section 2. The claim that Bradley fails to perceive that ground and consequent refer unproblematically to the same feature of an object,27 or that the relation between them is properly one of determinate to determinable,28or that he is here treating identity as abstract identity,29 or that the meaning of a proposition does not depend on its derivative characteristics30—these, I think, are best left to themselves and passed by. What unites or underlies these criticisms, however, is the more general view that Bradley’s critique of relations is metaphysically presuppositionless in character, i.e. that it is based in a logical or purely internal defi­ ciency in the concepts of terms and relations as such. As this view is also unanimously shared by Bradley’s more sympathetic commentators, it is less likely to die the natural death it so richly deserves. To help it on its way, it would perhaps be instructive to see if the interpretation of AR III, Sections 2 and 3, which I have so far offered is borne out by what Bradley says elsewhere in AR and in his other writings. Throughout what follows I will not hesitate to quote extensively from the texts—both to enforce the point at issue

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and to secure a hearing for an interpretation that on the standard readings is otherwise unlikely to be given much credence. 1. Those who see Bradley’s arguments in Sections 2 and 3 as metaphysically presuppositionless will above all be puzzled by the claim that the distinction he is concerned with there is that between the term as ‘given’ and the term as ‘made. ’ Surely, it will be said, his point is a purely logical one: namely, that the concepts of term and relation are essentially contrastive in nature (i.e. they are not interchangeable with or reducible to one another), and hence that a term cannot be identified with, or reduced to, its relations or possibilities of relation. Rightly or wrongly, what Bradley does—so the story runs—is to base his critique of relations on this conceptual point. Yet a number of important considerations have been overlooked here. In the first place—the theory of feeling having hitherto been so neglected—it perhaps needs emphasizing that the difference between the term or quality qua ‘given’ and qua ‘made’ is not at all unusual or exceptional in Bradley’s writings. As he himself insists: “I have great sympathy with the view that [...] characters are so developed as to be in a sense constituted by distinction, but I cannot defend this view or identify myself with it.” Indeed, he is prepared to go so far as to maintain that even a quality in feeling may already have the character,/! o rB, which we find when afterwards quality proper is made by ‘distinc­ tion.’ But his main point is clear enough: “Qualities exist [...] improperly as diverse aspects of felt wholes, and then again properly as terms which are distinguished and related” (AR 513). Now as we shall see, Bradley uses the distinction he makes here between nonrelational ‘qualities’ and relational ‘terms’ to good effect in his later writings. For the present, however, it is enough to notice that what he elsewhere calls the “this” (AR 199) or “the aspect of datum” (ETR 204) should hardly take his readers by surprise, so often does he recur to it; indeed, I will return below to the larger significance of what he also terms the “immediacy” or “aspect of existence” of a “presented subject,” in which “the aspects o f‘what’ and ‘that’ are not taken as divorced [...] it is given with its content as forming one integral whole” (AR 156). 2. Even if it be granted, however, that in various places Bradley distinguishes between the term or quality qua ‘given’ and qua ‘made,’ it could still after all be asked what direct relevance this has to the distinction between terms and relations on which he bases his critique of the relational form. Is it anything more than a general back-ground point? This question must be answered in the negative. For, secondly, in his article “Con­ sciousness and Experience,” published in the same year as AR, Bradley states that “Terms are never constituted entirely by a relation or relations. There is a quality always which is more than the relation, though it may not be independent of it” (ETR 193). This point is made in the course of a somewhat complex argument; Bradley is engaged in criticizing James Ward’s version of Kant’s transcendental ego as a unity which is prior to experience. Over against Ward’s position Bradley urges in the first place that nothing can be prior to experience. In this context he maintains that in so far as “terms are more than their relation,” then “the ‘more’ must be experienced or be nothing” (ETR 193). In the second place, Bradley argues that the unity which Ward requires is provided by nonrelational feeling—“a unity complex but without relations” where “the experienced and the

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experience are one” (ETR 194)—and which in contrast to Ward’s ego he here calls the “felt subject ” While Bradley freely admits that the theory of feeling is not without severe difficulties, the conclusion he goes on to draw as to the sense in which terms are ‘more’ than their relation is clear enough. For once granted nonrelational feeling as the perma­ nent background of the objective world, the experienced is therefore always more than objects [...] Everything experienced is on one side felt, and the experienced is, also in part, still no more than felt [...] The real subject, we may say, is always felt. It can never become wholly an object, and it never, at any time and in any case, ceases also to be felt (ETR 194-5; cf. 200).

Moreover, it is on this “same basis” that Bradley suggests “the difficulty of the relation and its terms might [...] be dealt with, though naturally I cannot attempt to work this out here” (ETR 195). The difficulty Bradley here refers to is of course the difficulty of the connection between the term qua given and its relations. He had earlier hinted that this difficulty might turn out to be a matter of the kind of “underlying whole” required or implied by the relational form (ETR 193). He now suggests that such a whole is “at once supplied by feeling” (ETR 195). In other words, he suggests that once the ‘more’ of terms is understood as nonrelational feeling the problem of the connection between the ‘more’ of the term and the term’s relations can be resolved: what connects terms and relations is not relational in nature. It is precisely this position which Bradley will maintain in AR. To be sure, it is often suggested that in AR Chapter III and elsewhere Bradley is either assuming or implying the ridiculous view that relations do not relate, i.e. that they are not relations. But in fact his point is that while relations indeed approximate to or “inade­ quately express” (AR 125) actual connections, these connections are not relational in nature. So relations do relate for Bradley, but not because they themselves have any relating power. Rather, relations relate only in virtue of the nonrelational unity of feeling. Far from constituting the connections we find in the world, it is upon the nonrelational unity of feeling that the relational form depends (cf. AR 125, 201, 522; ETR 200, 231 & n., 239; PL 695-696; CE 658). 3. In the third place, the usual accounts given of AR III are guilty of overlooking an important contextual factor to which Bradley explicitly refers there—namely, the distinction between his own analysis of the relational form and Hegel’s “dialectical method” (AR 26). Bradley’s objection to Hegel’s dialectic is clear enough; he maintains that Hegel reduces terms to relations, i.e. that he regards terms wholly as products of their relational differentiation. The basis for this objection has already been noted above—it is the “quality in feeling” (AR 514) or term qua ‘given’ which renders terms irreducible to their relations or possibilities of relation. Indeed, this is the criticism which Bradley explicitly makes of the dialectical method in PL. For there he maintains that Hegel’s account of differences as wholly determined by their negations (PL 121) denies the “positive” (PL 122) nature of qualities as they appear “in presentation” (PL 114; cf. 115), and hence mistakenly treats the contrary “as simply contrary” and not as “partially contrary” (PL 150). For Bradley, in other words, Hegel analyzes difference as no more than the product

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of conceptual contrariety. Hegel, in his view, thus overlooks the fact that, as data given in feeling, “both sides of the correlation are positive,” and that in consequence each negates the other not by way of mere conceptual contrariety but “from the ground of its positive counterpart” qua datum (PL 410).31 To be sure, by the time of AR, Bradley’s critique of Hegel’s dialectic is no longer tied in with the account of negation as a “floating idea” offered in PL. But that this does not affect his view of Hegel is indicated by the remarks made in AR III. Once the nature of Bradley’s objection to the dialectical method as a whole is recognized, it becomes possible to distinguish between his critique of relations and that offered by Hegel as he understands him. Both make the same point: namely, that it is the irreducibility of terms and relations which renders the relational form incapable of providing an intelligible account of the connectedness of things. To this extent Bradley later readily acknowledges his debt to Hegel (CE 653, n. 1). But the difference is of course that whereas for Hegel (as Bradley understands him) it is the contrastive nature of the concepts of term and relation at the level of Understanding which both constitutes their irreducibility and condemns the relational form to unintelligibility, for Bradley in AR HI it is the nonrelational ‘felt’ or ‘positive’ quality of the terms qua ‘given’ which does so. 4. thisAt point, however, the ‘intellectualist’ interpreter of Bradley might well see his chance and seize it. What grounds are there, he might ask, to think that Bradley’s acknowledgement of debt to Hegel in CE is anything but an unqualified admission that, like Hegel, his critique of relations is based on the conceptual irreducibility or contrastive nature of term and relation? Furthermore, when the late “Relations” essay is taken into account, surely it is quite obvious that there Bradley’s condemnation of relations (CE 635-636) is lifted directly and almost to the point of quotation from Hegel? But such claims are by no means as convincing as they might appear at first sight. After all, what Bradley takes from other thinkers he takes on his own grounds and for his own reasons—as will shortly be noted with respect to the theory of feeling itself. Enough evidence has perhaps been presented to indicate that this is as true of AR III as it is elsewhere. However, the “Relations” essay certainly deserves separate consideration. For here—in the fourth place—Bradley indeed develops a different kind of argument against relations—one which is characteristic of his later writings and has not, I think, hitherto been properly understood. At first glance, admittedly, Bradley’s critique of relations in the late essay has all the appearance of a logical or metaphysically presuppositionless argument. For it is on account of the irreducible conceptual distinction between term and relation (CE 634-635) that Bradley maintains that any attempt to render the nature of connections intelligible by means of the relational form “must end obviously in failure” (CE 635). Indeed, as he says (CE 635), his subsequent arguments (CE 635-638) are no more than exemplifications or illustrations of this point. However, it can hardly be denied that the theory of feeling in its guise of metaphysical substratum is now writ large in Bradley’s analysis (CE 631 -634). In fact it is here that he develops the distinction, noted earlier, between ‘qualities’ as elements of the nonrelational whole of feeling, and ‘terms’ as ideally or relationally differentiated

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particulars (CE 634, 636). Moreover, it is by means of this distinction that Bradley restates the “condition and result” argument of AR III (CE 637). Indeed, that argument is now presented as one of the subsequent exemplifications or illustrations of the point about conceptual distinction. So, as these considerations suggest, it may well be that Bradley’s point is not as ‘Hegelian’ as it seems. This is indeed the case. For what has of course been overlooked so far is that the conceptual distinction argument is only introduced after the discussion of feeling as a nonrelational unity of ‘whole’ and ‘part.’ So unlike AR III, Section 2, where Bradley appeals to the metaphysical ‘given,’ in the “Relations” essay he starts out from a full-blooded account of the theory of feeling as metaphysical substratum. Hence it is in that context that the conceptual distinction point has to be read; and in that context the point is no longer merely ‘logical’ in nature. For by beginning the “Relations” essay with a statement of the theory of feeling, Bradley has postulated the experience of a particular form of unity in which, as he puts it, “the whole and the parts (if we may use that expression) qualify one another through­ out” (CE 634; cf. 631). It is that kind of unity, manifest (Bradley holds) in the perception of a green leaf or an emotional or aesthetic experience (CE 633), which has now to be explained. For brevity, I shall refer to this kind of unity as ‘complete’ qualification. The consequences it has for the relational form are quite straightforward. Indeed, once granted the experienced fact of complete qualification, then what for empiricists and rationalists alike would be the otherwise harmless point that the concepts of term and relation are essentially contrastive in nature, takes on its damaging significance. For as irreducible or contrastive, the concepts of term and relation cannot render the experienced unity or connectedness of things intelligible in that they cannot, as contrastive, completely qualify one another. It is the experience of nonrelational or complete qualification which for Bradley is the unity that has to be explained by the relational form, and which, in the nature of the case, the essentially contrastive character of concepts—specifically, term and relation—renders impossible. As Bradley puts it: “And the attempt to find the required unity and totality in the terms and relations taken somehow together must end obviously in failure. For this ‘together’ must bring in something more than, and going beyond, the experience if (ex. hyp.) that is taken as relational” (CE 635). In this light it should be evident that while in Chapter III it satisfies Bradley’s purposes in AR (as we shall see below) to concentrate on the connection between the metaphysical ‘given’ and its relational form, and in that particular way to mount a critique of relations, in the “Relations” essay feeling is given a full-dress exposition as a meta­ physical substratum. As a result, it is this latter concept of unity which is there employed to condemn the relational form. It may be said that AR III and the “Relations” essay view the same problem—how nonrelational feeling and the relational form stand to each other—from two different angles. In AR III it is a matter of the connection between the nonrelational character of terms and the relational form. In the “Relations” essay, it is a matter of the contrast between two different forms of unity, the experienced and the relational, and the evident inadequacy of the latter to the former—a contrast made possible by the fact that feeling is explicitly made the starting-point of the argument.

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In my view, then, it is only when Bradley’s critique of relations in AR III and elsewhere is understood as based on the theory of feeling that it becomes possible to appreciate the full force of his remark that the relational form “would cease to be” unacceptable “only if the immediacy of feeling could be shown to be merely relational” (ETR 190). Again, it is only in this light that the real nature of Bradley’s appropriation of what he takes to be Hegel’s “conceptual distinction” critique of relations can properly be understood. For what Bradley has done in AR III and elsewhere is to take Hegel’s critique and re-cast it in a form that is free of what he regards as a major defect of the dialectical method—namely, its failure to recognize the ‘positive’ nature or “aspect of existence” of the “presented subject” or quality as it is experienced in feeling. Of course, Bradley explicitly insists that his theory of feeling itself has its sources in Hegel (cf. AR 508n.; ETR 153; CE 695). But even when he cites a specific text of Hegel’s in order to emphasize his debt (PL 515), his subsequent remarks confirm the analysis given here both of his view of the dialectical method and his transformation of what he takes to be Hegel’s critique of relations. For he immediately goes on to say: “Against an exaggeration of this importance [i.e. of the importance of feeling as a vague continuum below relations] Hegel often, and perhaps too sweepingly, protests” (PL 515). In other words, Bradley is maintaining that the theory of substrative feeling is—or ought to be—the real basis of Hegel’s dialectic, and that Hegel’s insistence that the original unity only emerges as a retrospective result of the dialectical procedure is not an accurate—or acceptable— description of his procedure. We have followed the ramifications of this view of Hegel throughout Bradley’s critique of relations. In order, however, to appreciate the full significance of his rejection of the dialectical method, it is necessary to consider his account of the nature of intelligi­ bility or intellectual satisfaction. Without this, indeed, the present analysis of Bradley’s critique of relations is hardly complete. For it is here if anywhere that those who want to defend some kind of ‘logical’ or metaphysically presuppositionless interpretation of Bradley’s thought would make their last stand, and it is here if anywhere that they could do so in the confidence that Bradley’s followers and critics alike speak on this point with complete unanimity: his position on this issue is universally held to be ‘intellectualist’ in nature.

Bradley on the Nature of Intelligibility Bradley’s account of intelligibility or intellectual satisfaction is commonly held to rest on some form of the principle of sufficient reason, despite his own vigorous protests on the issue: “There is an idea,” he says, “that we start [...] with certain axioms, and from these reason downwards. This idea to my mind is baseless” (ETR 311).32 To take his protests seriously, laying out the real but hitherto unrecognized nature of his position here, is an enterprise that will perhaps have more to recommend it than its mere singularity. Against his critics Bradley maintains that the “method” he employs in his metaphysics is not axiomatic but “experimental” (ETR 311). In AR he describes it thus: “The actual starting-point and basis of this work is an assumption about truth and reality. I have

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assumed that the object of metaphysics is to find a general view which will satisfy the intellect, and I have assumed that whatever succeeds in doing this is real and true, and that whatever fails is neither” (AR 491). Elsewhere he says: “What is assumed is that I have to satisfy my theoretical want, or, in other words, that I resolve to think. And it is assumed that, if my thought is satisfied with itself, I have, with this, truth and reality” (ETR 311). As to the nature of this assumption, Bradley says two things. In AR he remarks that it “can neither be proved nor questioned” (AR 491). In ETR, after the quotation given above, he adds: “But as to what will satisfy I have of course no knowledge in advance [...] the way and the means are to be discovered only by trial and rejection. The method is clearly experimental” (ETR 311). These quotations make quite clear what status Bradley gives to the principle of satisfaction taken as an experimental principle. We are not here in the presence of an ‘argument,’ nor are we being provided with an (‘intellectualist’) criterion of reality. On the contrary, what is meant here by ‘intellect’ or ‘intelligibility’ or ‘intellectual satisfac­ tion’ explicitly remains to be determined. On the other side, in consequence, nothing has yet been said which specifies the nature or natures of the ‘true’ and the ‘real,’ or the relation between them. So, as to whether truth and reality are what the complete sceptic would claim them to be, or whether the real is in some sense identical with the true, or is more or other than the true—no pronouncements have as yet been made or are implied. Thus Bradley is certainly standing outside of his own metaphysics when he states the experimental nature of the principle of satisfaction; but as experimental that principle is no more than a vade m ecum 33 In all respects open-ended, it neither states, nor tacitly assumes, nor embodies a metaphysical argument or doctrine of any kind, but is offered as a procedural rule or methodological premise to which, in the nature of the case, any participant in philosophical inquiry or discussion subscribes, even if he be an extreme sceptic or thoroughgoing intuitionist. This, then, is at least one sense in which for Bradley the principle of satisfaction “can neither be proved nor questioned.” Everything therefore depends on how he goes on to determine the nature or content of the concepts of ‘satisfaction,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘reality,’ in the course of the ‘experiment’ which he holds his metaphysics to be. The central text in this regard is of course AR Chapter XIII, on “The General Nature of Reality.” The strictly logical moves Bradley makes in AR XIII further to specify the nature of satisfaction are clear enough and can be briefly summarized. He points out, first of all (AR 120), that in Book I whatever manifested itself to be ‘inconsistent’ has been rejected; consequently, ‘inconsistency’ or ‘contradiction’ has been the criterion employed throughout. And because, when we think, “either in attempting to deny it, or even in attempting to doubt it, we tacitly assume its validity,” this criterion is ‘absolute’ in thinking, i.e. it is an “assumption” (AR 134) which belongs to the nature of the enterprise, though as yet we have not of course discovered what it is that constitutes ‘inconsistency. ’ Secondly, Bradley points out that if we have been rejecting what is inconsistent, then it follows by contrapositive inference that we are seeking the consistent. Consistency or noncontradiction is, then, that satisfaction which the intellect seeks, even if, clearly, we

