BRADLEY, FRANCIS HERBERT British philosopher, was born on Jan. 3o, 1846, at Glasbury, Brecknock, and educated at University college, Oxford, becoming a fellow of Merton in 1876. He was admitted to the Order of Merit in June 1924, and died on Sept. 18 of the same year.
Although greatly indebted to Hegel, Bradley disowned Hegelian ism as a system, and by his own efforts to re-state the case for idealism, made a substantial contribution to philosophy, a con tribution which, together with that of Caird, Green and Bosanquet, was to raise Britain to philosophical pre-eminence. His first large work, Ethical Studies (1876, 2nd ed. 1927), emphasized the neces sity for man first to find himself as a whole and then to bring himself into line with the world of completely harmonized experi ence, with the infinite coherent unity. It attacked utilitarianism by proclaiming that the moral end is the realization of the good will which is universal, free, autonomous, formal and superior to ourselves. The Principles of Logic (1883, 2nd ed. 1927), which infused fresh vitality into the study of logic, brought out the limi tations of the system of Mill, especially of the associationist the ory of inference. But it was Appearance and Reality (1893, 2nd ed. 1897) that stirred the philosophical world and led Caird to remark that it was "the greatest thing since Kant." The main doctrines formulated in this work and in the Essays on Truth and Reality (1914) may be briefly summarized. The ultimate fact is experience which means indissoluble unity with the perceived. But experience, though of itself non-relational, contains implicitly all differentiations of discursive thinking, these differentiations be ing rendered explicit in judgment. To be true a judgment must harmonize with all other judgments, but since the totality of reality is beyond the reach of finite minds, it seems that our par ticular judgments can never be entirely free from error. Thus, for Bradley the real subject of a judgment may be said to be the Absolute, a natural outcome of his view that nature is an appear ance within reality and an imperfect manifestation of the Absolute. What is this Absolute? Certainly neither a sum of finite minds nor a self-conscious mind, for the former implies external rela tions and the latter internal relations, and the point about reality is that it is non-relational, requiring nothing outside of it to com plete its being.
Bradley chooses to call the Absolute Spirit rather than Mind, but in the end, makes the admission that it has no assets beyond appearance.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—Apart from the works mentioned above, Bradley Bibliography.—Apart from the works mentioned above, Bradley wrote The Presuppositions of Critical History (1874) ; Mr. Sidgwick's Hedonism (1877) and numerous articles in Mind which are listed in A. E. Taylor's "Francis Herbert Bradley" in the Proceedings of the Brit. Academy (1926) . See also H. Rashdall, "The Metaphysic of Mr. F. H. Bradley" in the Proceedings of the same body, vol. v. (1912) and various articles in Mind for Jan. 1925.