and the rational perception of an outside object. But in his metaphysics founded thereon he interprets the outside object to mean an object outside you and me, but not self-subsistent; not outside universal reason, but only “Beënt reason.” He quotes with approval Schelling’s phrase, “Nature is visible Intelligence and Intelligence visible Nature.” He agrees with Hegel that there are two fundamental identities, the identity of all reason, and the identity of all reason and all being. Hence he explains, what is a duality for us is only a “quasi-duality” from a universal standpoint. In fact, his dualism is not realism, but merely the distinction of subject and object within idealism. Laurie’s metaphysics is an attempt to supply a psychological propaedeutic to Hegelian metaphysics.
Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893) is a more original performance. It proceeds on the opposite method of making metaphysics independent of psychology. “Metaphysics,” says he, “has no direct interest in the origin of ideas” (254), and “we have nothing to do here with the psychological origin of the perception” (35). This Bradley. metaphysical method, which we have already seen attempted by Lotze, is the true method, for we know more about things than about the beginnings of our knowledge. Bradley is right to go straight to reality, and right also to inquire for the absolute, in order to take care that his metaphysical view is comprehensive enough to be true of the world as a whole. He is unconsciously returning to the metaphysics of Aristotle in spirit; yet he differs from it toto coelo in the letter. His starting-point is the view that things as ordinarily understood, and (we may add) as Aristotle understood them (though with important qualifications) are self-contradictory, and are therefore not reality but appearances. If they were really contradictory they would be non-existent. However, he illustrates their supposed contradictoriness by examples, such as one substance with many attributes, and motion from place to place in one time. But he fails to show that a substance is one and many in the same respect, and that motion requires a body to be in two places at the same moment of one time. There is no contradiction (as Aristotle said) between a man being determined by many attributes, as rational, six-foot-high, white, and a father, and yet being one whole substance distinct from any other, including his own son; nor is there any contradiction between his body being in bed at 8.15 and at breakfast at 8.45 within the same hour. Bradley’s supposed contradictions are really mere differences. So far he reminds one of Herbart, who founded his “realistic” metaphysics on similar misunderstandings; except that, while Herbart concluded that the world consists of a number of simple “reals,” each with a simple quality but unknown, Bradley concludes that reality is one absolute experience which harmonizes the supposed contradictions in an unknown manner. If his starting-point recalls Herbart his method of arriving at the absolute recalls Spinoza. In his Table of Contents, ch. xiii., on the General Nature of Reality, he says, in true Spinozistic vein, “The Real is one substantially. Plurality of Reals is not possible.” In the text he explains that, if there were a plurality of reals, they would have to be beings independent of each other, and yet, as a plurality related to each other—and this again seems to him to be a contradiction. Throughout the rest of the work he often repeats that a thing which is related cannot be an independent thing. Now, if “independent” means “existing alone” and unrelated the same thing could not be at once related and independent; and, taking substance as independent in that sense, Spinoza concluded that there could only be one substance. But this is not the sense in which a plurality of things would have to be independent in order to exist, or to be substances in the Aristotelian sense. “Independent” (χωριστόν), or “self-subsistent” (καθ’ αὑτό) means “existing apart,” i.e. existing differently: it does not mean “existing alone,” solitary, unrelated. This existing apart is the only sense in which a plurality of things need be independent in order to be real, or in order to be substances; and it is a sense in which they can all be related to each other, as I am not you, but I am addressing you. There is no contradiction, then, though Bradley supposes one, between a thing being an individual, independent, self-subsistent substance, existing apart as a distinct thing, and being also related to other things. Accordingly, the many things of this world are not self-discrepant, as Bradley says, but are distinct and relative substances, as Aristotle said. The argument, therefore, for one substance in Spinoza’s Ethics, and for one absolute, the Real, which is one substantially, in Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, breaks down, so far as it is designed to prove that there is only one substance, or only one Real. Bradley, however, having satisfied himself, like Spinoza, by an abuse of the word “independent,” that “the finite is self-discrepant,” goes on to ask what the one Real, the absolute, is; and, as he passed from Herbart to Spinoza, so now he passes from Spinoza to Kant. Spinoza answered realistically that the one substance is both extended and thinking. Bradley answers idealistically that the one Real is one absolute experience, because all we know is experience. “This absolute,” says he, “is experience, because that is really what we mean when we predicate or speak of anything.” But in order to identify the absolute with experience he is obliged, as he before abused the words “contradictory” and “independent,” so now to abuse the word “experience.” “Experience,” says he, “may mean experience only direct, or indirect also. Direct experience I understand to be confined to the given simply, to the merely felt or presented. But indirect experience includes all fact that is constructed from the basis of the 'this' and the 'mine.' It is all that is taken to exist beyond the bare moment” (248). This is to substitute “indirect experience” for all inference, and to maintain that when, starting from any “direct experience,” I infer the back of the moon, which is always turned away from me, I nevertheless have experience of it; nay, that it is experience. Having thus confused contradiction and difference, independence and solitariness, experience and inference, Bradley is able to deduce finally that reality is not different substances, experienced and inferred, as Aristotle thought it, but is one absolute super-personal experience, to which the so-called plurality of things, including all bodies, all souls, and even a personal God, is appearance—an appearance, as ordinarily understood, self-contradictory, but, as appearing to one spiritual reality, somehow reconciled. But how?
3. Other German Influences.—Brief reference only can be made to four other English idealists who have quarried in the rich mines of German idealism: G. H. Lewes, W. K. Clifford, G. J. Romanes and Karl Pearson. Lewes (q.v.), starting from the phenomenalism of Hume, fell under the spell of Kant and G. H. Lewes. his successors, and produced a compromise between Hume and Kant which recalls some of the later German phenomenalisms which have been described (see his Problems of Life and Mind). Rejecting everything in the Kritik which savoured of the “metempirical,” he yet sympathized so far with Hegel’s noumenalism as to accept the identification of cause and effect, though he interpreted the hypothesis phenomenalistically by saying that cause and effect are two aspects of the same phenomenon. But his main sympathy was with Fechner, the gist of whose “inner psychophysics” he adopted, without, however, the hypothesis that what is conscious in us is conscious in the all-embracing spirit of God. His phenomenalism also compelled him to give a more modified adhesion to Fechner’s “outer psychophysics.” It will be remembered that Fechner regarded every composite body as the appearance of a spirit; so that when, for example, molecular motion of air is said to cause a sensation of sound in me, it is really a spirit appearing as air which causes the sensation in my spirit. This noumenalism would not do for Lewes, who says that air is a group of qualities, and qualities are feelings, and motion is a mode of feeling. What, then, could he make of the external stimulus? He was obliged by his phenomenalism to say that it is only one feeling causing another in me. He ingeniously suggested that the external agent is one feeling regarded objectively, and the internal effect another feeling regarded subjectively; “and therefore,” to quote his own words, “to say that it is a molecular movement which produces a sensation of sound, is equivalent to saying that a sensation of sight produces a sensation of hearing.” Accordingly,