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as yet know nothing else about it; as Bradley observes, “The question is solely as to the meaning to be given to consistency” (AR 123). No-one, I believe, would want to object to any of this as it stands—it is too neutral or indeterminate to be a cause for concern. And Bradley’s next move is at least quite straightforward, based as it is on his critique of the doctrine of “things-in-themselves” (AR Ch. XII); for he now claims that, as everything which ‘appears’ must in some sense belong to the ‘real,’ then, in consequence, “everything which appears is somehow real in such a way as to be self-consistent” (AR 123). What the intellect seeks for, in other words, is “unity,” “individuality” or “system” (AR 123-125) and, at this stage of the ‘experiment’ in AR, Bradley uses all these terms as synonyms for “consistency” (AR 123-124). Moreover, here again Bradley insists that consistency or noncontradiction is an “assumption about reality” (AR 134) which the intellect necessarily makes. This constitutes a second sense in which, as its nature unfolds in the course of the “experi­ ment,” the principle of satisfaction “can neither be proved nor questioned” (AR 494, cf. 135, ETR 315). Bradley claims in consequence that the law of noncontradiction gives us “positive news” (AR 124) or “absolute knowledge” (AR 134) of the real. It is here of course that the real problems begin. For Bradley is clearly maintaining that noncontradiction or consistency cannot be understood in metaphysics as a merely formal criterion—either in the sense that it is absolutely independent of any subject-matter or in the sense that it is relatively independent of any particular sub­ ject-matter34—nor as a report of linguistic usage, a convention with no reference to the world. On this basis it is usually claimed that for Bradley consistency and ‘reality’ are mutually entailing concepts, synonyms for one another. In other words, Bradley’s doctrine of noncontradiction is held to be rationalist in nature, i.e. like Bosanquet or Joachim, he is said to maintain that the law of noncontradiction, as an absolute necessity of thought, is also an apprehension of necessity in the being of things.35 Indeed, to deny this would be to depart from a view of his position which, among friend and foe alike, hardly one dissenting voice has been raised.36 What has here been overlooked, however, is that Bradley himself insists that the criterion of noncontradiction, taken merely as a logical principle and without further determination, is “general and empty” (ETR 315). For we still do not know what is the relation between the ‘consistent’ and the ‘real.’ The real world, for instance, could be either singular or plural in nature, and there is nothing in the criterion itself which guarantees that either its singularity or plurality is or is not intelligible (cf. AR 124-125; on which, see below). On the side of ‘consistency,’ equally, we know only that in some sense, but not in what sense, the ‘consistent’ is the ‘real. ’ To this extent it should not be forgotten that Bradley and Bosanquet are at one. For both would agree that the law of noncontradiction has to be interpreted in the context of metaphysics. After all, both maintain that the law— ‘A is not not-A’—cannot be understood in the traditional tautological sense as meaning that “A can be nothing but what is simply A” (PL 146).37 So, for both, the question as to what constitutes noncontradiction or consistency is a metaphysical question. In logic, as Bradley says, the law of noncontradiction “takes for granted that nature of things in which certain elements are exclusive of others” (PL 145); it does no more than “rest upon the fact” (PL 146) of “incompatibility.” And because “it

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gives not the smallest reason for the world being such in nature and not otherwise” (PL 145), it is as far as metaphysics is concerned what Bradley calls a “practical” maxim (AR 133-134; “Do not try [...]” etc., PL 145). In other words, the law of noncontradiction, as such, serves only to raise the question as to what incompatibility is; it is up to metaphysics to “ask itself the question if any further account can be given of incompatibility” (PL 146). If Bradley goes so far with Bosanquet, though, how could he not go further? For when, in respect of the law of noncontradiction, we find Bradley carefully insisting that “about the truth of this Law, so fa r as it applies, there is in my opinion no question,” and then going on to ask “how far the Law applies and how far therefore it is true” (AR 506, my italics; cf. PL 165 n.9)—we might be forgiven for wondering if, for Bradley, consistency and ‘reality’ are the synonyms which the rationalists hold them to be. So just what could be the account of incompatibility which Bradley’s metaphysics gives? In other words, on what grounds could he possibly maintain that consistency is neither merely formal (absolutely or relatively), nor merely a report of linguistic usage— and yet hold that it constitutes a rational necessity in the being of things? At this point, clearly, everything depends on the way in which, in the course of his ‘experiment,’ Bradley goes on further to determine the nature of the ‘unity’ which thought seeks. And were it not for the previous history of Bradley commentary, it might have been assumed that at least his derivation of the nature of ‘inconsistency’ in AR XIII was obvious enough. For there, having stated the theoretical necessity of the principle that consistency (in some sense) is the criterion of the real (in some sense), he then goes on to show that the consistent ‘real’ could not be plural in nature, i.e. that it could not be a relational system of independent reals; and this not only because “a mode of togetherness such as we can verify in feeling destroys the independence of the reals,” but also because: Relations, we saw, are a development of and from the felt totality. They inadequately express, and they still imply in the background that unity apart from which the diversity is nothing. Relations are unmeaning except within and on the basis of a substantial whole (AR 125).

In other words, a relational system of independent reals is condemned because it is contradictory or “unmeaning”—and it is so because it cannot render intelligible the concrete nature of the ‘reals’ as they are experienced in the unity of feeling. For Bradley, therefore, it is feeling which defines the metaphysical account of inconsistency. The inconsistent is that which fails to render intelligible the unity of feeling. The implication of Bradley’s position is clear: it is the unity of feeling which is the unity thought seeks to explain. But in AR XIII Bradley does not yet go on explicitly to draw this positive conclusion; as we shall see, he will do that in Ch. XV with reference to a specific objection. In contrast, all he does in Ch. XIII is to conclude to monism by way of his critique of relations. Elsewhere, however, where Bradley is not proceeding according to his plan of exposition in AR, he is more positive and explicit, employing his theory of feeling and the critique of relations it involves in tandem in order directly to define the unity which thought seeks to render intelligible, and which, on account of the nature of that unity, it cannot.

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Consider, for instance, “Note A” of the 1897 Appendix of AR, to which Bradley refers us for “the order of thought” (AR 494) in that work. For there, having made the now-familiar point that “Thought cannot do without differences, but on the other hand it cannot make them” (AR 501); and having affirmed that “What is given is a presented whole, a sensuous total” (AR 502); Bradley goes on to state the main issue—which is that “when we try to think its [feeling’s] unity, we end in failure” (AR 508). Or as he describes it a little earlier and in more detail, against the view that “What is offered is not the elements apart, nor the elements plus an external bond, but the elements together and in conjunction” which, as given, should be accepted by the intellect: the question is how thought can think what is offered. If thought in its own nature possessed a ‘together’ [...] it could reaffirm the external conjunction. But if these sensible bonds of union fall outside the inner nature of thought, just as much as do the sensible terms which they outwardly conjoin—the case is surely different (AR 504).

By ‘external’ or ‘outwardly’ Bradley does not here mean ‘external’ in the sense of external relations (that he explicitly excludes from the view he is considering: “not the elements plus an external bond”). He is here using ‘external’ or ‘outwardly’ of conjunc­ tion or relation in the sense that for thought the conjunction or relation lies ‘between,’ or cannot be identified with, its terms. In this passage Bradley is maintaining that, once his critics accept (like Hobhouse) the thought-sensation distinction and acknowledge the ‘sensible’ or ‘given’ nature of terms and their conjunction, then, ‘i f his interpretation of the offered conjunction in terms of nonrelational feeling is correct, the failure of the relational form is evident. Indeed, throughout the Appendix Bradley employs feeling in its guise as non-relational whole or metaphysical substratum—much as he does in the “Relations” essay. In the Appendix, however, he is following his logical “order of thought,” and not, for instance, the veiy different arrangement of the two Books of AR (which will be discussed below). So he begins with the demand of thought for rational unity (AR 501). But when we discover that the kind of unity for which thought must seek an explanation is defined in terms of the complete qualification experienced in feel­ ing—then the fate of thought is sealed. The same position is expounded in ETR. There, Bradley defines thought as the attempt, by means of the relational form, to “reconstitute” (ETR 231) or “to make good ideally our lost unity” of feeling (ETR 313). Once again it is the nature of this unity which renders intelligibility impossible: You go on to think, you analyze, you introduce terms and relations, whereas in your immediate whole there were no relations or terms; or at least and in any case, the whole itself was nonrelational. And, so far as you have terms and relations, the unity is destroyed. It now, as the fact of ‘relatedness,’ falls outside of the relational scheme, and this fact you have not specified. The attempt to specify this fact, to re-include it not really but ideally, and so to make good the broken unity, is the demand and search for the ‘how’ and the ‘why.’ [...] We have here no axiom, standing on which we proceed to argue downwards. So far as this is true, it is a result and character of our procedure itself (ETR 313-314).

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At this point in the present essay detailed comment on this passage would, I think, be superfluous. But two general points may perhaps be made. In the first place, it is evident enough that Bradley is not, impossibly, asking thought to ‘be’ feeling, or, again, confusing the ‘having’ and the ‘knowing’ of an experience;38 rather, he is asking whether the relational form of thought can of its own nature “make good ideally” or “re-include [...] not really, but ideally” the experienced complete qualification of feeling. In the second place it should be noted that, when read alongside AR Chapter XIII, the passages cited do serve to indicate Bradley’s difference from rationalists such as Bosanquet on the status to be given to ‘consistency.’ For insofar as it is the experienced unity of feeling which is to be rendered intelligible, then it is apparent that for Bradley ‘consistency’ does not constitute any kind of necessity in the being of things; the real cannot itself be said to be consistent or inconsistent, necessary or non-necessary, in any meaningful sense. The real indeed remains a ‘unity’ or ‘system’ or ‘individuality’; but these are contrastive definitions (AR 463) of that which is not rational (relational) in nature. It is in this context that we can now understand “how far the Law of Noncontradiction applies and how far therefore it is true” (AR 506). The law “holds” so far as it condemns the incompatible or inconsistent (PL 167 n. 9). Moreover, whatever is relatively or comparatively consistent for thought can be regarded as expressions of the one real— and in that qualified sense the ‘consistent’ is ‘true’ and ‘real.’ Beyond that, however, it is feeling which defines the nature of the unity that thought must explain; it is feeling which defines what constitutes ‘incompatibility’; and so it is feeling which forces us to deny that the ‘true’ can as such be identified with the ‘real. ’ This is not to deny, of course, that in the Appendix, ETR, and the late essay Bradley’s critique of relations works from the sides of both feeling and relations at once; that it is the “contrast” (CE 631 ) between the unity of feeling and the conceptual distinctness of terms and relations on which his argument rests. But it is equally evident that it is only the nature of the unity of feeling as complete qualification which gives the otherwise unexceptionable fact of conceptual distinctness its damaging significance.

Some Objections In maintaining such a position, however, Bradley faces two different kinds of objections. The first is that of the rationalists—namely, that thought cannot think that which is ‘other’ than thought. This is nowadays perhaps a position which does not command much interest; but for Bradley, writing after Green and against Hegel, it could not be ignored, and he attempts to meet it in AR Chapter XV—a chapter which he describes as contain­ ing “the main thesis” of that work (AR 493). In the context of the present essay, more­ over, that chapter has a particular significance; for here the theory of feeling in its various guises is everywhere in evidence—as the “that” or “aspect of existence” (AR 145, 149), as experienced emotion (AR 150-151 ), and as the “felt background” (AR 153). Indeed, Bradley is throughout explicitly employing feeling in an ostensive or phenomenological

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fashion to indicate the distinction between thought and experience (as he remarks elsewhere, “‘Experience’ is not definable; it can only be indicated” [CE 205 n. 1]). At the high point of his argument he introduces the “presented subject” (AR 155), of which, for present purposes, only the aspect of ‘immediacy’ need be referred to: “In it the aspects o f‘what’ and ‘that’ are not taken as divorced [...] it is given with its content as forming one integral whole” (AR 156). After his critique of relations, Bradley has of course little difficulty in showing that such a unity cannot be achieved or rendered intelligible by means of the relational form (AR 157-159). But he now adds two further points. In the first place, he makes quite clear what kind of unity it is which on his account of the matter thought attempts to render intelligible. For as he says: The reality that is presented is taken up by thought in a form not adequate to its nature [...] But [...] this nature also is the nature which thought wants for itself [...] The end which would satisfy mere truth seeking, would do so just because it had the features possessed by reality (AR 158).

If it be asked what is the force of the “also” here, this is Bradley’s second point; for he maintains against the rationalists that we are able to think an Other which is not thought because thought already possesses the Other “in an incomplete form” (AR 158), i.e. in the experience of immediacy (“the terms are given to it and not constituted by it” [AR 159]). Hence “this nature also is the nature which thought wants for itself’ in the sense that it is the nature of the presented subject, as experienced in feeling, which defines and gives content to the completely empty and indeterminate kind of unity sought for by thought. Thus it is on account of the unity of the subject “presented” in feeling that for Bradley there are no difficulties here of the sort the rationalists would maintain. It should perhaps be added at this point that, contrary to the conventional and strictly ‘logical’ interpretation of Bradley’s theory of predication, he defines the kind of unity or ‘qualification’ that is sought for in predication in exactly the same way as that required of the relational form. Here, indeed, extensive misinterpretation justifies extensive quotation. For as he tells us, the meaning of qualification is derived from immediate experience and sensible perception. If you take, for instance, an object such as an apple, this is qualified by its adjectives. It is each and all of them, and yet it is something more, though you are unable to say what. It is different from its qualities, and it is also the same and one with them. This is the idea of qualification which we apply in judgement (ETR 324).

Or as he puts it elsewhere, when discussing his theory of predication; its “meaning,” he says, comes from and, we must add, rests on that which is called immediate experience or feeling. In the sensuous inherence[39] of qualities in a subject you have given to you, without any relation, “parts” which both are the whole and one another, and yet (as taken separately) are not either. And it is an appeal, however unconscious or denied, to an experience of this kind on which depends the entire sense given, when any sense actually is given, to predication and judgment (PL 695-696).

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Moreover, the metaphysical consequences of such a view he spells out clearly enough: I cannot accept, for instance, the relation of subject and predicate as an adequate expression of reality. It evidently fails to carry over consistently into a higher region the felt sensible unity of the one and the many. And there is no possible relational scheme which in my view will end in truth. The apprehended fact of terms in relation cannot itself, I am sure, be reconstituted ideally (ETR 239, cf. 231-232).

Thought and Reality But even if the role of feeling as defining the satisfaction and unity which the intellect seeks has usually been overlooked by Bradley’s commentators, it is not likely to impress some of his more telling critics. They would readily grant the irreducibility of the distinction between thought and experience. But if experience is an intellectually inaccessible unity, why, they would inquire, should the intellect seek to comprehend it? Why ask so much? What justifies us in making this kind of demand on the intellect? As J. H. Randall puts it, writing in the pragmatist tradition, “Why is not Bradley content to say, thought can ‘experience’ or ‘formulate’ reality, without having to ‘comprehend’ [...] it?”—a question which echoes John Dewey’s much earlier claim against Bradley that “the object of thinking is not to effect some wholesale [...] reconciliation of meaning and existence, but to make a specific adjustment of things to our purposes and our purposes to things.”40Yet by far the most explicit and damaging statement of the problem is Gilbert Ryle’s. He confesses himself at a loss to know why the idea of an object should satisfy the demands of reason, or, more impor­ tantly, how reason can be dissatisfied with the idea of any object. And why should we suppose that it is in philosophy that thought is following its own bent most completely rather than in, say, astronomy or Antarctic exploration [...] ?41

Now were Bradley to share those views of the relation of finite truths to the complete reality—i.e. of metaphysics to the special sciences—imputed to him by C. A. Campbell or Brand Blanshard, he would indeed find himself in difficulties here. However, the very diversity of their interpretations of his position on intellectual satisfaction suggests that neither is accurate. Blanshard maintains that all individual propositions or groups of propositions can be arranged in a series tending to full reciprocal entailment as a limit, i.e. that they constitute a system of mutual entailments.42But here Ryle’s objections are, I believe, fatal. From the search for causal necessities or laws to explain observed conjunctions in the natural sciences, it hardly follows that the canons of inductive reasoning are in some way continuous with those of mathematical reasoning, or that such knowledge displays a tendency toward the form of a system each of the propositions of which entails the other. Natural knowledge does not suggest a nisus to a system of inter-necessitations.43 Moreover, it is usually forgotten that this is Bradley’s view also.

