Logic (1883) criticized John Stuart Mill’s inductivism for glossing over the
universals hidden in its “resemblances” among sensations, and argued that
isolated propositions always rest on unstated assumptions.^44 Syllogistic and
other formal logics are too narrow; the true subject of logic is always reality
as a whole, and our thought at any moment is always an abstraction, incom-
plete and one-sided. In 1893 these ingredients were built into a full-scale
metaphysical system in Appearance and Reality. Any relation between items is
unintelligible without further relations which attach the relation to its relata,
and these in turn give rise to an infinite regress of intermediating links. Both
copula and identity are relations, and their downfall has far-reaching conse-
quences. Causality is an infinite web of conditions, never complete, unintelli-
gible in its relation to its effects, simultaneously continuous and discontinuous.
Substances and their qualities are condemned by this critique; so too space and
time, motion and change, selves and things. All these must be appearances
only, not reality.
Yet error is never total; it too is part of the larger Reality (now capitalized,
and referred to as the Absolute). Bradley wields the techniques of skepticism
to clear the ground for something positive. There is an ultimate criterion for
Reality, the non-contradictoriness invoked in Bradley’s previous arguments;
and this points the direction in which the Absolute reconciles our difficulties,
even if we cannot know just how this is done. Our contradiction-riddled
thought is not reality, but our inevitably relational form of thinking implies a
completion beyond itself. Bradley resonates a religious sense of human finitude
and dependence on a larger harmony. The latter part of his system takes on
increasingly the shape of a philosophical if rather heretical religion. Evil is
one-sidedness which somehow finds its place in the Absolute; so too must
appearances of bodies and souls. Personal immortality, however, is improbable,
and Bradley would rather be free of degrading superstition (Bradley, 1893:
448–452). Bradley’s style is beautifully attuned to his message. Its concise
formulations set up crisp paradoxes; its elegant puncturing of opponents and
its polite self-deprecation are enfolded in the clarity and symmetry of its
architecture; the whole moves to a stately rhythm which assures us ultimately
that all is well. It is a perfect expression of the Oxford intellectual aristocracy
at its height, the philosophical counterpart of the aesthetics of Walter Pater
and Oscar Wilde.
Bradley illustrates the width of the turf which Idealism had located. He
proceeds via the criterion of non-contradiction, reversing the emphasis on
dialectic as used by Hegel and his followers (as in the evolutionary develop-
mentalism of Caird, who was, not surprisingly, a critic of Bradley). Relations
which Green had taken as evidence of mind in constructing the universe
Bradley holds to be incoherent. Like all intellectual movements, Idealism pros-668 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths