BOSANQUET, BERNARD ( 1848-1923 ), was born on June 14, 1848, the son of the Rev. R. W. Bosanquet, of Rock Hall, Northumberland. He was educated at Harrow and at Balliol col lege, where he came under the influence of Jowett, T. H. Green and W. L. Newman. From 1871 to 1881 Bosanquet was a fellow and tutor at University college, but from 1881 he made his home in London, devoting himself to philosophical writing and to work on behalf of the Charity Organization Society and of various associations. He married in 1895 Helen Dendy. Eight years later, he returned to academic life as professor of moral philosophy at St. Andrews, a post which he held until 1908. In 1911 and 1912 he delivered in the University of Edinburgh his Gifford lectures on The Principle of Individuality and Value and The Value and Destiny of the Individual. He died in London on Feb. 8, 1923.
Although Bosanquet, like Bradley, owed much to Hegel, his first writings, Knowledge and Reality (1885) and Logic (1888), show the influence of Lotze, whose Logic and Metaphysics he had already edited and translated in 1884. The fundamental principles in these works, which are brought out more clearly in the later and smaller Essentials of Logic (1895) and Implication and Linear Inference (192o), turn on the dynamism of logical thought and the notion of system and coherency, and are summed up in his remark: "Logic, or the spirit of totality, is the clue to reality, value and freedom." In middle life, Bosanquet turned to aesthetics and ethics. Pre viously in 1886 he had introduced a comparatively new subject into British philosophy by his translation of the Introduction of Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Art. His own History of Aesthetics (1892) and the later Three Lectures on Aesthetics show his belief that aesthetics can reconcile, as he himself says, "this world and the other, the a posteriori and the a priori, the natural and the supernatural." In his ethical and social philosophy, the more practical side of which appears in his Suggestions in Ethics (1918) , he shows the same desire to think of reality as a concrete unity wherein "the other world" and "this," pleasure and duty, egoism and altruism are reconciled. This desire he says was in spired by Plato's passion for the unity of the universe, a passion which reappeared in Christianity as the doctrine of the divine spirit present in human society. In social life, the most valuable thing, for Bosanquet, is that communal will which grows out of individual co-operation and at the same time supports the indi vidual, making him free and bestowing upon him the fruits of participation in the whole. This doctrine is developed at length in the famous Philosophical Theory of the State (1899) and Social and International Ideals (1917) .
In later life, Bosanquet became more interested in metaphysics. In the Gifford lectures (see above), he started with Hegel's con ception of the dynamic character of human knowledge and expe rience, and insisting that the content and the object of thought are inseparable, and that thought, as he expresses it in Three Chapters on the Nature of Mind (published posthumously in 1923), is "the development of connections" and "the sense of the whole," ar rived at an indispensable reality beyond and behind experience, a reality which determines the true mutual relations of all beings. He observes in his paper on the formation of his philosophy for Contemporary British Philosophy (1924) that experience has value in so far as the fullness of the whole is reflected in it, and knowl edge is true in proportion as a system has adequate determination and the minimum of alternative possibilities. It was his over emphasis on the incoherencies and hazards of finite personality which led him to deny to this ultimate reality or the Absolute the applicability of the word "personality" and to prefer "indi viduality." And just as he believed that it could not be the su preme end of the Absolute to give rise to beings such as he ex perienced himself to be, so he concluded that the desire for per sonal immortality is unworthy, since the content of the self and the continuance of that for which we care most is secured in the Absolute.
Apart from the works mentioned above, Bosanquet's more im portant writings are Civilization of Christendom (1893), Companion to Plato's Republic (1895), Psychology of the Moral Self (1897) and Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy (1921) . A number of his papers which appeared in various philosophical journals were edited by J. H. Muirhead and R. C. Bosanquet under the title Science and Philosophy (1927) . See also the short biography Bernard Bosanquet by his wife (5924).