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For Bradley insists on the “want of unity” and “disconnectedness” (AR 325; ETR 31) between different spheres or aspects of experience, and this he regards both as empirical fact and—on the basis of substrative feeling—as the inevitable condition of the relational form. To be sure, in PL Bradley emphasizes that insofar as there is a distinction between logic and metaphysics this resides in the fact that for its own purposes logic must work with the assumption that knowledge constitutes an intelligible system (PL 598ff; cf. AR 321). But this can hardly be regarded as a final revision and bequest of PL in the rational­ ists’ favour. For of course Bradley maintains that logic “is powerless to justify” (PL 599) its assumption, i.e. it is not an assumption which (for the reasons just given) can be sustained either in practice or in principle, as a metaphysical account of the nature of knowledge which issues in a doctrine of the real as inclusive system. Rather, Bradley explicitly states what he holds to be the enabling ground of logic’s system-principle: namely, “that which is called immediate experience or feeling,” in which “you have given to you, without any relation, ‘parts’ which both are the whole and one another, and yet (as taken separately) are not either” (PL 695-696). Only because unity is ‘given’ in substrative feeling does the idea of logical system have any ‘meaning’ or “sense” for us (PL 695, 696). But it is equally on that basis that the idea of knowledge as intelligible system founders. So for Bradley the demand for intelligibility, and hence the doctrine of the inclusive real, can hardly be said to be justified by any account of the systematic nature of thought. In this light, it could appear that Bradley’s view of intellectual satisfaction and the relation of metaphysics to the special sciences, if not Blanshard’s, may well be Camp­ bell’s. For Campbell, after all, insists on the radical difference of thought and reality in terms of the suprarelational nature of the real. And Campbell is correct in pointing to the importance of Bradley’s analysis of the nature of contradiction in “Note A” of the Appendix to AR for an understanding of his metaphysics. There, Campbell maintains, Bradley presents the demand for a complete grasp of the object as a demand “intrinsic to the intellect,”44 holding that thought of its own nature both rejects bare conjunctions of differences as contradictory, demanding a ground of connection wherein the mutual implication of elements is perfect and their union a completely understood system. Although Campbell acknowledges that this demand of reason for perfect implication or “intrinsic connection”45 is taken fully into account only by metaphysics—where due to the failure of relational thought it results in a sharp distinction between what he calls “phenomenal” (relative) and “noumenal” (ultimate) truth—he nevertheless places it on a continuum with the “practical” sciences and sees its metaphysical statement as the final step or ultimate unfolding of a “pure intellectual interest”46 that elsewhere is limited or controlled by other interests or objectives.47 Yet Campbell’s position is clearly the result of a very one-sided reading of Bradley’s “Note A” in the Appendix to AR. Rejecting the theory of substrative feeling,48 Campbell ignores the fact that for Bradley in “Note A” the question is how thought can think what is offered (AR 504; my italics); that what is offered “is a presented whole, a sensuous total”; and that only on this ground does Bradley maintain that “a bare conjunction [...] is for thought unsatisfactory and in the end impossible” (AR 505). So whereas for Campbell the demand for a ground of connection issues from the intrinsic nature of the

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intellect—and thus metaphysics and practical inquiry can be placed on an ascending scale—for Bradley there is nothing in the intellect’s demand for a ground which as such warrants that demand being taken to the lengths to which Campbell takes it. Bradley is in fact much closer to his critics here than to those who have traditionally claimed him for their own. For Bradley, unlike the rationalists, does not suggest “that it is in philosophy that thought is following its own bent most completely.” Rather, his point is that only in metaphysics does thought follow the object completely. Elsewhere, the object is always the practical or finite object, i.e. it is approached from the perspective of a practical interest and in terms of some determinate feature or features with a view, as Dewey says, to making specific adjustments. The ‘interest’ of metaphysics, in contrast, resides in the object as a whole, i.e. as it is experienced in the unity of feeling. Thus to the query ‘why the idea of an object should satisfy the demands of reason?,’ or ‘how can reason be dissatisfied with the idea of any object?,’ Bradley would reply that it is not any intrinsic demand of the intellect which is considered in metaphysics, but of the object as experienced in the unity of feeling. Indeed, Bradley makes it quite clear that, without the theory of feeling, he regards the rationalists’ so-called demand of the intellect, if merely that, as no more than that, i.e. as lacking, and requiring, a justifying ground. For, as he says in criticism of what he sees as Hegel’s intellectualism and in confirmation of the analysis of his attitude to the dialectical method offered earlier: I [cannot] accept what is often understood as the process of Hegel’s dialectic. I do not believe in any operation which falls out of the blue upon a mere object [...] the series of reflection is generated by and through the unity of immediate experience [...] It is this totality which for ever demands an expression which is unattainable within our relational experience [...] The principle of the process therefore does not reside in pure thought, but on the contrary must be said to imply [in thought] a mere conjunction (ETR 278).

It is, in short, the theory of feeling which for Bradley both defines and justifies the question of intelligibility or intellectual satisfaction. While that question is in the first instance a metaphysically presuppositionless procedural principle, as Bradley goes on to determine it within the ‘experiment’ of his metaphysics, it is quite explicitly defined and defended by means of the theory of feeling. I, at least, cannot see how Bradley’s state­ ments on the matter can be otherwise interpreted.

Concluding Remarks It is by now, I think, more than evident that in every area of Bradley’s work which bears directly on his critique of relations, the theory of feeling plays a crucial role. That this has hitherto been so often ignored is, I believe, due to a variety of factors, ‘internal’ and ‘external.’ Among the ‘external’ factors, not the least has been the fact that Bosanquet’s later twentieth-century followers have tended to identify rather than to differentiate the metaphysics of the two thinkers, and have tried to enlist the more dashing and pugnacious figure of Bradley in an otherwise lack-lustre cause.49 Among the ‘internal’ factors perhaps

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the most important is the structure or organization of AR. As has already been noted, in contrast (for instance) with the late essay on “Relations,” Bradley does not begin AR with any full statement of the theory of feeling, i.e. his method throughout is clearly not a matter of stating his premises and proceeding from there. Instead, he employs the theory of feeling in AR whenever he needs it—as a premise in Chapter III, in the form of an ostensive argument in Chapter XV, and so on. There are a number of reasons why he does this. In the first place, it can plausibly be said that, rather like Hegel’s Phenomenology but without his graded progressions, the first Book of AR is offered as a kind of drama of the contemporary consciousness. Throughout, Bradley works through and overturns the Greenian, personal idealist, Spencerian, and other comforts of the late nineteenth-century, and takes the sceptical doubts of the period to their furthest point—in order to redeem them in Book II, though in a fashion that does not obliterate the tragedy of the realm of appearance. It is in line with this ambitious and even histrionic format that Bradley does not attempt in AR HI (or elsewhere in Book I) to go into any detail on the character of the term qua ‘given.’ There, he merely employs the theory of feeling in its simplest and (for his empiricist-educated “English readers” [AR viii]) most easily accessible guise as the ‘given’ that cannot be identified with, or reduced to, the relational form of thought, only allowing its full nature to emerge later on. It hardly needs stressing, however, that the shock-tactics of Book I have a distorting effect on the whole work. True enough, Bradley himself tried to clarify the situation in the 1897 Appendix. For there he is unequivocal about the role played by feeling in his argument: We start from the diversity in unity which is given in feeling [...] The criticism which really desires to be effective ought, I should say, to show that my view of the starting point is untenable [...] and such criticism I have not seen (AR 494).

But it was too late; as subsequent interpretations have made all too clear, the organization of AR amounts to a serious tactical error. Furthermore, it must be admitted that feeling is employed in an oblique, crab-like fashion throughout that work; it sidles up to the topics under discussion, but does not itself receive any independent or extensive treat­ ment. In part, Bradley is doubtless encouraged to present the theory of feeling in this somewhat presumptive fashion by the convergence of sources which (as I have tried to indicate elsewhere50) impelled him to that theory in the first place. Nor must it be forgotten that as a defence of the distinction between thought and experience, feeling is for Bradley a matter of ostensive rather than argumentative demonstration. At the same time, however, as his essay on “Consciousness and Experience” indicates —written as it was at the same time as AR—he was also acutely aware of the problems the theory of feeling brings with it, problems which at that time he felt he could not fully resolve (cf. ETR 198). In the light of these considerations I would suggest that in AR Bradley is more interested in vindicating the theory of feeling by demonstrating its effectiveness as what he will later call “the one road to the solution of ultimate problems” (ETR 159) rather than in dealing with it head-on. In other words, the structure and development of

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argument in AR can be described as essentially ‘immanent’ in character; and this is why of course, as Bradley says, the actual order in which topics are discussed in the book are “to myself a matter of no great importance” and could easily be altered (AR 491). The theory of feeling would have brought the same results wherever he had begun. Once seen in the light of these considerations it can be acknowledged that the division of AR into two books is by no means as objectionable or as misleading as it is sometimes said to be. Bradley’s philosophical readers have been too busy searching for syllogisms to notice the carefully-wrought way in which the theory of feeling at once shapes and unfolds within the structure and organization of the work. Nevertheless, that division does help to throw the work off-centre and too easily invites those travesties of Bradley-interpretation which have become part of our philosophical folk-lore. In dealing with AR, and particularly with Chapter III, the reader has to save Bradley’s view of relations and intellectual satisfaction not only from his critics, but also, to some extent, from himself.

Notes 1. I would like gratefully to acknowledge the generous support of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation while doing much of the research for this article. I am also indebted to the invaluable comments and criticisms made by colleagues at the Colloquium of the Department of Philosophy, Memorial University of Newfoundland. 2. Appearance and Reality, 2nd. ed., 9th. corrected impression (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930); henceforth AR. Other abbreviations are as follows: Principles o f Logic [PL] 2nd. ed., corrected impression (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928); Essays on Truth and Reality [ETR] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914); Collected Essays [CE] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935). 3. The theory of feeling, in other words, constitutes the “bad reasons” for which Bradley’s well-known epigram on metaphysics seeks (AR x)—as he explicitly indicates at ETR 20-28; see also PL 591. 4. Admittedly, Bradley never quite gives up the view that feeling could also be a psychological level or stage. But, as he makes quite clear, this is philosophically a matter of indifference to him (cf. AR 461; ETR 175-157; CE 632,635) contra James Ward, “Bradley’s Doctrine of Experience,” Mind, 34 (1925) 14-17. 5. Contra Rudolph Kagey [The Growth of Bradley ’s Logic (New York, 1931)56], R.D. Mack [The Appeal to Immediate Experience: Philosophic Method in Bradley, Whitehead and Dewey (New York: King's Crown Press, 1945) 25], and J. H. Randall Jr. [Philosophy after Darwin: Chapters for The Career of Philosophy, Volume III, and other essays, ed. Beth J. Singer. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977) 192], Bradley’s insistence that “feeling” is a permanent feature of experience is not a late development, See AR 125,128, 129,156, 199,406-407,413,462, 502-503. 6. See, for example, R. Wollheim, F. H. Bradley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959) 110, 112. 7. See B. Russell, “The Monistic Theory of Truth,” in Philosophical Essays (London: Longmans, Green, 1910) 161-162; and R.W. Church, Bradley’s Dialectic (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1942) Chs. Vin and DC. 8. H. Spencer, Principles o f Psychology, 3rd. ed. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1890) para. 65. 9. T.H. Huxley, Hume (London: Macmillan and Co., 1879) 67,69.

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10. H. Lotze, Logic [in three books, of thought, of investigation, and of knowledge], tr. ed. Bernard Bosanquet. 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), Vol. II, 263. See also his Metaphysic [in three books, ontology, cosmology, and psychology], tr. ed., Bernard Bosanquet, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887) Vol. 1,186-91. 11. H. Lotze, Microcosmus [an essay concerning man and his relation to the world] tr. Elizabeth Hamilton and E. E. Constance Jones. 3rd ed. 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1888) Vol. II, 596. 12. Lotze,Microcosmus, Vol. II, 619. 13. Lotze, Microcosmus, Vol. H, 620, 621. See also H. Jones, A Critical Account o f the Philosophy of Lotze - the doctrine of thought (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1895) 308-312. 14. C.D. Broad, Examination of McTaggart's Philosophy (Cambridge: The University Press, 1933) Vol. 1,84; see also A.C. Ewing, quoted in R. W. Church, Bradley 's Dialectic 165-156, and G. F. Stout, “Bradley’s Theory of Relations,” in Studies in Philosophy and Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1930) 186-187. 15. Broad,McTaggart, Vol. 1,84. 16. Broad, McTaggart, Vol. 1,85. 17. See Broad, McTaggart, B. Russell, An Outline of Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1956) 262-264; A. C. Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey ( London: Methuen & Co., 1934) 147. Ewing documents the supporters of this view: L.T. Hobhouse, Theory ofKnowledge (London: Methuen, 1895) Ch. XU F.C.S. Schiller, Humanism (London: Macmillan, 1903) Essay xi; G. F. Stout, Studies in Philosophy and Psychology, Ch. IV; J. Cook Wilson, Statement and Inference (Oxford, 1926) Vol. D, 692ÍF. The same view is also supported by F .L. Will, “Internal Relations and the Principle of Identity,” The Philosophical Review, 49 (1940) 506; Wollheim, Bradley 113; and David Pears, Bertrand Russell and the British Tradition in Philosophy, 2nd. ed. (London: Fontana, 1972) 165. At least Ewing, however, recognized what we shall find to be his mistake and added a note to that effect in the 3rd. ed. of his Idealism; consequently his well-known classification of theories of internal relations does not apply to Bradley. 18. See Pears, Russell, 171-173. 19. See B. Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World (London: Allen & Unwin, 1914) 18; G. E. Moore, “External and Internal Relations,” in Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1922) 276-309. See also W. James, “The Thing and Its Relations” in Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912) especially 117-122; and F. L. Will, “Internal Relations” 506-507. 20. See R.G. Ross, Scepticism and Dogma: A Study in the Philosophy ofF.H. Bradley (New York, 1940) 88; R.W. Church, op. cit., Ch. X; H. Khatchadourian, The Coherence Theory of Truth (Beirut: American University, 1961) 47. 21. C. A. Campbell, “Bradley’s Anti-Relational Argument,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 8 (1958) 58, refusing as always to acknowledge the theory of feeling, misses this. 22. See J. F. Herbart, Sämtliche Werke, ed. G. Hartenstein (Leipzig, 1850ff.) Vol. IV, 69-74,8Iff.; Vol. 1,219ff. Cf. AR 539. 23. T. H. Green, Works ed. R. L. Nettleship, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906-1908) Vol. n, 179. Against the view that the idealist doctrine of internal relations is antiscientific, I should add that undoubtedly one reason for its ready acceptance in the late 19th century was the fact that the scientific developments of the period were seen as lending it support. (See J.B. Stallo, Concepts and Theories of Modem Physics [London, Kegan Paul, 1882] especially pp. 184-185.) This was one of the few books on science that Bradley had in his possession; see the catalogue of his library at Merton College Library. See also David Masson, Recent British Philosophy [a review, with criticisms; including some comments on

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Mr. Mill's answer to Sir William Hamilton] 3d ed.: with an additional chapter (London: Macmillan and Co., 1877) 141,144. 24. See, for instance, C.D. Broad, “Critical and Speculative Philosophy,” and J. H. Muirhead, “Past and Present in Contemporary Philosophy,” in Contemporary British Philosophy, 1st. Series, ed. J. H. Muirhead (London: Allen & Unwin, 1924) 97,317-318. For a recent expression of the same view, see M. J. Cresswell, “Reality as Experience in F. H. Bradley,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 55 (1977) 179. 25. On Bradley’s alleged obscurity see, for instance, B. Blanshard, “Autobiography,” in The Philosophy o f Brand Blanshard (La Salle, IL.: Open Court, 1980) 142; and Wollheim, Bradley 114. 26. It is this ideally inaccessible “sort of relatedness” which we are “to boggle at”—in answer to a query of H. W. B. Joseph’s in an unpublished Ms. (p. 5) with the title “Bradley on Quality and Relation” and dated 17 February 1937 (in the possession of Prof. D. M. MacKinnon, to whom I am grateful for giving me access). 27. See Wollheim,Bradley 114-115, who has failed to recognize that it is the “double character,” as both given and made, of the “same feature” of an object which is the problem. I should add that, contra pp. 112 and 114,1 fail to see how Bradley’s arguments on AR 26 can be taken as arguments ‘for’ internal or ‘against’ external relations. 28. See R. D. L. Montague, “Wollheim on Bradley on Idealism and Relations,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 14 (1964) 162ÍF. 29. See A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, “A New Theory of the Absolute” in Man ’s Place in the Cosmos (Edinburgh and London: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1897) 92-159; a view reiterated by H. B. Acton, ‘T. H. Bradley,”Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy; ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan and the Free Press, 1967) Vol. 1,359-363. 30. See J. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921) Vol. I, 89; Broad, McTaggart Vol. 1,98-99; S.V. Keeling, La Nature de TExperience chez Kant et chez Bradley (Montpellier, 1925) 112-116. See also B. Russell, Principles o f Mathematics (Cambridge: University Press, 1903) Ch. IX, 99 and Wollheim, Bradley 113-4. 31. It is interesting to note that in the 2nd. edition of PL (426, n. 19) Bradley is prepared to revise his account of Hegel’s theory of negation in the light of McTaggart’s Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic. This is not surprising, however, in view of the fact that McTaggart’s work is an attempt to re-read Hegel in the light of Bradley’s insistence on the irreducibility of the distinction of thought and existence and the primacy of affirmation over negation. See my “Hegel in Britain: A BriefHistoiy of British Commentary and Attitudes,” Part 2, The Heythrop Journal, 20 (1979) 163-182. 32. Among those who see Bradley’s metaphysics as based upon the principle of sufficient reason are B. Russell, “The Monistic Theory of Truth,” Philosophical Essays (London: Longmans, Green, 1910) 165; T. L. S. Sprigge, “Russell and Bradley on Relations,” The Bertrand Russell Memorial Volume, ed. George W. Roberts (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1979) 162-3; and Stewart Candlish, “Scepticism, Ideal Experiment, and Priorities in Bradley’s Metaphysics,” The Philosophy of F.H. Bradley, ed. A. Manser and G. Stock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)243-267. 33. J. de Mameffe, “La preuve de l’Absolu chez Bradley,” Archives de Philosophie, 22 (1959) 76-99,227-249,566-604; 23 (1960) 207-229, emphasizes Bradley’s hypothetical method and rigorously distinguishes it from any particular metaphysical starting-point. For an excellent treatment of Bradley’s notion of “ideal experiment” see Don MacNiven, Bradley ’s Moral Psychology (Queenston, ON: Edwin Mellen, 1987) Ch. I. 34. See PL 520-521,533 n. 1 & 2.

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35. Among Bradley’s critics, see L. T. Hobhouse, The Theory of Knowledge (London: Methuen, 1897) 495-6; John Dewey, “The Intellectualiste Criterion for Truth,” in The Influence of Darwin Upon Philosophy (New York, 1910) 112ff., and Logic: The Theory o f Inquiry (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1938) 529ff.; A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, “A New Theory of the Absolute,” 230; R. G. Ross, Scepticism and Dogma (New York, 1940); R. D. Mack, The Appeal to Immediate Experience, 15-16; A. Aliotta, The Idealistic Reaction Against Science, tr. Agnes McCaskill (London: Macmillan, 1914) 106-107. Among those who impute to Bradley, and defend, an “intellectualist” position on noncontradiction and its derivation, see B. Blanshard, The Nature of Thought 2 vols. (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1939) Vol. H, 422-423; CA. Campbell, Scepticism and Construction (1931) Ch. I; S. K. Saxena, Studies in the Metaphysics of Bradley (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967) Ch. V; G. Vander Veer, Bradley 'sMetaphysics and the Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970) Ch. 9. The list could be lengthened indefinitely. 36. The honourable exceptions are M. B. Foster, “The Concrete Universal,” Mind, 40 (1931) 16; andH. H. Joachim, Logical Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948) 290-291. Foster does not develop the point, however, and Joachim raises objections that do not take the theory of feeling into account. 37. See B. Bosanquet,Logic, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911) Vol. H, 21 Iff. 38. Contra Mack, The Appeal to Immediate Experience, 22. 39. Bradley uses the term “inherence” at AR 27 n. At both at PL 695-696 and CE 657 it is defined in terms of the unity experienced in feeling. 40. J. H. Randall Jr., Philosophy after Darwin, 195; Dewey, “The Intellectualiste Criterion for Truth,” 135. For the earliest expression of this criticism of Bradley, see “The Unpublished Letters from William James 1842-1910 to F. H. Bradley 1846-1924,” ed. J.C. Kenna, Mind, 75(1966) 33 Iff. 41. Gilbert Ryle, “Mr. Collingwood and the Ontological Argument,” Collected Papers, 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson, 1971) Vol. II, 105. 42. See Brand Blanshard, Reason and Analysis (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1962) Chs. 6 and 10. 43. See Gilbert Ryle, “Review of Brand Blanshard, The Nature of Thought,” Philosophy, 15 (1940)324-329. 44. C.A. Campbell, On Selfhood and Godhood (London: Allen & Unwin, 1957) 391. 45. C.A. Campbell, Scepticism and Construction (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1931) 18. 46. Campbell, Scepticism 12. 47. Campbell, Scepticism 11-13; Selfhood, 391-392. 48. Campbell, Scepticism 51-53. 49. See especially J. H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1931), “Dioscuri,” 255-256. For an extreme version of this view, see F. Houang,Le néo-hegelianisme en Angleterre (Paris: Vrin, 1954). 50. See my “F. H. Bradley’s Metaphysics of Feeling and Its Place in the History of Philosophy,” The Philosophy of F.H. Bradley, ed. A. Manser and G. Stock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) 227-242.

