The English philosopher Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924) based his thought on the principles of absolute idealism. He rigorously criticized all philosophies based on the "school of experience."

Born in Clapham on Jan. 30, 1846, F. H. Bradley was educated at University College, Oxford. In 1870 he became a nonteaching fellow at Merton College, Oxford, a post he would be permitted to hold until marriage. Never marrying, he remained a fellow at Merton until his death. Although a sick and often suffering recluse, Bradley spent several winters with a mysterious American woman, Mrs. Radcliffe, for whom he wrote outlines of his metaphysics, which she later destroyed. In character, Bradley may be classified as an English eccentric. While he was a conscientious member of Merton, witty though reserved in his speech and well versed in French literature, he was curiously impressed with his marksmanship and occasionally shot cats in the evening.

Bradley's first published work was a pamphlet, The Presupposition of Critical History (1876). In his first major work, Ethical Studies (1876), Bradley sought to refute John Stuart Mill's philosophy of individualism. The chapter "My Station and Its Duties" was influenced by G. W. F. Hegel's concept of the ethical community and placed the individual within, and dependent upon, the community. Continuing his critique of individualism and atomism in Principles of Logic (1883), Bradley attacked the method of Mill's inductive logic by holding that judgment and inference cannot begin with isolated, particular facts. For Bradley, thought must begin and end with universal statements. Finally, in his metaphysics, Appearance and Reality (1893), Bradley argued that the world of appearances is self-contradictory. Absolute reality, however, is a "seamless whole, complete and harmonious." It transcends discursive thought, but it can be compared with the unity and wholeness felt in immediate experience. Bradley once defined metaphysics as the "finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct."

Bradley's ideas were widely debated by British and American philosophers in the first decades of this century, and his philosophic system is still worthy of study. He was the older brother of A.E. Bradley, the distinguished literary critic. Bradley died of blood poisoning on Sept. 18, 1924.

Further Reading

Richard Wollheim, F. H. Bradley (1960), is a short critical study with bibliographical references and a biographical note. The most recent work on Bradley is Sushil Kumar Saxena, Studies in the Metaphysics of Bradley (1967). For an appreciation of Bradley's literary style see T. S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (1964). For Bradley's place in the history of idealism, good sources are John H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy (1931), and John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (1957; 2d ed. 1966).

For more information on Francis Herbert Bradley, visit Britannica.com.

Bradley, Francis Herbert (1846-1924) British absolute idealist. Educated at Oxford, Bradley was awarded a Fellowship at Merton College that gave him complete leisure for his studies and writing: it is said that he only visited Oxford during the vacations. He was the major British absolute idealist, owing much to the influence at Oxford of Green. His Ethical Studies (1876) is a polemical and fertile attack on utilitarianism, largely on the grounds that the self-sufficient individual that it requires does not exist: individuals gain their identities only through community, and to realize oneself is to contribute to social and other ideals. Bradley's logic was similarly an attack on the basis of empiricism in the atomistic relation of experiences and thoughts to things, which he rejected in favour of an acquaintance with general properties and universals. The metaphysical picture to which this leads is one that celebrates unity and wholeness as attributes of the real, with anything partial and dependent upon division, in the way that thought is, regarded by contrast as flawed and contradictory. Truth as formulated in language is always partial, and dependent upon categories that themselves are inadequate to the harmonious whole. Nevertheless these self-contradictory elements somehow contribute to the harmonious whole, or Absolute, lying beyond categorization. Although absolute idealism maintains few adherents today, Bradley's general dissent from empiricism, his holism, and the brilliance and style of his writing continue to make him the most interesting of the late 19th century writers influenced by Hegel. His battles with the new realism of Russell and Moore, and the complex relationship he had with pragmatism, mark a major crux in the history of philosophy. His major works include Ethical Studies (1876), Principles of Logic (1883), and Appearance and Reality (1893). Collections of his essays include Essays in Truth and Reality (1914) and Collected Essays (1935).

1846–1924, English philosopher. He was educated at Oxford, where he became a fellow of Merton College in 1876. His works include Ethical Studies (1876), Principles of Logic (1883), and Appearance and Reality (1893). In logic, Bradley attacked the psychological tendencies of empiricism by differentiating sharply between the mental act as a psychological event and its universal meaning; to him only the latter was the concern of logic. In metaphysics Bradley held that many phenomena considered real, such as space and time, are only appearances. Reality, or what Bradley called the Absolute, is an all-inclusive whole that transcends thought. Although greatly influenced by Hegel, Bradley's metaphysics is generally considered a highly original contribution to philosophical thought.

Bibliography

See his collection of essays (2 vol., 1935) and T. S. Eliot, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (1989).

(1878-1934)

British author who wrote in support of Spiritualism and psychic phenomena. He was also a direct voice medium, an ability he claimed he developed after his experiences with the medium George Valiantine in America.

The story of his first sittings and Valiantine's first visit to England is told in Bradley's book, Towards the Stars (1924). His second volume, The Wisdom of the Gods (1925), narrates Valiantine's second visit and gives an account of the author's own séances, at which many prominent people attended. He was approached by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR; London) for test sittings, but, on the advice of his controls, he refused. Later Bradley declared open enmity to the SPR, resigned his membership, and in March 1931 issued a pamphlet of indictment.

Bradley was the greatest propagandist and champion of Valiantine's mediumship. He cleared the medium of three exposure charges, only to launch the most serious accusation himself in And After, published in October 1931. As a result, R. Sproull took action for libel against the author, obtained a judgment with £500 damages, and the book was withdrawn after July 1932. By now, Bradley's own enthusiasm had considerably abated. In an interview to the LondonDaily Express on October 8, 1931, he declared that the general tendency of Spiritualism in its present public form was toward evil, that as a religion it was a farce, and that, nevertheless, "genuine phenomena do occur and genuine communication with spirit entities is, in certain cases, possible and practicable." Bradley died November 20, 1934.

Quotes:

"The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care."

"We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings."

"Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst."

"Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink."

"Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct."

"There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth."

See more famous quotes by Francis H. Bradley

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