The dominion which his principle gave to Hegel over intellectual Europe at the beginning of the 19th century is one of the romances of philosophical history. There were three impressive features of him and his system. First, here was a thinker with apparently sufficient range to confront the entire field of man's then recorded experience of himself and the universe; in the second place he seemed to succeed in throwing whole territories of experience for the first time into some sort of order; and thirdly—the really re markable circumstance—these results precipitated themselves in obedience to the assumption that the universe was the expression of spirit. It may be difficult to account for the currency of these beliefs about Hegel, but granted their currency there is nothing surprising in the impression he made.
This is one of the important works of the school. It is initially a constructive criticism of the empirical standpoint in ethics, its interest being to show the impossibility of either, with materialism, deriving self-consciousness from something other than itself or, with hedonism, defining the moral end by reference to something other than itself. Against the objection, almost inevitably arising, that Green is here eliminating the possibility of a logical or rational account of these matters at all, there is but one resource. It is to inquire what logic is and how far the new meaning which Kant threw into it is defensible.
Neo-Hegelianism is thus at heart a logical doctrine, and Bosan quet, whose Logic (1896, 2nd ed. 1911) together with Bradley's
Principles of Logic (1883, 2nd ed. 1922) may be said to provide the technique of the whole way of thinking, expresses the spirit of it equally accurately and simply when he suggests that a colour harmony may have logical necessity as well as a syllogism. The logic which permits such a saying is a logic of coherence. Stress upon coherence is a leading feature of Bosanquet's mind and writing. He does not, in vindicating his general position, press upon his reader the logical compulsiveness of the Kantian start ing-point as Green does. He is content to exhibit the coherence which comes into our view of things when we decide to read the universe in the light of our highest experiences in it. Only in those is the coherence of the world revealed to us. And when we see how it coheres we see it as it is.
In the logical doctrine of coherence a metaphysical doctrine is involved, that of "degrees of reality." What we call our "highest" experiences occur only intermittently ; and they suggest rather than express what is meant by coherence. As will, I seek the good; I rarely if ever actually find it in realizing the social will. On the other side, as intelligence, I seek the true ; I shall only com paratively seldom find it in the propositions which were supremely important to my human nature as it is. None the less these rare experiences are those showing reality, giving reality in pro portion as they are full and unqualified. This coincidence of reality with what man encounters when "at his fullest stretch" is the theme of the two volumes of Gifford Lectures in which Bosanquet's long term of philosophical activity culminates, The Principle of Individuality and Value (1912, 2nd ed. 1927) and The Value and Destiny of the Individual (1913, 2nd ed. 1923).
But since man is not always at his fullest stretch, and since what he encounters and experiences in his casual moods must also be real, a doctrine of grades or degrees of reality is involved. This vital implication of Neo-Hegelianism is bared to the bone only in the metaphysical essay by F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (1893, 8th impression, 1925) usually allowed to be the greatest work emanating from the Neo-Hegelian school.
Bradley argues for one ultimate system of experience which is reality, and shows that nothing finite is real taken as it stands.