Part 2: Metaphysics

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Introduction This second part focuses on metaphysics. As noted in the Introduction, metaphysics has had a rather varied legacy in the last 100 years. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it still had a high degree of respectability. But metaphysics—and systematic philosophy in general— soon encountered a number of challenges—that they were given to paradox or obscurantism, that their statements were meaningless, and that there was no legitimate way in which they could prove their conclusions. Excluding metaphysics, however, was eventually seen as excluding many of the hitherto central questions of philosophy—questions such as, ‘What is the nature of reality?,’ ‘Is there a principle of unity?,’‘What is time?,’ and, most importantly, ‘Is there a reason for what there is?’ It also entailed that the classical philosophers were important only for the arguments one could isolate in and extract from their works, and relatively little attention was given to identifying and articulating the contexts in which these arguments were made. The return to metaphysics that one finds in the last few decades began by an acknowl­ edgment that many of the criticisms raised were based on a failure to see arguments in their context—either by uprooting them from their texts or by placing them in another context. And it has, therefore, provided a fertile ground for the traditional forms of speculation engaged in by many idealists. It was noted in the Introduction to this volume that a number of philosophers who endorse contemporary ‘anti-realism’ do so by drawing on arguments that look remarkably like those employed by some idealists. But the arguments of the British Idealists—and especially those like Bosanquet—are often far from easy to classify; McTaggart once complained that many of Bosanquet’s arguments could quite consistently be endorsed by a materialist. And so it is interesting to see, as John Leslie argues, that not only is anti­ realism not plausible, but that opposition to it might well be compatible with idealism. When it comes to looking for an explanation for what there is, Leslie suggests that we can be anti anti-realists and yet hold, with Spinoza, that we are all elements in a ‘divine mind. ’ Lawrence Dewan’s essay also deals with the question of ‘explanation’—in particular, the question of the character of a philosophical proof that claims to explain what there is. Dewan focuses on Aquinas’s first and second ‘ways’ to the existence of God, arguing that metaphysics can provide proofs or demonstrations (in this case, of God), and pointing out some misunderstandings of Aquinas that occur when his arguments are taken out of their contexts (as in Peter Geach’s reading of ‘the five ways’). Aquinas’s arguments for a principle of unity and a principle of explanation hinge on the exclusion of the hypothesis of an infinite, eternal series of causes. Thomas De Koninck turns to the great Greek classical philosophers to clarify these notions of time, eternity, and causality. In Aristotelian metaphysics, the primary cause is substance and time is eternal. Nevertheless, De Koninck notes that, from the eternity of time and the world, we can still be led to the divine— God. The focus on argument and on an (at least) quasi-demonstrative method in metaphysics, characteristic of the early modem period, led inevitably to a reaction. The metaphysical tradition, following Descartes and refined by Kant and Hegel, is often seen as ‘rational­ ist’—one that excludes the passions, such as love—and as an approach that, as it came to

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influence theology, naturalized the character of evil. Vidar Lande presents Kierkegaard’s response to the speculative metaphysical tradition as it is developed in Hegel. For Kierkegaard, like St. Augustine, love is central to reality. While he separates reason from the passions, he recognizes that there must also be a relation between them. Kierkegaard’s solution may be confusing, because the context of his remarks is often overlooked. In work such as the Philosophical Fragments, he is not only involved in a polemic with Danish theologians, but is also attacking the Hegelian notion of ‘speculative reason’ and protesting that speculative thought had an insufficient awareness of the importance of suffering to the consciousness of sin and the need for salvation. Lande reminds us of Kierkegaard’s ‘neo-Platonic’ and Kantian inheritance, and suggests that it is here that Kierkegaard’s ‘idealistic’ solution to the problem of the separa­ tion of reason and the passions is to be found. For Kierkegaard, the answer is to hold reason and passion in a tension—to embrace the paradox—in a way that nevertheless has reason at its core. It is clear from the studies in this Part that, in raising certain metaphysical questions, one is inevitably led to questions concerning community and values. James Thomas’s essay explores this in detail, through examining central themes in Leslie Armour’s metaphysical ‘trilogy’—The Rational and the Real, Logic and Reality„ and Being and Idea—and by relating them to Armour’s recent work in the history of philosophy. Thomas’s strategy is to focus on the work of Spinoza and Hegel—the principals of Being and Idea—who addressed the central metaphysical question of whether there is a unity within, or underly­ ing, diversity in the world. Thomas notes that Hegel criticized Spinoza’s account for failing to show how the Absolute relates to the diversity of things, but that Hegel, too, left the problem unresolved. Armour’s work, influenced by Spinoza’s ‘rational psychology’ (i.e., a psychology that aims at expressing the conditions for intelligible experience) and in­ formed by Armour’s own notion of “dialectical individuality” (involved in his account of logic and his ‘deterministic’ analysis of the form of community), provides a way of explain­ ing some of the characteristics of ‘reality,’ how the Absolute enters experience, and the ethical consequences of such a view. Thomas suggests that, just as Bradley distinguishes two metaphysical levels o f‘reality’ and ‘appearance,’ so Armour gives us the ‘idea of idea’ (or Absolute) and its expressions (i.e., finite individuals) that are on different levels and cannot be reduced to one another.

6 Anti Anti-Realism JOHN LESLIE

Introduction Metaphysics is world-modelling of a bold kind It goes beyond immediate verification and even, in many cases, all possibility of ever reaching anything worth so strong a name as ‘verification.’ While evidence may give some support to metaphysical speculations, they remain deeply speculative. Notoriously, there have been efforts to dismiss metaphysics as meaningless. The logical positivists deployed a ‘verifiability criterion of meaning,’ complaining that metaphysical pronouncements failed to satisfy it. They quickly found themselves in difficulties over verifying statements about events far in the past, for instance, or statements of the laws of nature which apply, if the universe is infinite, to infinitely many happenings. What if they contented themselves with a weak kind of verifiability? How about calling events verifiable if suitably empowered, suitably located possible observers (such as observers able to survive in the heat of the sun’s centre, or existing at times before any life in fact evolved, or able to tour an infinite universe in its entirety) could in principle check up on these events, or have checked up on them, with the help of principles for interpreting evidence which had at least some plausibility? Then, alas, it seemed possible to give meaning to even the boldest metaphysical speculations. You could say, for example, that an observer able to investigate in detail a burning bush which seemed to utter impressive words could (had any such bush made an appearance) have checked up on the existence of God. Still worse: mere claims to have met God mystically, or suggestions that the wonders and beauties of the natural world were signs of its supernatural origins, might have to be taken seriously. Yet if the criterion of verifiability were instead kept strong, so that all such theological speculations could be dismissed, then many standardly accepted scientific theories would have to be dismissed as well. After all this had been appreciated, logical positivism appeared irremediably dead. Philosophical errors can be surprisingly hard to kill, though, and today’s journals are filled with what is called ‘anti-realism.’ To all appearances this is logical positivism back from the dead, and only flimsily disguised. Anti-realists oppose any ‘view from nowhere’ which reveals things as they really are, as distinct from how they would seem after suitably prolonged investigation. They claim that ‘how things really are’ must mean nothing other than how matters would seem, were collection of evidence to be adequately persistent. It would be impossible, they declare, to find any meaning in the suggestion that one was oneself an immaterial soul tricked by a Cartesian demon, or a brain kept alive in a vat by a mad scientist and stimulated by her gigantic computer, if one’s tireless efforts to gather evidence were fated never to reveal this. Their arguments for their position involve many sophisticated claims about the nature of meaning, claims which have grown complicated enough to be virtually immune to criticism. Chopping away at one anti­ realist claim, you find it defended with another, and that in turn by another, and so on; and each, taken individually, can seem to make a lot of sense. Typical anti-realists are no

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fools. Yet what they have in common is an inability to grasp just how badly logical positivism failed, and what a disgrace it would be if anything markedly like it became philosophical orthodoxy. In “Demons, Vats and the Cosmos,”11 argued that anti-realism must deny meaning to many fairly evidently meaningful speculations in the field of physical cosmology. For all practical purposes, the case is exactly as if the anti-realists were logical positivists of the old school. How could “sufficiently prolonged investigations” ever decide the rightness or wrongness of claims about events early in the big bang or hidden inside the horizons of black holes, or about the existence and nature of other universes which lacked all causal contact with our own? Even when they are kept very vague, cosmological speculations may well be rejected by one rational person, as not at all reflecting how things seem to be, while another finds them plausible. Believe it or not, Professors Hawking, Penrose and Rees, without any of them being positively irrational, differ widely in the principles they use for evaluating theories. And when one’s cosmological hypothe­ ses are made precise, perhaps at the cost of becoming sheer guesswork (but since when have all sheer guesses been guaranteed to be meaningless?), it can well be thought ludicrous to equate their truth or falsehood with how they would seem after investigations suitably prolonged—unless we introduce suitably empowered possible investigators travelling to, say, the early stages of the big bang, to count the precise number of tiny black holes which formed as the primordial material underwent quantum fluctuations, or visiting other universes to verify just how many of these were life-containing. Yet wouldn’t such investigators have to inhabit the realm of magic? We do not need, though, to bring in the marvels of black holes and multiple universes in order to make out our case against anti-realism. It is enough to consider some hypothe­ sis about exactly how many ants ever came to be squashed by any one dinosaur. The suggestion that the number is 9,335,967,005 is a mere guess and presumably wrong; but surely it is meaningful and with some slight chance of being right. Surely, too, it would be impossible for suitably prolonged investigation by suitably equipped investigators to decide firmly on its correctness or incorrectness—unless, that is to say, we invoke possible investigators following around eveiy single one of the larger dinosaurs and counting the squashed ants with superb accuracy at times long before any actual human investigators had evolved. Yet if we are allowed to introduce such investigators, then why not also possible mystics who would be able, by sufficiently prolonged efforts, to make contact with any mind, even the mind of God if any such mind existed, thanks to the telepathic powers with which they came “suitably equipped”? Yet isn’t it clear enough that imagining investigators suitably proficient in telepathy in order to throw light on the statement ‘There really is a divine mind’ would be just a fantastically roundabout way of saying that the statement in question would be correct i f there indeed were a divine mindR Here as in the case of the dinosaurs, “being suitably equipped” and “working away for sufficiently long” must boil down to being in a position to arrive (by magic if need be) at what really is so, and then working long enough to arrive at it. In which case trying to understand the phrase ‘what really is so’ in terms of the activities of the ‘suitably equipped’ and ‘suitably persistent’ investigator is putting cart before horse.

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Again, consider the theory that reality has a genuinely fractal structure: that is to say, possesses structure on progressively smaller scales, ad infinitum. Some physicists deny that this is possible. They believe that the smallest meaningful scale is given by the Planck length, important to quantum physics, of roughly a billion trillion trillionths of a centimetre. Other physicists think otherwise, however. Well, disagreement over whether increasing fineness of structure must come to an end at the Planck length does not look to be disagreement of a kind resolvable by some theory, such as the anti-realist one, of how words get their meaning, neither does it look as if any such theory could settle whether any smaller-than-Planck-scale structures would be genuinely fractal. The most that an anti-realist could hope to get away with would be a flat denial that it was meaningful—more than pure verbiage—to talk of infinitely detailed structure. But surely it is fairly plainly meaningful to suppose that, no matter how far investigators moved through higher and higher magnifications, they would find more and more detail, were they suitably equipped. Why on earth should anyone believe that mere Principles of Meaning dictated that all realities had to be realities of how things seemed, or would seem or would have seemed if persistently investigated? When we try to say truly, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than intelligent beings could ever dream of,’ must this be either wrong or meaningless, just on the basis of the correct theory of truth and meaning? Presumably not. But wrong or meaningless is what it would have to be if the never-dreamable-of things, because they could never seem in any fashion whatever, could never truly be supposed to exist. I can guarantee that the above points will not convince all anti-realists. Some of these folk have even tried suggesting that past events are essentially fuzzy. It is then neither right nor wrong that the largest number of ants ever squashed by a dinosaur is 9,335,967,005, or that the geese on the Capitoline Hill, on the night when those helpful birds gave timely warning of the barbarian attack on Rome, numbered precisely 53. Exact statements in these areas are meaningless, some leading anti-realists have suggested, or are perhaps meaningful but exceptions to such logical principles as Excluded Middle. This is reminiscent of the story (perhaps apocryphal, so we had best not reveal its hero’s name) about one of the more famous American analytical philosophers of recent years who swore that, were he ever to become convinced of a need to choose between believing in God and rejecting the law of Non-Contradiction, then he would reject the law. There are some who will never be persuaded! Let me make a few further attempts at persuasion, none the less. They concern what could be meant by ‘would seem’ in the sentence ‘This is how things would seem, in the end, to investigators suitably located and equipped who pursued their investigations with adequate persistence. ’ My first point is that it is often devilish hard to say how things seem. I would often much prefer the task of deciding whether a rod was over one metre in length, really, to that of saying whether it really seemed so, because ‘seems’ can be terribly ambiguous. When a young child atop a skyscraper gazes on cars down below, perhaps it seems to the child that the cars are the size of toy cars, in a strong sense of ‘seems.’ There may even be a sense, a weak one, in which cars seen from such a position seem toy cars to adults.

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There is another sense, though, in which they seem to them just ordinary cars. To try to define the two senses exactly, also discovering at what age children stop finding that distant cars seem (in the strong sense) to be of toy car size, is as much a waste of time as trying to say precisely when a balding man becomes worth the description ‘bald. ’ Quite apart from all the well known difficulties of introspecting mental states accurately, attempts to describe how things seem run into such a morass surrounding the meaning of ‘seem’ that this by itself might be enough to ruin the idea of a world whose truths were all of seeming. Anti-realists might answer that it is in many cases possible to say firmly that some­ thing really seems thus and so, and that these are the cases which interest them. Look again at the case of the rod. After measurement, mayn’t it have seemed over a metre long, beyond all possibility of doubt? But to this I reply that I might fail to know whether a rod seemed over a metre long, even after extremely careful measurement; for might it not stretch to more or less exactly the one-metre mark? Yet even then, surely it would be meaningful to suppose that the rod really was (or was not) over a metre long. Also, surely saying that something really seems, after long investigation, to have characteristics such and such, is saying that long investigation gives a strong impression that the thing really does have characteristics such and such, instead o f merely seeming to have them. The fact is that the idea of something’s really seeming to be thus and so is parasitic on the idea that things actually can be thus and so—and not vice versa. Really seeming to have such and such properties, to anyone not just interested in describing impressions, means seeming actually to have them. There may be a sense in which a metre rod seen from atop a skyscraper ‘seems only a centimetre long, to adults as well as children.’ But in a more interesting sense of ‘seems,’ a rod really seems a centimetre long to a grown man when he has measured it carefully and decided that this really is its length (and therefore really would be, regardless of how distant it was from anybody). Admittedly, when he claims that this is the rod’s true length that's because this is how the matter seems to him after conscientious measurement; but the claim is not itself a claim that this is, after conscientious measurement, how the matter seems. He could later become convinced that he had measured wrongly, while still accepting that it truly had seemed to him that he had measured rightly. In this case he ought to say ‘What I claimed was wrong’—and not that his claim had been only about how matters seemed after conscien­ tious measurement, and had therefore been, like a document stamped with a Chinese imperial signet, composed of truth, no matter what evidence might afterwards come to light. Have I have given the anti-realists too quick a dismissal? Mayn’t my arguments against them have relied too much on repeating ‘surely,’ ‘surely,’ ‘surely’? My excuse, if one is needed, is that these people are only encouraged in their errors when philoso­ phers try to fault, one after another, their successive very complicated claims about how words get meanings. True, I am tempted to diagnose their main mistake. I suggest it lies in the queer notion that there is just the one way—pointing and naming, plus complex extensions thereof—in which words could possibly become meaningful. ‘Genuine water’ might then always have to mean stuff of just the sort, in all its physico-chemical detail, which people had in fact pointed at when they uttered the word ‘water,’ whether or not

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they had ever heard tell of physics and chemistry. ‘Genuine brain’ and ‘genuine vat’ would have to get their meanings similarly. And, no doubt, for the meaning of ‘witch’ to be teachable, somebody at some stage would need to lay hands on a genuine witch or two. These excessively firm and often bizarre consequences stem, I suggest, from exaggerated philosophical worries about the technical difficulties facing any theory about how word-pictures and mental maps come to correspond to actual or possible realities. (The philosophical worriers notice that what we call ‘word-pictures’ are always clearly distinguishable from genuine pictures produced by painters, and that even masterpieces of representative art and of cartography are in many respects unlike what they represent. They then disregard the all-important structural similarities which exist between a map and the correctly mapped countryside, between an expertly produced pattern of paint-blobs and the reality which it portrays, and even between a detailed word-picture of a witch and the wax model of a witch in a museum of folk mythology. They are therefore baffled by how, say, a cosmologist could possibly hope that his or her verbal descriptions or graphs correctly represented a universe which existed in parallel with ours but which was totally disconnected from it—so that the cosmologist’s words or other symbols could never be linked to any such parallel universe through the kind of causal history which joins, say, our talk of Aristotle with the man to whom people could once point while uttering the word ‘Aristotle’ or, to be more precise, the original Greek word from which the English word ‘Aristotle’ is derived.) However, it does not much matter whether my diagnosis is right. It ought to be enough to point out that anti-realism must be wrong because it denies meaning to what is obviously meaningful, also trying to get us to declare that what we really meant, ail along, was what we fairly clearly didn’t mean. In this brief paper, at any rate, my main aim has been to speed onwards to my next theme, which is that opposition to anti-realism is perfectly compatible with idealism: idealism, that is, in the Eveiything-is-Mental sense. Like Leslie Armour, I have consider­ able respect for this sort of idealism. I am now hard at work on a book expanding “A Spinozistic Vision of God”2 and “A Neoplatonist’s Pantheism” — articles which defended the metaphysical speculation that we are all of us simply elements in the thoughts of a divine mind. This Spinozistic speculation avoids, I reckon, any conflict with our day-to-day experiences. I actually consider it plausible. Now, people who join me in these possibly bizarre opinions can be firmly opposed to anti-realism. Making everything mental does not automatically erase every difference between the realm of true being and the realm of appearance. To begin with, the Spinozistic speculation is about how things really are, not about how they seem. When I suggest we are all of us elements in a divine mind, I am calling it fairly probable that that’s what our situation really is. And if that’s what it really is, then that’s what it really would be no matter whether it seemed like this to most of us. As a matter of fact, it does not seem like this to most of us. Most people of today treat Spinozism of the sort I have in mind as little (if at all) short of madness. Again, I feel certain that most of them would continue to react in this way after long, careful investiga­ tion both of their principles of reasoning and of all evidence they would ever find. The theory that everything is mental, and the more specific theory that it is all of it divinely

