from Spain (1648), and the Dutch Republic in the 1660s and 1670s was the freest
state in the world. Spinoza’s own political activities were on behalf of freedom of
private religious belief, whereas the German Idealists were wresting control of the
educational system from the theologians and proselytizing the creative freedom of
the philosophical faculty. The difference in the immediate organizational bases for
intellectual life, rather than the political context as a whole, explains the divergent
positions on freedom in these philosophical systems.- Sources on the history of English university reform (Rothblatt, 1981; Engel, 1982;
Green, 1969; Richter, 1969); for international comparisons, see Rothblatt and
Wittrock (1993). - Bradley sardonically expressed his attitude toward religious authority by parking
his bicycle in the Merton College chapel; upon protest that it was desecrating the
holy place, Bradley replied that he was willing to have it consecrated (Richter,
1969: 36–38). - To see bare particulars in the world is not primitive or simple, but an advanced
accomplishment resting on many intellectual distinctions. We ourselves, as well as
children and animals, Bradley declares, first perceive universals. Even indexicals
(“this,” “here”) are in some respect universals, words invocable across situations.
To be sure, there is an indexically inexpressible aspect of every experience, but it
resides not in the particularity of that moment, but in the fact that every “this”
has for its subject reality as a whole; it is the whole which is indexical and
inexpressible. Bradley hints at metaphysical consequences by pointing out that
“this,” unlike other ideas, can never be a symbol of something else. If we could
find all ideas whose contents cannot be used as adjectives of something else, this
would open the way to a new Anselmian ontological proof (Bradley, [1883] 1922:
27, 35, 69, 98). - A foreign member was William James, who founded the American Society for
Psychical Research in 1884, during the time when he was working on his psychol-
ogy. Peirce and Royce participated in the 1880s and 1890s in research on haunted
houses and table turning (Myers, 1986: 11; Brent, 1993: 209, 215, 223). - Bradley’s Logic (1883: 53–55) had started a somewhat similar argument: the fiction
of the atomic now is due to the combination of presence (two events marked as
simultaneous) plus existence (a real appears in the time series, but is not in time).
Bradley concluded that presence is the negation of time. For Bradley, time is mere
appearance, and there may be any number of time-sequence equivalents in the
Absolute. - It was formulated in the Gifford Lectures, 1916–1918, and published in 1920 as
Space, Time, and Deity. Whitehead’s Process and Reality (1929) was from the
Gifford Lectures for 1926–1928. James’s Varieties of Religious Experience was
from the lectures for 1902. The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, endowed
at the Scottish theological strongholds of Edinburgh and Glasgow, were a principal
promoter of Idealist philosophy. - Russell (1967). Perhaps because German Idealism was acquiring a bad name under
the influence of Russell’s polemics, Whitehead pretended that his system was a
development of themes in the classical tradition from Descartes to Locke and
1010 •^ Notes to Pages 664–671