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mental, are not theories identifying being with seeming, or even with seeming after long and serious investigation. Second, there is little enough excuse for basing idealism, the belief that everything is mental, on a mere theoiy of meaning. Logical positivists such as the early A. J. Ayer, the Ayer who was a convinced phenomenalist, were driven to believing that everything was mental because they thought that only the mental could be verifiable; but their verification theoiy of meaning was a disaster. Again, while Bishop Berkeley may have been right in arguing that the only actual existents (meaning things which are not just abstractions like the number nine) which can be conceived in any complete fashion are mental existents (minds or elements in their thoughts or experiences), I do not see how anyone could prove that mental existents were the only ones which could be conceived in any way whatso­ ever. It seems to me meaningful to describe complex structures mathematically and then add, ‘The structures are real but not mental. ’ Third and finally, it seems to me that even a reality in which everything was mental could be extremely complex, and that there are strong reasons for thinking it would be infinitely complex. In particular, a divine mind might include knowledge of what infinitely many possible universes would be like. Some of these universes would be (as cosmologists often think our universe is) infinite in extent, so that they could include infinitely many planets inhabited by observers. As knowing everything, or at least everything worth knowing, the divine mind would know precisely how it would feel to exist as a finite and, indeed, very severely limited being in one such universe, and to be convinced of one’s severe limitations. Therefore (this was Spinoza’s magnificent central insight) the divine mind would have inside itself elements, intricate sub-systems of the divine thought, which firmly believed, and believed correctly, that they actually were severely limited beings, beings ignorant of immensely much—beings some of them with such names as ‘John Leslie.’ What is more, the ignorance of these beings might never be removed. It might be utterly irremovable. Reality might stretch vastly beyond how things could ever seem to them. It might be, for instance, that the structure which most tidily completes, rounds out, the crude and broken patterns of John Leslie’s conscious life, the structure which he calls ‘the structure of the physical world of which I form part,’ was genuinely fractal, with an infinite number of layers of ever smaller details. The divine mind could know this entire pattern—which would make it a real pattern, one truly existing inside that mind, whether or not it existed anywhere else as well—without much of it ever becoming known to John Leslie, by computer-assisted human efforts or in a mystical vision or anyhow else. And it is actually rather doubtful whether any mind could remain the mind of John Leslie, if it could be led to grasp such a pattern in its infinite entirety. A nice thing about Leslie Armour is that you can indulge in such speculations in his hearing without feeling thoroughly defensive. While he may not agree with them, he at least does not hiss them. He knows stunningly much about the history of metaphysical theories and about how hard it is to evaluate them. It is a pleasure and an honour to be contributing to this festschrift.

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Notes 1. Philosophical Papers, 18 (1989) 169-188. 2. Religious Studies, 29 (1993) 277-286. 3. The Monist, 80(1997) 218-231.

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7

St. Thomas and Infinite Causal Regress LAWRENCE DEWAN, O.P.

Introduction In an essay on Thomas Aquinas published in 1961, Peter Geach1 contends that all of Thomas’s Five Ways, i.e. the five arguments for the existence of a God presented in the Summa theologiae,2have in common a move which he calls “lumping together.”3 Rather than consider merely this or that particular object, one treats the world as an object; one gathers together all observables, and makes statements pertaining to them. In this fashion, one arrives at God as Maker of the World. Geach tells us that, in proposing this, he is opposing certain theologians who wish to conceive of the Ways as starting from the existence of any random object and arriving at the existence of a God. He contends that this is not possible, and is not what Thomas himself was trying to do. In order to show this, he argues that the causal explanation of any particular object is satisfied by pointing out the immediate particular cause or causes, as the child is caused by the parents.4 He points out that this sort of causation can be traced back to infinity in a line of parentage, according to Thomas himself. Thus, it is not a chain of causes that Thomas is speaking about in the Ways, nor is the God at which they arrive first in such a chain ( 111 -112).5 Geach sees the alternative to this as what he calls “lumping things together” in a “world.” He sketches what he means by speaking of the Earth, the Solar System, the Galaxy, the Galactic Cluster, etc. He takes the whole as in process, and, on the basis that a process requires a cause other than itself, he holds that there must be such a cause, outside of or beyond all process, even if one contends that the world as so described extends to infinity (113-114). It is clear from what he says that Geach’s world consists in a causal system, origins of change that require ontologically prior to them other origins of change.6 For this reason I was puzzled as to why he spoke of “lumping things together.” In a causal system, things are already together in a unity. Where, if I may so put it, is the iu m p ’? The answer seems to lie in his consciousness of (as he sees it) the possible infinity of the causal system he can observe. Aware that someone might simply let the mind run back from item to item endlessly, never seeing the need to encounter a “changeless origin of change,” he calls for a lasso, so to speak, and grasps the infinite as a “whole.” Focusing on the fact that it all would be in process, he calls for something beyond the infinite causal system, a different sort of thing, a ‘God. ’ It is significant that Geach was criticized by Patterson Brown in a paper on infinite causal regress.71 say this because it seems to me that what Geach is evading is the need to show that one cannot go to infinity in origins of change. His world, though it is a causal system, may be infinite, just as long as it is, as a whole, in process. Everything depends on the grasping of the world as a whole, the whole of which is changing. And so it is important for him to be able to say: all the members of the series, all the parts of the whole, are in process; therefore, this must also be true of the world as a whole.

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I do not think Geach is adequately presenting Thomas’s line of thought, nor do I think Geach’s own argument is adequate. Can an infinite series such as he has in mind exist? Thomas proves that it cannot. What about a per impossibile argument? It seems to me that seeing the validity of the per impossibile argument requires seeing the prior validity of the real argument given by Thomas. And it is not a per impossibile hypothesis for Geach. Before criticizing Geach any further, let me look at Patterson Brown and a recent Geach defender, John Lamont. Brown is writing about the doctrine that one cannot regress to infinity in causal series. He himself is able to understand such a doctrine only as an expression of the determination to have a scientific explanation for everything.8 To go to infinity removes the possibility of such explanation. However, he notes the position of Geach. He sees that some such composition arguments (the “lumping together”) are valid, and that Geach’s particular composition argument is valid. If the parts are in process, the whole is in process. His complaint is that this move by Geach is not the needed mainspring for Geach’s own position. What he rather sees as central is the argument: if the parts are moved by another, the whole is moved by another. This he says neither Geach nor Thomas nor Aristotle has shown (231). John Lamont9 writes to defend Geach against Brown. He thinks that with a little explanation and patching up, Geach’s sort of argument is valid. His own argument says that there are effects; that an effect requires a cause other than itself; that this is true not only of effects taken one by one, but also of effects taken collectively. Thus, there must be an uncaused cause for the whole effect, even if its (the effect’s) parts or members are infinitely numerous. Lamont’s argument rests on the principle: if you take a group of things that are all effects, the group itself will be an effect. This seems to be the same as the argument which Brown required of Geach but did not find: if the parts are moved by another, the whole is moved by another; or if the parts derive from something else, the whole derives from something else. Can we then say that Lamont has successfully responded to the complaint Brown brought against Geach? Several features of Lamont’s presentation trouble me. The principle: “if you take a group of things which are an effect, the group itself will be an effect” is true, especially if by ‘group’ one means a causal series or hierarchy (not a mere ‘chain’). Lamont is able to appeal to this principle as pertaining to Thomas’s Second Way, the argument from efficient causal order. It depends upon one’s ability to recognize such order in observable reality, something Brown would probably not concede,10but that is not necessarily a reason to reject it. However, Lamont says, speaking of the First Way, the “Way of motion or change,” that Thomas “assumes” that change requires something other than the changed thing as origin of change.11 This is not true. Thomas proves it in the First Way. That, at any rate, is what he primarily undertakes to do in that Way. This in fact is what should be replied to Brown as regards his criticism of Geach, namely that Thomas, for one, did show that if all the members of a causal series are caused, the whole series is caused. Or rather, there I fall too much into the Brown-Geach pattern. Thomas is not working with the composition schema. He is saying that i f there is a causal series,

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there is afirst, by which all the members save the first are caused. This is what I would say both Aristotle and Thomas have shown. Geach did not do so. Still, there is more wrong with Lamont’s presentation than that ‘assumption.’ He recalled an argument of Hume’s that while each effect requires a cause, still the whole assemblage of effects does not necessarily require a cause, since the assemblage is something conjured by our minds. Lamont challenges Hume’s contention. He acknowl­ edges the mental dimension of the assemblage, but he continues to affirm the need for a cause for the whole. He takes as an example all the buns baked in the bakery today. Each bun has a cause, and so all the buns have a cause (269-270). In this matter, I side with Hume against Lamont. I do not mean to say that all groups are mental constructs. I underline that what Geach and Thomas were talking about were causal series, i.e. a multiplicity with an extramental coherence or unity. Geach regularly refers to a causal “system.” It was Brown who first mentioned the Hume argument, with similar remarks from William of Ockham, only to say that Geach was not touched by it.12 This is true, because of the system. However, Lamont has no such system in his picture. He expressly states that the buns have no connection one with another. Yet he thinks the argument: each bun has a cause; therefore all the buns have a cause, will hold. This is not so. It holds only in the possible sense that many buns have many causes. Each bun in the bakeiy might be baked by a different baker. There is no need for one cause for the buns. Thus, I see Lamont as failing in his project.13 Could we not put together Lamont’s principle with Geach’s system and have a defence against Brown? We could do so, but there is the question: is it enough to answer Brown? Brown himself is weak, I contend, because he does not see the force of the argument against infinite causal regress. He thinks it all comes down to the desire for scientific explanation. I believe that the argument against regress has solid (I might even say ‘hard’) foundations. Nevertheless, it does not work along the lines sketched by Geach. An indication of the source of Brown’s difficulty can be found in his attempt to answer a criticism made by C. J. F. Williams concerning Thomas’s argument.141 think Brown’s answer is inadequate, and inadequate in a way which shows why Brown himself is not really facing Thomas’s argument. Thomas, in both the First and Second Ways,15 argues that a second mover only brings about movement under the influence of a first mover. In an infinite series, there is no first. Hence, there is no other mover. This last is clearly false. Therefore, etc. Williams objects to the premise which mentions a “first mover” (and thus also a ‘second’ mover). He sees this, in a quest for a first mover, as begging the question. Brown, who otherwise is v ay helpful in clearing up confusions about the meaning of the issues under discussion, here stumbles, I believe. He reads the expression “first mover” in the premise as describing the item as situated merely p rio r to the so-called ‘second’ mover. The second is ‘second’ merely as depending on another (222-223). In this way, he avoids the appearance of question-begging, true enough, but in so doing he empties the argument of its force. In an infinite regress, every member would have a member prior to it, and so every member would have a cause. No wonder that in the end he does not find the argument convincing.

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W illiams’s complaint needs another answer. Thomas does not say ‘prior’; he says ‘first.’ He generally means what he says, and the Five Ways, despite what some Thomists16have thought, are very subtly crafted. The problem reminds me of the doctrine of a cause of beings as beings. Thomas himself points out that in particular natures a cause cannot be the cause of the very form which it itself possesses. This dog cannot cause doghood, for it would thus be the cause of all dogs including itself. It can only cause “doghood to be in this matter,” i.e. ‘this dog.’17Yet Thomas speaks of a cause of beings as beings.18 This means that the cause in question must have a nature prior to the nature of being. That can only be the case if ‘being’ does not name a univocally common nature, i.e. one that is on the same level in eveiy particular. It is because ‘being’ is found already, in the things which are available to us, according to priority and posteriority that one can reason to a cause beyond this domain of being, and thus discover an even more elevated occurence of what it is to ‘be. ’ So here. ‘First cause’ is something we already actually encounter, but encounter as open to higher realizations. Thus, Thomas will say: [...] it does happen that some principle of change [motus] is first in a domain [primum in genere], which nevertheless is not unqualifiedly first \primum simpliciter]: for example, in the domain of things subject to alteration the first source of alteration [primum alterans] is the celestial body, which nevertheless is not the first source of change unqualifiedly [primum movens simpliciter], but rather it is changed as regards local motion by a higher source of change (ST l-2.6.1.ad 1 [753a36-49]).

And again: [...] a first cause [causa prima] can then be impeded from [bringing about] its effect through the deficiency of a second cause [causae secundae], when it is not universally first [universaliter prima] containing under itself all causes [...] (ST 1.19.6.obj. 3 and ad 3).19

Because of this openness to higher realizations, we do not know what precisely the nature is to which we eventually reason in the First and Second Ways, but we know there must be such a nature. And if there were a regress to infinity, there would be (we will maintain) no such nature. How do we see the nature of ‘first cause’ or ‘first mover’? The example of Thomas, in the hand-stick-stone line, is the human being. It is the human agent, as a source of events, which gives us an experience of primacy in causality. Aristotle (in Metaphysics 9) presents power20 in two levels or modes: without reason (i.e. natural power) and with reason. Whereas nature is a power determined to unity, reason is a power relative to opposites, and thus a source of choices. It is this power of choice which most clearly exhibits for us primary causality. For certain activities, we can obviously use an instru­ ment or do without the instrument. This is crucial since the property of true causal hierarchy is that the higher cause is causing the causal contribution of the lower cause.21 It can do this only if it itself possesses the power to do what the lower cause does. I say ‘most clearly exhibits’ because, while I am sure that we obtain much light on causality and first causality from ourselves as agents, I would not say, as Williams (404-405)

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seems to mean, that this is the exclusive source. Do we not appreciate causality in nature outside ourselves? Do we not ‘see’ that the hot stove is a source of my hand’s being burnt?22 Williams sees Aristotle (and I am sure he would put Thomas in the same boat in this respect) as evincing “a conceptual preference for unmoved movers: uncaused causes are real causes” (404, his italics). He goes on: Maybe this is due to our originally deriving our conception of causation from ourselves as agents. Nevertheless the conceptual preference exists [...] There is here an implicit analogy between the microcosmic uncaused cause [the human free act] and the macrocosmic [the act of God]. (404-405) [my italics]

Williams is right about the analogy. I would say that the issue is whether we have a case of mere “conceptual preference” or of genuine metaphysics. The priority of act over potency, I contend, is no mere conceptual preference. We should note that, though Williams calls first causes “uncaused causes” and “unmoved movers,” this is not what Thomas says. He comes at the very end of the First Way to a “first mover which is moved by none.” (To put a comma after ‘mover’ is, I suggest, wrong and misleading. He does not appear to mind ‘first movers’ being moved, as long as there is one which is not.) He allows for a hierarchy of ‘first causes’ having several levels (though he does end the Second Way simply with “some first efficient cause”).23 The really interesting part of Williams’s note is his reference to Thomas’s Commen­ tary on Aristotle 's P h y s ic s . He is quite right in seeing that Thomas and Aristotle are thinking of causes which can do without the subsequent causes. He is quite right in relating this to our appreciation of causality seen in our own freedom of choice. However, he seems to think that Aristotle has overlooked examples such as bulldozers, i.e. instruments which are truly indispensable for what we can do with them. (Aristotle’s example is of our being able to move a stone either by means of a stick or doing without the stick.) Here, Williams is wrong. Aristotle knows of plenty of instruments which one cannot do without (the arm cannot do without the hand, nor the shoulder without the arm). The point is that Aristotle is envisaging a true causal hierarchy, not a composite single cause (the mover of the stick would be the hand-arm-shoulder as a single cause, not a hierarchy in the sense Aristotle is considering; man and bulldozer are a single cause of things man alone cannot cause). My general line of thinking is that we must encounter ‘first cause’ as a type of thing (according to priority and posteriority, just as with the nature of being). We do this when we see the action of the rational power or human agent (hand or man). This is our encounter with the sort of cause which can use an instrument or do without it. This provides the vision of a hierarchy in the domain of efficient causality as such (nature, and will or reason as moments in the hierarchy). God emerges as the cause at the head of the hierarchy, just as he is the infinite nature of being beyond the infinite nature of being.24 One need not shy away from making God the first in the series, if one understands to what extent the higher member of such a series transcends the lower.

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Accordingly, Williams’s objection is one the correct response to which illuminates the true meaning of the argument. It seems to me that one should stay closer to the proposal of Thomas himself than Brown has done. Second movers do not bring move­ ment about, save under the influence of a first mover, as the stick only as influenced by the hand. The hand is an example of a ‘first mover.’ If it does not qualify as “altogether first,” then we must posit something higher. But we must arrive at a first which is unqualifiedly first, for this is clear from the very nature of causal order as evident to us in the stone-stick-hand setup. To propose a regress to infinity is to ignore the evident demands of causal order.25 Is it really necessary to consider the natures of the three items in the efficient causal hierarchy? I have stressed the role of the hand or man as such. However, in Thomas’s presentations, particularly for the Second Way, he does not seem to need such a consider­ ation. We read: But it is not possible that in efficient causes there be procession to infinity. Because in all ordered efficient causes, the first is the cause of the intermediate, and the intermediate is the cause of the last, whether the intermediates are several or one only; but, the cause being removed, the effect is removed; therefore if there is not a first in efficient causes, there will not be a last nor an intermediate. But if there is a procession to infinity in efficient causes, there will be no first efficient cause, and thus there will not be an ultimate effect, nor intermediate efficient causes, which plainly is false (ST 1.2.3 (14a29-41); italics mine).

And in his presentation of Aristotle in Me tap h. 2, he says: [...] if it is necessary for us to say which is the cause among some three items [inter aliqua tria], which are first, middle, and last, of necessity we will say that the cause is that which is first [...]26

Even as regards the First Way parallels, consider Summa contra gentiles 1.13, the second argument given there for not going to infinity in movers and things moved: In ordered movers and things moved, i.e. one of which is moved by another by virtue of the order, this necessarily is found to obtain, that, the first mover having been removed or ceasing to bring about movement, none of the others will bring movement about or be moved: because the first is the cause of movement of all the others. But if there are movers and moved items in an order unto infinity, there will not be any first mover, but all will have the role of intermediate movers. Therefore none of the others will be able to be moved. And thus nothing in the world will be moved.27

I would say that we must save ourselves from too abstract a consideration, lest we fall into a mathematicism. When envisioning the series, we should always insert likely members of the series, such as the stone, the stick and the hand, or the surrounding air, the violin, and the violinist. A thing is neither a mover nor a thing moved merely as occupying a position in a line. Rather, we are supposed to consider ‘first, middle, and last’ in a group of things having the natures which fit them to be movers and moved.28

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We see this identification, this pointing out within common experience, of first movers in Aristotle himself, as Thomas comments: [Aristotle] presents a comparison of first mover and second. For, though we say “brings about movement” of both the first mover and the last,29we say that the first mover brings movement about moreso [magis] than does the last. And this is clear for two reasons. One is that the first mover moves the second mover, but not the converse. The second reason is, because the second mover cannot bring the movement about without the first, but the first mover can bring the movement about without the second; for example, the stick cannot move the stone unless it is moved by the man, but the man can move [the stone] even without the stick.30

The above is the veiy passage from Thomas which Williams had the merit of considering. Is my answer the same answer as that given by Brown to Williams, viz., that the term ‘second’ merely means ‘having something prior to it’? No. Brown does not mean by ‘prior’ what I do. I think it has to be made clear that a term like ‘prior’ should here suggest ‘having more of the nature of a first, ’ ‘closer to a first. ’31 It is interesting that Geach,32 aiming to agree with St. Thomas, stresses the idea that, even //the series of causes stretches to infinity, still there will be need of a cause beyond the infinity. He seems to make this a part of the essential explanation. If this is the procedure, it is obviously no longer a doctrine that one cannot have a causal regress to infinity. The suggestion that the series might go to infinity comes from Aristotle himself. Having made the argument that the first is the cause of the middle, he then points out that it does not matter whether the middles are one, many or even infinite in number. If they are all middles, nothing will happen (Aristotle, Metaph. 2.2 [994al4-19]). Thomas, in commenting, simply incorporates this point into the reasoning, accepting it without any special comment. However, in making the argument on his own account, he never, to my knowledge, includes the possibility of an infinity of middle causes. In fact, it is clear that no such infinity is even possible. If the causal hierarchy is truly causal, positing an infinity of members negates the very causal structure. One might envisage a hierarchy of created pure spirits, and it might be posited to stretch to infinity;33 but it could not be an efficient causal hierarchy, even as regards some added perfection such as illumination. The structure of an infinite series cannot have a causal nature. Thus, I see Aristotle’s suggestion as a per impossibile challenge. Once the nature of a “middle cause” is caught sight of34—i.e. that which needs something more causal to activate it—then one can multiply it to infinity, to no effect. However, the point is only valid because one has seen what it is to be a first in causality. Thus, it seems to me that the enthusiasm of Geach for this point leads, not merely to confusion, but to a contradic­ tion of the very point Thomas is making. Ultimately, the argument seems to return to the distinction between the actual and the potential. We can recognize a causal nature which stands in need of fulfillment, if it is to do anything. We see other things which supply that extra something, the completive, the nature o f actuality. We thus see the proportion (or distance) between potency and act. This is indeed what we mean by ‘priority’ or ‘dependence.’ ‘Firstness’ is actuality.

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We see the nature of efficient causal hierarchy, presented in a small observable system. We thus see that this nature must obtain in any efficient causal hierarchy, no matter how univeral or ultimate. There is no such thing as an infinite causal series. It is a contradiction in terms. Notice, again, that the conclusion of the First Way should not be to a “first mover (comma) which is moved by no other,” but rather to a “first mover which is moved by no other”; the comma after “mover” in deceptive. We have already encoun­ tered first movers in the Way, arid what is new in the conclusion is not a “first mover” merely, but one that is moved by no other, one that is “universally first.” We arrive at an ultimate first mover. Williams calls the root of the procedure “conceptual preference.” I would say it is metaphysical observation that drives the reasoning. It is what we see in causal natures and the way they dominate the effect. There is a “local” wealth of being in any causal nature, a “local stop,” most obviously in humans but to a lesser extent in lower animals, plants, and indeed in any substance35 which reveals that ‘the buck always stops somewhere/

Notes 1. Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe, Three Philosophers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961) 65-125 contains Geach’s essay entitled “Aquinas”; 109-117 are on the existence of God. I will sometimes simply refer to the page number in my text. 2. Summa theologiae [ST] 1.2.3. Where helpful, I will indicate the pagination in the edition published at Ottawa (Collège Dominicain, 1941). 3. Geach says: [...] It seems clear, then, that in spite of what a hasty reading of Aquinas’s “Five Ways” might suggest, he did not think God could be reached by following to its end a causal chain starting from a random object. I shall argue that what is in fact essential to the “Five Ways” is something tantamount to treating the world as a great big object (112). 4. This is, in itself, a potentially disastrous contention. While we shall ourselves below affirm the reality of the contribution of particular causes, we note that Thomas would say that to satisfy causal requirements, one must mount from the cause of the individual to the cause of the species, etc. Cf. e.g. Summa contra gentiles 3.65 (Liber de veritate catholicae fidei contra errores infidelium, seu Summa contra gentiles, vol. IE, ed. C. Pera, P. Marc, et P. Carmello [Rome\Turin: Marietti, 1961] #2400). 5. I take it that Geach means by a “chain” such a mere juxtaposition of local causes as one finds in the parental sequences; thus, a chain would not be a true ‘system’ (nor, perhaps, a true ‘series’). 6. He lumps together the series of causes and calls it ‘X.’ And he asks: [...] But what is it that maintains this process of change in X? Something that cannot itself be in process of change; for if it were, it would be just one of the things in process of change that causes the process in A (or the coming-to-be of A); i.e. it would after all be just part of the changeable system o f causes we called X, and not the cause of the process in X. Thus we are led to a changeless cause of the change [...] in the world [...] The number of items in X is irrelevant; and the changeless cause is introduced as the cause of the change in the whole system X, not as the last link in a chain, directly related only to the last link but one [Geach, 113-114, my italics].

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7. Patterson Brown, ‘Infinite Causal Regression,” in Aquinas, ed. A. Kenny (New York: Anchor Books, 1969) 214-236; reprinted from The Philosophical Review 75 (1966) 510-525.1 will sometimes refer merely to the (Kenny ed.) page number, within my text. 8. Brown seems to be followed in this by Lubor Velecky, Aquinas ’Five Arguments in the Summa Theologiae la 2,3 (Kampen, The Netherlands: Kok Phares, 1994). At 56-58, he considers the infinite items discussed as “explanatory steps” rather than “things” (agreeing, he says, with Brown and opposing Williams). The efficient causes, I would say, are things which are explanatory steps. 9. JohnR. T. Lamont, “An Argument for an Uncaused Cause,” The Thomist, 59 (1995) 261-277. I will sometimes refer simply to the page number, within my text. 10. Brown ended his essay (235) by wondering if the whole conception of cause as what is responsible for something ought to be allowed in science, or whether one ought to limit causality to concomitance. 11. He says: [...] The first way, the argument for an unchanging changer, assumes that one of the properties that make something an effect is change. Every change is an effect; whenever we encounter change, like the rotting of food or change in the weather, we assume that it has a cause. Since every change is an effect, all change put together is an effect and has a cause. This cause cannot itself be changing, so there is an unchanging cause of all change (270-271, my italics). 12. Brown 229-230. It is “not certain” it is effective against Geach. 13. Since I wrote this criticism of Lamont, he has also been criticized by Antoine Coté, “A Reply to John Lamont,” The Thomist, 61 (1997) 123-131. Coté (131) seems to be saying something along the same lines as I am, as regards the Lamont 'composition argument.’ 14. C.J.R Williams, “Hie autem... (St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3 ) ”Mind LXIX (1960) 403-405. 15. The first two Ways differ as regards their starting-points, change and causal order. They do not differ as regards there being no infinite regress in causes. Thus, Thomas, in his commentary on Aristotle, Metaphysics 2.2, at In Metaph. 2.3, ed. Cathala (Rome\Turin: Marietti, 1935) (#303), discussing the very argument used in the Second Way, uses what amounts to his own vocabulary of the First Way: “prima causa movens” and “secunda causa movens.” 16. Cf. e.g. W. Norris Clarke, The Philosophical Approach to God: A Neo-Thomist Perspective (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Wake Forest University, 1979): “I do not think that [the Five Ways] represent the best of St. Thomas’s own truly original and most characteristic metaphysical structure of ascent to God as shown in the rest of his works.” and “The first three are Aristotelian and for that very reason incomplete” (35). 17. Cf. again Summa contra gentiles 3.65 (ed. Pera, #2400). 18. Cf. e.g. ST 1.44.2; also In Phys. 8.2. ed. M. Maggiolo (Rome/Turin: Marietti, 1954) (#975 [5]). 19. Thomas, arguing at ST 1-2.1.6 (716b 1-9) that one always wills in view of something having the role o f ‘ultimate end,’ says: [...] an ultimate end has a role in moving the appetite, which is the same as the role which a first mover [primum movens] has in other motions. But it is evident that second movers do not bring movement about save according as they are moved by a first mover [a primo movente]. Hence, second objects of appetite [secunda appetibilia] do not move appetite save [as] in an order to a first object of appetite [primum appetibile]9which is an ultimate end. My interest here is in the fact that one is dealing with causal roles, not with particular realizations of them. This is clear from the fact that the immediately following article asks

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whether there is one ultimate end for all human beings. It is I who translate as “a first mover” and “an ultimate end,” rather than “the first mover” and “the ultimate end,” since that seems to me the sense of the text. Another text actually employing the first mover-second mover premise is ST 1-2.17.1 (802M2-48), where the first mover involved is the human will. 20. “Power” is precisely “source of change in another, or in the same thing qua other.” Cf. Thomas, In Metaph. 9.2 concerning Aristotle at 1046b 1-27, and 9.4 (#1820), concerning 1048al0-17. 21. Thomas Aquinas, Super Librum de causis expositio, prop. la. ed. H.D. Saffrey, O.P., (Fribourg/Louvain: Société philosophique/Nauwelaerts, 1954) 8, line 21-ff): For it is evident that, to the extent that any efficient cause is prior, to that extent its power is extended to more things; hence it is necessary that its proper effect be more common. On the other hand, the proper effect of the second cause is found in fewer things; hence it is also more particular. For the first cause itself produces or moves the cause acting secondly, and so becomes for it the cause that it act. (my transi, and emphasis) A recent English translation of Thomas’s commentary is: St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Book of Causes, tr. Vincent A. Guagliardo, O.P., Charles R. Hess, O.P., and Richard C. Taylor (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1996). 22. Cf. ST 1.115.1, “that some body is active,” i.e. acts on another. Thomas begins: “[...] it is sensibly apparent that some bodies are active.” And the role of fire and warmth in our experience of this is used (ad 5). There are the “sensibles by association” (Latin: per accidens). These are the things which occur to the intellect as the immediate fruit of our orchestrated sense-experience. Thus, for example, Thomas says that when I see someone speaking and setting himself in motion, I apprehend that person’s life (considered universally), and I can say that I ‘see’ that he is alive (thus speaking of the intelligible object as a ‘visible’). For a short resume of the doctrine, cf. ST 1.78.3.ad 2. For the example mentioned, cf. Thomas, Sentencia libri De anima, in Opera omnia, t. 44/1 (Rome/Paris: Commissio Leonina/Vrin, 1984) 2.13 (lines 182-190). Cf. Aris­ totle, De anima 2.6 (418a7-26). 23. In this connection, Thomas’s treatment of the existence of a God in Compendium theologiae 1.3. ed. Leonine, t. 42 (Rome: Editori di san Tommaso, 1979) 84, is of interest. There is only one proof, and it concludes to “a first mover which is supreme over all; and this we call a God.” Only once the existence of a God is established does Thomas prove, in 1.4, the point: “it is necessary that God be altogether immobile.” This work is dated with hesitation at 1265-1267 (ed. cit., p. 8), thus at about the same time as the ST 1. 24. On created esse as infinite relative to creatures but finite relative to God (who is thus the infinite beyond the infinite), see Thomas Aquinas, In Librum beati Dionysii De divinis nominibus Expositio, ed. C. Pera, O.P. et al. (Rome/Turin: Marietti, 1950) XIII, iii (989): [...] each thing, to the extent that it is finite and bounded [>terminatum], to that extent has actual unity. But the one which is God is prior to all end [finem] and boundary and [prior to] their opposites, and is the cause of the boundedness [terminationis] of all things, and not only of existent things [existentia], but even of being [esse] itself. For created being itself [ipsum esse creatum] is not finite if it is compared to creatures, because it extends to all; if, nevertheless, it be compared to uncreated being [esse increatum], it is found to be deficient [i.e., to fall short], and [to be something] having the boundedness [determinationem] of its own intelligible character [stemming] from the forethought of the divine mind.

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25. An indication that this is the right understanding of the Ways is the objection introduced by Thomas which mentions the human mind, as well as nature, as satisfying all causal needs. Though nature is regarded as requiring a higher cause, an intelligence, as shown in the Fifth Way, the human mind is shown as needing something higher on the grounds that it is mobile and subject to failure. See ST 1.2.3. obj. 2 and ad 2. 26. InMetaph. 2.3 (#302), concerning Aristotle at 994al5-20. 27. Summa contra gentiles 1.13 (#94). We see here the ‘all’ applied to the movers, which is perhaps what prompted Geach to speak of “lumping together.” However, it seems to me that the ‘all’ is justified by the systematic character of the group, thus requiring no “lumping” to speak of. Moreover, note well that Thomas’s ‘all’ here applies to a hypothetical and impossible ‘all.’ 28. The presentation in the Compendium theologiae 1.3 reads: [...] It is impossible that this proceed to infinity. For since everything which is moved by something is in some measure an instrument of a first mover [quasi instrumentum quoddam primi mouentis], if a first mover is not, whatever things bring movement about will be instruments. But it is necessary, if one proceed to infinity to movers and things moved, that a first mover not be; therefore, the entire infinity of movers and moved will be instruments. But it is ridiculous, even among the untutored, that one posit instruments to be moved, save by some principal agent: for this is comparable to someone proposing, concerning the making of a cabinet or a bed, the saw or the hatchet without the carpenter acting. Obviously, we must be able to recognize “principality” or “firstness.” 29. William Lane Craig, The Cosmological Argumentfrom Plato to Leibniz (London: Macmillan, 1980) explaining Thomas, says: “in an essentially subordinated series, the only cause that is really moving anything is the first cause. The others are like lifeless instruments.” (174, my italics). This is hardly the view of Thomas. 30. In Phys. 8.9 (#1039 [3]). At #1038 [2]-# 1040 [4], we see that Thomas introduces much the same vocabulary that he employs in the First Way, calling the moved mover a “second” mover: an expression not found in the text of Aristotle. This discussion in Aristotle, at Physics 8.5 (256a4-20), is the basic source of the First Way premise on not going to infinity in movers. 31. Thomas, In Metaph. 2.3 (#304), concerning Aristotle at 994a 1-15, points out that in an infinite which has neither first nor last, no part is closer to the first or to the last: all are equally “intermediate.” Notice that the doctrine that the first mover is “more” of a mover than the second brings the first two Ways of Thomas into the ambit of the Fourth Way, the way of degrees of nobility or actuality. 32. Cf. Joseph Owens, “Aquinas on Infinite Regress,” Mind, 71 (1962) 244-246. This is a reply to Williams. Father Owens (like Brown in this) reads “second” merely as “dependent on another.” He tells us that “any moved movent” has a “secondary status as a movent” (244). While this is true, it will only do the work St. Thomas demands of it as equivalent to: needing afirst mover (not merely “another”). Owens also says: “whether a particular series of moved movents is finite or infinite is beside the point” (244). He holds that there is the “philosophical possibility of an infinite series of moved movents.” Owens merely focuses on the potentiality and dependence proper to what is moved. He does not discuss ‘first mover’ as explicitly involved in the premise of the Way. Nor does he take seriously the causal order among the moved movers themselves: his examples are taken from the discussion of a per accidens series of causes. Need it be said that we earlier noted the possibility of a regress to infinity in causes related only incidentally? The issue at present concerns an essentially ordered system of moved movers. To hold that such an ordered system can go to infinity contradicts Thomas. As I say, I can understand Aristotle’s mention of an

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infinity of middle causes only as a per impossibile challenge. 33. Thomas’s negation of the possibility of an actually infinite multitude, at ST 1.7.4, seems based on its being out of keeping with the divine wisdom: it would, as such, have neither form nor purpose. He does not seem to consider it a contradiction in terms. See Quaestiones de quolibet 12.2.2 [3], in Leonine ed., t. 25-2 (Rome/Paris: Commissio Leonina/Cerf, 1996) 400, lines 1228: When, therefore, it is asked whether it is possible for God to make something [which is] actually infinite, it is to be said that [it is] not. For something is repugnant to the power of one acting through intellect in two ways: in one way, because it is repugnant to his power; in another way, because it is repugnant to the way in which he acts [modo quo agit]. In the first way, it is not repugnant to the power of God absolutely, because it does not imply contradiction. But if the mode of acting by which God acts be considered, it is not possible; for God acts through his intellect and through his Word, which is formative of all; hence it is necessary that all that he brings about [agit] be formed. But the infinite is taken as matter without form, for the infinite stands on the side of matter. If therefore God were to bring this about [ageret], it would follow that the work of God was something formless, and this is repugnant to that through which he acts and the way of acting, because through his own Word he brings about all, by which [Word] all are formed. This is dated by the editor, R.-A. Gauthier, at 1272, just before Thomas left for Naples. If this is correct (and I believe it is), it is clearly his last word on the subject. 34. This is in fact how Thomas handles the point, at InMetaph. 2.3 (#303): [...] And similarly it makes no difference whether there be a finite or an infinite [number of] intermediates; because as long as they have the nature of the intermediate [dummodo habeant rationem medii], they cannot be a first moving cause [prima causa movens]. 3 5. 1 say “any substance.” In this regard, I think of ST 1.45.7, as to whether a vestige of the Trinity of Divine Persons is necessarily to be found in every creature. In affirming that it is necessary, Thomas says: [...] any creature whatsoever (1) subsists in its own being, and (2) has form whereby it is rendered determinate as to a species, and (3) has order towards something else. Therefore, according as (1) it is a certain created substance, it represents the cause and the principle: and thus it demonstrates the Person of the Father, who is the principle not from a principle [...]. [my italics] And he goes on to relates the other Persons to the other two items. The point is that the subsisting substance as such is a representation of what characterizes a source, a principle, a first or cause.

8 Leslie Armour, Spinoza, and Rational Psychology1 JAMES THOMAS

Introduction In the preface to his Being and Idea: Developments o f Some Themes in Spinoza and Hegel? Leslie Armour makes reference to two of his earlier works: Logic and Reality: An Investigation into the Idea o f a Dialectical System and The Rational and the Real: An Essay in Metaphysics? It is suggested that the latter two works are of some impor­ tance as background to Being and Idea. More recently, in a personal communication, Armour wrote that The Rational and the Real studies being from the point of view of the inquirer; Logic and Reality, from the point of view of the inquiry; and Being and Idea completes the trilogy by focusing on “the object of enquiry—being and/or idea.”4 My intention in this paper is to review each of these works to better understand Armour’s interpretation of Spinoza and the ways it helps us to understand Spinoza’s rational psychology.

The Rational and the Real The Rational and the Real approaches the study of being by establishing the necessary conditions for intelligible discourse about experience—one might say for intelligible experience. One needs to note, as Armour remarks, that the premise of this approach to metaphysics is “that ‘it is possible to talk sense in and about the world’” and that this premise “is the justification for a certain sort of a priori concept.”5 It should also be remarked that to deny this premise would be self-refuting. However, it is also difficult to avoid begging the question against those who deny the possibility of metaphysics, or this type of study of being, claiming that experience rests on no conditions over and above itself. This is one reason why a rational psychology is so important to Armour’s program of study, as it is through this psychology that the understanding of the conditions for intelligible experience can be said to make a difference to the world. It is because we can develop ourselves as rational beings that the claims we make about the conditions on intelligible experience are meaningful in experience. The primaiy conditions for intelligible experience are, according to Armour, “noticing, remembering and identifying” (RR 4): we are unable to make our experience intelligible without applying a priori concepts to intuitions. Armour is clearly using memory in this context in its Platonic and Neoplatonic sense, as the recognition of a priori concepts. The exploration of the conditions for intelligible experience is thus a continuation of experience as it starts out; that is to say, such an exploration continues to be the application of such concepts to our intuitions of thought. However, Armour’s

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objections to empiricism suggest that the conditions for intelligible experience must be explored through rational inquiry. The method in this work is therefore to show that certain paradoxes can be resolved by denying the presuppositions underlying these paradoxes and by adopting others, and this is fairly obviously an attempt to make our self-reflection more coherent. In the case of the concept of the self (or the mind), Armour adapts Ryle’s reasoning regarding the idea of the self as being a “ghost in the machine,” i.e., another thing. Armour denies Ryle’s conclusion, that the self is the body’s acts. For Armour, the “category error” in identifying the self as another thing is that of identifying a whole with any one of its parts. That the self is a collection of acts of the body or of any collection whatsoever, or of anything determinate, is opposed to the very notion of reasoning, as this implies the freedom to infer the conclusions one ought to infer from a given set of premises (RR 16). One’s self is not the collection of things one was, is, or is expected to be; nor can one’s self be impossible to experience—even on a strictly empiricist account of meaning, it would be meaningless and self-contradictory to suppose one’s self to be in principle impossible to experience. One is thus invited to suppose that the self is “co-extensive with all possible reality” or at least that the self is “the possibility of experiencing” (RR 25). This concept of the self is further clarified through a study of universais. For Armour, the universe is never made finally comprehensible—which is the traditional task of universais—because thinking is always a process and thus cannot end if it is to remain what it is. Nor can the world turn out to be wholly inexplicable, because to say so would be to make a self-contradictory statement: this would be to express an understanding of the universe as something that cannot be understood. The paradox presented by these two conclusions suggests that though the “concept” of the universe is complete, the actualization of it in thought is always incomplete (RR 30-1). Universais, similarly, can neither be reduced to particulars (as the universais would then fail to help us to understand the particulars) nor be said to be something else—another particular—as this would presuppose another universal. Thus, we are led to think that a universal is a “determinate possibility” actualized in the particular and that the self as the universal in the particular is “a tendency to experience, a tendency to actualize possibility” (RR 36). Although Armour does not at this stage directly examine the term idea or its concept, he considers the contents of experience, suggesting that these are “permanent dispositional properties” actualized by acts of thought. The reason is that experience must be structured in terms of noticing, remembering (or interpreting) and identifying. Consequently, the contents of experience cannot take the form of merely given entities, without structure; nor can these contents take the form of pure possibility. So, it is suggested that they might be “permanent possibilities” actualized by thought. This answers the question about the relation of the type of understanding that physicists have of material things to that had by others, as constituting their ordinary experience, since these two interpretations of the contents of experience are within the range of possibilities in the permanent dispositional properties of experience (RR 46-7). In the universe, then, there are selves, acts o f thought, and these permanent dispositional properties.

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Similar paradoxes—concerning the concepts of space, time and causality—are dealt with in similar ways. Our experience of spacial objects is perspectivai; thus, my view of a given object sometimes seems incompatible with another’s impressions of it. The idea of Euclidean space is in some respects very useful in understanding events in space, but it seems to capture little if any of this perspectivai nature of space as experienced. The solution to the paradox of the way one deals with space in Euclidean terms and the ways we experience space may be to say that these differing impressions of the object lie within the range of its possibilities. To really capture that range requires an interpretation of the experiences of a community of observers. Euclidean space is in some sense a pragmatic fiction (although Armour’s views on the status of these ‘fictions’ change) (RR 57).6 A similar problem emerges with the concept of time, which is also experienced as perspectivai; Euclidean space seems moreover analogous to time in McTaggart’s explorations of the nature and impossibility of time. He explored the concept of the “before-and-after series” (i.e., time as measured by the clock), as opposed to the “earlierand-later series” (consisting of events always changing from future to present to past). Time, McTaggart argued, cannot be constituted by any of the following three possibilities: 1) time cannot be both these series, any more than space can be constituted by both Euclidean space and the experience of the whole community of perspectives; 2) time cannot be constituted by the earlier-and-later series, as this is no more like our experience of time than Euclidean space is like our experience of space; and 3) time cannot be constituted by the before-and-after series, as the nature of events in this series seems to generate conflict. Each event is, on the whole, with its whole history, an event before, at, and after the present; in other words, it is an event future, past and present. However, events in time can be spoken of as actualizations of possibilities, actualized in a beforeand-after series in each temporal perspective, but actualizations of possibilities that are not themselves in time (RR 60-1). The earlier-and-later series would be again in some sense a pragmatic fiction. The paradox Armour considers in the case of causality he develops from his own premises: “we cannot understand the notion of causal law unless choices are possible and [...] we cannot understand the notion of choice unless there are causal laws” (RR 64). The freedom of choice involved in causality is that of being able to recognize the truth about something. On the other hand, the possibilities must be determinate for us to make any choice among them. Armour suggests a solution to this paradox in viewing causality, or determinism, as consisting of the restrictions on a given self or on the content of the self s experience and in viewing choice, or freedom, as occurring within a determinate range of possibilities. Confusions about determinism and freedom are confusions of two types of question: “one has to do with the range of possibilities known to a given man, the other to the choice among these possibilities” (RR 66). Statistics thus pertain to the ways possibilities are generally restricted by circumstances, and the ability of the researcher to state these restrictions is compatible with the freedom of choice of those who experience them. Armour develops an argument like Kant’s for freedom and immortality—i.e., it is based on a moral premise and is intended to bring us to conclusions about the nature of reality. But this is an argument for freedom and for a determinism compatible with

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freedom. A m our’s argument differs from Kant’s in that Armour denies the reality of the unknown and unknowable thing in itself: the moral premises of Armour’s contention are based on reason, without a starting point in faith. The argument is based on two moral principles: the second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative, to treat all rational beings as ends in themselves, and the imperative to attempt to increase the freedom o f every rational being. Armour shows that the contraries of the first imperative are false: to treat no rational agent as an end in his or herself would be self-defeating, as it means treating one’s self as other than an end. To apply the imperative to some but not all makes it false because there are no relevant distinctions to be drawn among rational beings. One may note that the imperative to give the greatest freedom to every rational being is probably open to the obvious qualification that each one’s freedom must be compatible with that of others. This imperative follows from the fact of there being any moral imperative, as without freedom it is impossible to be moral. From the truth of either of these two principles, Armour argues that, because we need to be free to be moral, we are free, or potentially able to realize our morality. Also, we need to have determinate choices to exercise our freedom to be moral; therefore, a complete determinism follows in the sense of events all having explanations (including explanations in the decisions of free agents). Indeterminism would undermine our ability to understand the consequences of our actions for ourselves and for others and therefore also undermine our ability to realize our morality, contrary to the given imperative. Three conclusions seem to Armour worth emphasis: 1) that material objects are permanent possibilities of experience; 2) that minds, or selves, are tendencies to have experience; and 3) that reality “[is] a panorama of experience against a permanent background of possibility, an experience driven on to its own completion, but a completion which, under the impact of free agents faced with an infinity of possibilities, may take any number of forms” (RR 90). He is unwilling to conclude that the views derived by the method of paradox and solution necessarily solve all the problems that may arise in discussing the conditions for intelligible experience or to conclude that no other paradoxes might be implied by these dialectical opposites of the positions originally so paradoxical. This in turn suggests that the study of metaphysics will be in constant progression and that it involves a plurality of views that must itself be made sense of. To explain the nature of this process and the diversity of the views it gives rise to is the work of Logic and Reality.

Logic and Reality The aim of Logic and Reality is to establish the most general conditions for rational discourse (LR 33), which is a way of dealing with the diversity of interpretations of experience sanctioned in The Rational and the Real. This is the explanation for starting with “pure being.” The generality of the category is the justification for the logic in the sense that this makes it “possible to develop one’s inference rules and arguments together with one’s subject matter” (LR 3), so that the logic provides its own justification without

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its presupposing itself. In other words, the categories and inferences of the logic always depend for their validity on being whatever one finds otherwise inconceivable, and this structure of thought is the logic’s subject. The logic developed from the starting point of pure being is similar to Hegel’s. But the method in Armour’s logic enables him to overcome some of the ambiguity and indeterminacy of other idealist logics. In Armour’s logic, moreover, “‘becoming’ is a property of philosophical systems rather than (as Hegel thought) a category.”7The significance of this is tied to the justification of the logic in two ways: where the method in the logic is applied to a given person or subject matter, it is open to development in ways compatible with the categories developed in the logic. Armour and Suzie Johnston explore this point in suggesting that “objectivity in a world in which a plurality of agents plays a creative part can be found only in a system within which each constituent member is able to understand the others.”8 The categories of the logic are unchanging in a way that allows individuals and the sciences a certain development. But also the categories and inferences obviously are related to intuition in the sense that they depend for their validity on the perception of the conceivability or inconceivability of other forms of interpretation. Consequently, the validity of the logic depends on the endeavour of the inquirer and the community of inquirers, which is the point that Armour and Johnston are making in saying that “each mind [...] depends in some measure on the insights of other minds.”9 This approach to logic is not therefore self-defeating, although it implies a sense of being rational that is always an exploration, rather than a mastery, of being. At the outset, the approach to research in Logic and Reality is like that of the earlier work, The Rational and the Real—resolving the paradoxes in the categories to satisfy the conditions for rational discourse explains the movement from one category to the next. “Pure disjunction” is needed to make distinctions to form any intelligible concept (LR 36). The further transition to “determinate being” stems from the inability of pure being and pure disjunction “to draw attention to anything,” as a result of their being too general (LR 37). Pure disjunction and determinate being owe their emergence to the structure of experience, as that of noticing, remembering (structuring) and identifying; one may say pure being is the simplest form of noticing, pure disjunction is the simplest form of structuring, and determinate being is the simplest form of identifying. Determinate being defines collections of discrete objects. It is more concrete than pure being or pure disjunction; determinate being establishes a level of concreteness (or abstractness, relative to the next level). The logic’s triads each establish another such level. Thus, “systematic unity” is needed to distinguish at least two categories, to make anything comprehensible on the level of determinate-being. This is confirmed in the ability of systematic unity to overcome the paradoxes generated by determinate being. Such paradoxes result from the inability of determinate being to completely define objects within its domain, such as the paradox (developed by Russell) of the class of all classes that do not contain themselves. Because Russell defined objects as sets of sense data that do not contain themselves, there should be a class of all classes that do not contain themselves to constitute the universe of such objects. But this class is self-contradictory ; it can neither contain nor fail to contain itself without contradiction. If it contains itself, then it is self-contradictory, as it is therefore not one of the classes that do not contain

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themselves and thus does not contain itself. If it fails to contain itself, then it satisfies the description of the class, but it does not contain itself. If the class of all classes that do not contain themselves does not contain itself, then it should contain itself, but it fails to. The paradoxes of infinity are other examples, such as illustrated in Hilbert’s infinite hotel that has an infinite number of rooms, all full, but that can always accommodate one more guest. Kant’s antinomies of space, time, causality and freedom are also examples of paradoxes stemming from determinate being (LR 43-50). Such paradoxes stem from the division into discrete entities of the object of reference under the category of determinate being, whereas under systematic unity “we can think of the domain as being divided into a set of ordered perspectives, each of which contains the whole but differs from the others in centre of focus” (LR 55). As with the earlier-andlater series, one can say that set theory and mathematics applied in the domain of determinate being are pragmatic fictions, with limitations defined by this category of interpretation, which cannot, like systematic unity, refer to itself (Armour further explains the status of the paradoxes of determinate being in Being and Idea.) Logic has rules of inference: the moves from pure being to pure disjunction and from determinate being to systematic unity exemplify “specific exclusion reference.” The move from pure being and pure disjunction to determinate being exemplifies “joint specific exclusion reference.” Joint specific exclusion reference applies specific exclusion reference to something common—the “specific inclusion reference”—of two categories (LR 63-64). Exclusion is negation, and to negate is to shift the focus of attention within systematic unity; something is not if there are conditions excluding its being (LR 78). This concept of negation helps to resolve the paradox of material implication, which is another of the paradoxes of determinate being. The paradox arises in truth-functional logics owing to their use of abstract inference patterns, without the inference deriving from the meaning of the premises and the conclusion within the argument. Truth-functional logic abstracts a certain relation of premises to conclusion from the argument that is a whole that cannot be analyzed in this way without distortion. A statement like “if 2 + 2 = 5, then I’m the Pope” does not derive a true conclusion from false premises, the only condition on valid implication in determinate being. So it is a valid implication if logic is truth functional, but the antecedent bears no necessary relation to the consequent. Implication in systematic unity, in contrast, depends on demonstrating that the premises of an argument exclude any possibility other than the conclusion (LR 84). The laws of noncontradiction, identity and the excluded middle must be accordingly redefined. Properties in determinate being are reordered in systematic unity, with centres of experience, rather than objects, made the point of reference. Objects in determinate being are related through external relations, which make no difference to their terms, such as resemblance, proximity and inclusion in sets. In systematic unity, relations are internal, they make a difference to their terms. Centres are defined by relations among themselves, such as in a genuine community, and the properties appearing in the experience of each centre are defined by their place in the order of the whole system of these perspectives. Centres of experience and their contents each constitute a focus of attention within the system as a whole. As each centre is in this sense “identical to the whole,” its contents can

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be said to exist, to be themselves and not another thing, or to be one type of thing rather than another, only by degrees (LR 118-119). The joint specific exclusion reference of determinate being and systematic unity is “pure process.” What determinate being and systematic unity have in common is the static state of being (LR 120-121). Pure process is again, like systematic unity, an identity in difference, but it is also a changing pattern of experience, and if in one’s experience there is the idea of another’s similar changing pattern of experience, one’s focus shifts to “determinate process.” One’s own changing pattern of experience is then determined through a community of such processes. A determinate process is again the realization of possibilities (LR 126). To express the idea of the realization of something more than these changing patterns of experience, Armour uses the example of a symphony being more than a series of notes (LR 152). What plays the role of the symphony to determinate process is “ideal universality.” A realization of a possibility is the expression of a universal in a particular, and the joint specific exclusion reference of pure and determinate process is therefore this ideal universality. An event in history appears under ideal universality as the universal to be realized. The specific exclusion reference of ideal universality is thus “objective universality,” under which the same event appears as conditioned by circumstances explaining its realization, such as socioeconomic conditions and the ways people are prepared to receive one’s thought. But these seem to make agents in history appear as passive expressions of circumstances and the universal to be realized. Freedom as the active expression of the individual is underemphasized. “Pure individuality” is therefore the joint specific exclusion reference of ideal and objective universalities, as it is opposed to the universal law expressed in each. The specific exclusion reference of pure individuality is “pure activity,” as this is pure individuality’s other in the dialectic Armour develops (LR 207-208). Finally, the joint specific exclusion reference of pure individuality and activity is selfdetermination, or “dialectical individuality.” Something more is needed to explain the relation of the individual to his or her activity, something other than whatever is common to each: What is seems to be [...] something which is only intelligible in and through the activities which manifest it but which, in order to explain and sustain those activities, must, itself, transcend them. It is, in a way, a subject of cognition and activity which cannot, itself, be turned effectively into an object of cognition and activity except insofar as its existence is a presupposition of these occurrences (LR 216).

Pure individuality and activity are unable to be self-determining. A single individual becomes either the whole of the universe or is excluded from it in the attempt at selfdetermination or at being self-sufficient (LR 225). Dialectical individuality allows us to understand how each member of a community of individuals is concretely defined by their rights in, and their unique ways of meeting their responsibilities to, their community (LR 223-227). Although dialectical individuality is the form of the community to be realized, it is not “the Absolute,” such as the existing community of souls knowing and loving one another

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in the work of McTaggart (LR 239). To be the absolute, it has to be realized in the world. Because the attributes of Spinoza’s substance are the ways Spinoza’s absolute is expressed in experience, Armour views them as the categories of the logic, or as the structures of things we can experience (LR 230). Spinoza’s metaphysics thus offers a solution to the problem of how the absolute is realized in experience, and the study of Spinoza’s metaphysics is therefore the work of Being and Idea.

Being and Idea The issue dealt with in Being and Idea is that of how the absolute enters into experience. Spinoza’s metaphysics provides an appropriate vehicle for dealing with this issue, as it begins with the unity needed to avoid the paradoxes of determinate being and because this unity, i.e, substance, is supposed to be the cause of itself (BI 7). Armour interprets Spinoza’s metaphysics in terms primarily of the conclusions drawn in The Rational and the Real. This takes Armour some way to solving the problems in Spinoza’s system cited by Hegel. However, on this interpretation, Spinoza’s metaphysics contains unresolved issues about the attributes, time, freedom and the status of ideas—or about the ways the elements of diversity are contained in substance. Armour therefore develops an alternative system, a set of principles serving to further define the system in terms of the categories developed in Logic and Reality, which, with Armour’s further development, results in a version of the system of Spinoza as a workable response to the issue of the absolute’s entry into experience. This issue is really about how unity contains diversity, or about how the absolute is related to the diversity of things and people experienced in the world. This is what Hegel’s criticism of Spinoza is about. Hegel’s basic criticisms stem from readings of Spinoza’s substance, attribute and mode that take no account of the unity among these concepts that contemporary idealist readers of Spinoza, such as Armour and Errol Harris, tend to find. Hegel thus objected that 1) there is no unity in difference in Spinoza’s substance, and hence, 2) diversity is defined merely by negation, or in simple contrast to the unity of substance; 3) such diversity as is represented by the attributes is merely given empirically; 4) the attributes are not united to substance through an identity in diversity, and hence their simple distinctness from substance implies that they do not define its essence but are subjective; 5) the modes of the attributes are unconnected to substance; and 6) the unity of substance is not expressed in these modes (BI 14-15). Although Hegel tried to develop a system in which these difficulties were overcome—working with the idea of identity in difference, or systematic unity—it leaves unresolved the issue of how the absolute enters into experience (BI 16). If substance exists, then it exists necessarily as the cause of itself, according to its definition, or as the “formal cause” of itself (BI 9)— a point which Armour is careful to attribute to Alonzo Meyer. On the basis of this interpretation, Armour argues that “if we think of Substance as that of which everything else can be predicated but which cannot be predicated of anything else, then it becomes clear that it is unintelligible without the corresponding plurality” (BI 32). Substance is, in other words, like a person who cannot

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be reduced to any of his or her expressions, or the mind that cannot be reduced to any of its ideas. Substance must therefore issue in infinitely many expressions, which are the attributes and their respective modes. Seen sub specie aetemitatis the system of modes is like the “actualization of the largest set of compossibles” (BI 31). This is suggested by the “negative principle of sufficient reason,” as Armour expresses it, used by Spinoza to prove God’s necessaiy existence (Spinoza’s Ethics , E1P1 lDem2).10 In earlier work, Armour had argued that this largest set of compossibles cannot be actualized, because the limits of possibility are incomprehensible (RR 31). Here, Armour similarly suggests that the series of modes seen sub specie temporis must be endless, on the ground that substance cannot be reduced to its expressions (BI 41). The idea of freedom developed in the earlier two works is incorporated into the interpretation of Spinoza in Being and Idea. Armour suggests that Spinoza regards our natures, or character, as determined in the ideas God has of us. Our character determines our will in the way that a formal cause was said to restrict possibilities being realized in the series of modes seen sub specie temporis , while leaving certain alternatives open (BI 47). This approach to the issue requires our adopting the idea of “reciprocal determination” between substance and its expressions (BI 47-8), as now it seems we contribute to the nature of the absolute as it is realized in our experience. The status of ideas in Spinoza’s system depends on the interpretation of E2P21Schol, that the idea of the body and that of the mind are one and the same. Armour suggests an interpretation other than that of Errol Harris, who thinks that the idea of the body and that of the mind have to be ideas of distinct individuals. However, they do not have to be distinct individuals insofar as they are distinct “expressions” of the one substance,11 or the results of two ways of structuring our experience. On the one hand, Harris’s view, if it is frilly spelled out, is that the attribute of thought has primacy among the attributes and that Spinoza was an idealist in this sense. On the other hand, the diversity of attributes suggests dialectical materialist interpretations of Spinoza (BI 57-8, 59). On Armour’s view, Spinoza’s starting with unity and the conditions on unity suggest an idealist interpretation on which the series of adequate reflections on ourselves takes us to a stage at which we are realized in the form of God’s ideas of ourselves, and “our task, if you like, is to make what is there in eternity intelligible in time” (BI 61). While the attribute of extension is influential in our lives and while it seems evident that there are conditions in extension that have to be met for us to be able to realize ourselves, extension is principally like thought in being a type of order (BI 61). Some problems remain, as Armour remarks: 1. the attributes are still merely given empirically (BI 34); 2. eternity and time are arguably incompatible, and if the series of modes seen sub specie temporis is infinite, then there cannot be a system of modes seen sub specie aetem itatis (BI 41);

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3. Spinoza argued that God’s nature contains all things (E1P 15) and that God’s nature excludes any contingency (ElP33Schol2), which suggests that Spinoza would deny reciprocal determination (BI 48); and 4. John Clark Murray suggested that, after Descartes, different kinds of knowledge are thought to indicate different kinds of objects, and Spinoza’s first kind of knowledge seems to have material objects (BI 62-63). According to the alternative system Armour develops to respond to these issues, substance is a ‘whole’ with ‘parts.’ This language is in some respects deceptive, as the parts of the whole are very like the ways the mind has of expressing itself (BI 68). The attributes correspond to the categories of the logic developed in Logic and Reality. Accordingly, extension corresponds to determinate being and thought is systematic unity, as ways of ordering the properties, or modes, of substance through the attributes (BI 71 ). This explains why there are more attributes as expressions of substance than just extension and thought. “Taking temporality as basic distinguishes, for instance, physics from biology” (BI 71 ). The alternative system is in many respects simply a way of systematizing dialectical individuality, to make it a system similar enough to Spinoza’s to be of use in answering these issues. A key development in the alternative system is, however, the claim that “eveiy real part has at least one of its defining parts determined by itself’ (BI 70), which is to say that the mind has some part of itself that is not determined through the whole; i.e., the mind has an idea of itself, as part of itself, a part that, being in a sense the whole, is not determined through the whole, and insofar as the finite mind is a part of the infinite, the finite has an idea of the infinite that is not determined by its place in the whole. This claim derives from the mind’s self-identity, and it means that external relations characteristic of determinate being acquire a reality according to the alternative system—something they did not have in Logic and Reality : the whole is internally related to its parts and determines their nature, but every part must be a whole with parts that are not necessarily determined in this way. Although my thoughts of a rabbit, for example, determine its nature as a part of my mind, the rabbit is more than this. Or again, some sets of properties, such as in the case of a set’s being a member of itself, “sum” (in the sense of being comprehensible in themselves), while a set’s not being a member of itself has to be understood in terms of the property of a set’s being a member of itself, as its negation (BI 79-81). So, although external relations play a role in our experience, external relations are only real insofar as they represent the negation of our natures as determined through the part of each us that is the whole. This suggests that 1) the attributes are derived from substance as its ways of expressing itself (they will not be merely given empirically but will be derivable as the categories of the earlier logic); 2) eternity is related to time as systematic unity is related to process and as the mind taken as containing the whole is related to the same mind taken as the part; 3) insofar as the finite mind is a part of the infinite, the nature of the finite is determined, but insofar as part of the finite mind is a complete perspective on the infinite, it is self-determining and free; and 4) that the object of the first kind of knowledge is our

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experience viewed from the point of view of time and the object of the second kind of knowledge is the same experience viewed from the point of view of eternity. The central issue is transformed in this way into one of resolving a certain tension between two aspects of our experience without reducing the one to the other: one’s experience insofar as one seems to be the whole, or “centre,” of experience and that insofar as one seems to be a part of a greater whole, seen as the “periphery” of one’s experience (BI 99). The way to resolve this issue is to develop an idea of our experience without either reducing the centre of experience to a mere instantiation of an abstract idea, which is in many respects the failure of the categorial imperative of Kant’s ethics (BI 105), or dissolving the distinction of the whole and its parts, which is the failure ascribed to Hegel in saying that his system turns the finite individual into God. The resolution of this issue cannot be in making substance into the formal cause of itself, as the form is again a whole (centre) whose relation to its parts (periphery) is unclear: the form is either the presupposition of finite experience and finite experience is the cause of the form (as in Kant) or it is the cause of itself but bears no special relation to finite experience (BI 114-5). Values, Armour suggests, can alone explain the entrance of the absolute into experience if the motivation for our realizing the absolute is the “good” taken in the sense of the largest set of compossibles: “goodness nags at the world without being the world and emerges in the long tendency of nature toward a rich set of possibilities and of men (as Matthew Arnold had it) toward the best” (BI 115). The idea underlying this alternative is that of the triad found in The Rational and the Real—noticing, remembering and identifying—which is again the self: the idea of idea introduced by Armour to explain this alternative makes ideas into “reflexive orders which are capable of bearing knowledge” (BI 102, see 116). Given, or simply noticed, in experience are the properties of experience, and thought is “the set of orders in which all the various properties of the world can appear” (BI 123). Although the “idea of substance is a substance [...] The idea may be useful, but the substance, as such, cannot be put to any use [...] substance expresses the idea; the idea is made manifest in the substance” (BI 123). Substance is therefore the domain of dialectical individuality, or what is progressively identified through a series of successively more adequate ideas of community. Two problems are recognized by Armour in this idea of idea: 1) the idea of the number two, for instance, does not have to identify anything but can be defined by its place in the system of natural numbers; and 2) the idea of the formal beauty of a piece of music can similarly be known without reference to its sensual medium (BI 138-139). These two problems can be resolved if the functions of noticing and identifying are reduced to the intuition of different types of order, or ways of ordering properties as far as they may be considered independently of these properties; i.e., noticing is the intuition of an inadequate idea, whereas identifying is that of a more adequate idea. With mathematics, one perceives the number in directly perceiving the relations that characterize it. Music is different for the most part because its characteristic structure—that of theme and variation—allows us to perceive ideas of determinate process, which makes music seem to be a form of life.

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Lawrence Dewan raised two objections to the account of the relation of eternity and time that Armour expressed in 1981. In that year, Armour argued that If anything explains how the unconditioned can enter our world, it might be the simple fact of the existence of persons. Centrally, of course, a person uses reason and acts in the world and thus bridges the realms.12

The person is the self-reflexive order through which God is expressed in the world. The ground for this relation is in the idea of a person as 1) the principle of identity in difference developed by the tum-of-the-century British, Canadian and American idealists, and by Plotinus andProclus, 2) Scotus’s “principle of disjunctive transcendentais,” or 3) “the principle of the reciprocity of powers” (attributable to Scotus and to Spinoza). Though they are identical, the third is a variation on the second. It is like the immediate intuitive grasp of the principle as one purely of demonstration: “for instance, whatever I will to happen, happens—unless something gets in the way.”13 This is clearly the principle at work throughout the logic, as well as being the principle by which Spinoza derived the existence of God in E1P1 lDem2. Armour also uses it to the define the relationship of the eternal being of God to the world. Dewan’s objections are that to make sense of Copleston and Maritain, which is Armour’s goal in this paper, then 1) the relation should be defined by a causal rather than a logical principle14 and 2) Armour’s position appears to make the person as involved in eternity related to his or her appearance in time as “the soul is in the body as a pilot is in a ship,”15 whereas they should be related to each other as “the soul being in the body as form in matter, i.e [...] the two constitute one se lf”16 In his reply, Armour emphasizes Dewan’s first objection, arguing that if there is to be a causal relation, then there must be a logical relation and “the unconditioned can be construed as the formal cause of the world, but is not that relation inherently logical?”17 However, in 1987, Armour remarked that “if ethical requirements necessitated in a purely logical way a kind of existence capable of filling their demands, then a world which met those requirements would seem to be required as a kind of fa it accompli, immediately,”18 which is evidently not the case; rather, values incline without necessitating. The thesis that values answer the question why there is something rather than nothing is stronger than is needed for the issue of explaining how the absolute enters into the world, but the latter issue is part of establishing how values answer this question. A value account relies on a non-ontological principle: the existence of values needs no explanation. Such an explanation overcomes the infinite regress of explanations in terms of ontological principles. As it relies on a non-ontological principle, it is general enough moreover to account for any ontological principle, and it is verifiable in the ways people respond to values. Any alternative account has to contradict the rationality of the universe, as the need to explain the whole without breaking it down into separate unrelated parts is the need to view things in terms of values. Also, even assuming we can take the parts on their own, we need to make reference to values to distinguish the parts.19

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However, each of these arguments presupposes the existence, or the effectiveness in the universe, of the idea of the person or community of persons as a formal cause, and this is further apparent in Armour’s accounts of how values might be said to make the transition to actuality in the world The will’s inclination to value is involved in this, along with the ways values affect the part/whole relation in experience, the individuation of things, and the possibility of the scientific investigation of occurrences otherwise reasonably assumed to be random events.20 In contrast, the idea of the person or community of persons, as a value, can be said to become efficacious insofar as its structure is concrete. An analogy of this is found in one’s ability to imagine a possibility so concretely that it is experienced as an actuality: a value in this way acquires the intuited properties of being clearly imaginable and internally coherent. The difference between this and the case of the realization of the good, is in its being an order of things so comprehensive that it is in no way refuted by any other experience. The idea of “relational properties” is important to understanding the attributes of substance and the ways that the order of “the Eternal” (BI 33) is realized in experience, and it is one that Armour develops in dealing with Bradley’s objections to the reality of ideas as relations: these objections are 1) that the connection of a relation and its terms always involves another relation, with the result that the idea is never a complete explanation, and 2) the properties of things owing to their relations and those independent of their relations must be related, but the terms of these relations must be similarly divided in their properties, and so on, with the same result. To have the categories of the logic or the attributes of substance govern the realization of values, these attributes must be like “a characteristic of a thing which establishes a plurality but does not itself require a further relation to explicate it.”21 The answer to this issue is found in “perspectives,” which are not related to things in the way that bridges are related to rivers. They are not something placed over the thing; they are the thing seen in a certain light. Being expressible in and through some activity is a property of the absolute and one that we know that it has.22These perspectives are analogous to Bradley’s finite centres, which are also ideas in the sense of being expressible as order and being expressible as something that exists.23 The idea is not the reality constructed from its expressions; rather, it is the reality preceding its expressions. The idea of idea developed by Armour is thus a promising approach to understanding the metaphysics of Bradley, as this idea of idea and its expressions are analogous to Bradley’s reality and its appearances: both reality and idea necessarily appear or are expressed; they are nothing over and above their appearances or expressions and never exhausted by any of the ways they appear or are expressed. But if the idea is a form of self-reflection with terms in relation, such as a triadic relation of the noticed, the structure of things, and the identified, then the same problem about the reality of relations is left unresolved. The relation can be triadic if the order of the Eternal, through its concreteness, explains the intuition of being and if the intuition of being, through its immediacy, connects this structure of being with the mind’s idea of it. The issues raised by Bradley about the reality of relations can thus be resolved if a relational property is in this sense the intuition of the order of things in substance; if the order of things is what

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is to be explained, however, then the intuition rather than the order is primary, at least in the order of discovery. The attributes of Spinoza’s substance are differing ways in which the order of substance is constituted by a given intuition: thought is given in our experience as the intuition of affirmation and denial that, for Spinoza, is the intuitive aspect of the structure of things ultimately constituting the “infinite intellect”; extension is given in our experience as the intuition of motion and rest that, for Spinoza, ultimately constitutes the entire face of the universe. Spinoza identified the immediate infinite mode of extension as “motion and rest.” Conceived through an attribute, the order of experience intuitively grasped is the mediate infinite mode. So, the order of extension is the “face of the whole universe,” or the same intuition of extension but constitutive of a systematic order, and it is as such that this order is clearly conceivable in an intuition of space. Spinoza’s face of the whole universe, “although varying in infinite ways, yet always remains the same”; it remains the organic whole of substance, as the structure of the real. The immediate infinite mode of thought is the “absolutely infinite intellect.”24 This can be read by analogy with the case of extension as the intuition of affirmation and denial; the mediate infinite mode of thought, the intuitive grasp of the concrete order of ideas, or the intuition of an internally coherent system of ideas, including each of the attributes as nuances on this intuition in the absolutely infinite nature of God. This same order is intuitively apparent through each of the attributes of God. The intuition of an internally coherent system of ideas determines the order of things in substance insofar as it is a mode of a thinking substance, and the intuition of the clarity of the conception of things subject to motion and to rest determines the same order insofar as it is constituted by extension. One order can be said to be constituted by each of the attributes, i.e., the order of dialectical individuality, or the order of experience in a community of centres of experience, each with a moving perspective on the world. For example, if I see a train moving toward me, it is one thing to perceive this motion and another to affirm the idea of this motion, although the order of this motion is in the idea and this motion affects the centre of experience as a motion of one’s whole sense of being in the world. The attributes as intuitions are nevertheless independent: the motion felt by a centre of experience cannot directly contradict its affirmation of any idea in the ways that ideas can, nor can an affirmation of an idea deflect motion. Still, the intuition of motion and rest in extension and that of affirmation and denial in thought both enter into the formation of the order of things, and their corresponding mediate infinite modes—the intuitive clarity and coherence of this order—enter into the ways we develop our conception of the order of things in substance. The interpretation of the attributes as nuances on the intuition of being enables us to understand how eternity as the order of dialectical individuality is commensurable with time in our experience—just as Armour understands this—but also how Spinoza was able to say that we think and feel (sentimus) that we are eternal (E5P23Schol). The attributes as intuitions are an implication, moreover, of the logic developed by Armour: if dialectical individuality is not the absolute and they are on the same level of concreteness, then the absolute is the specific exclusion reference of dialectical individuality. As these categories will have order in common, their joint specific exclusion reference will be

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