Bradley F(rancis) H(erbert) (1846–1924), the most original and influential nineteenth-century British idealist. Born at Clapham, he was the fourth son of an evangelical minister. His younger brother A. C. Bradley was a well-known Shakespearean critic. From 1870 until his death Bradley was a fellow of Merton College, Oxford. A kidney ailment, which first occurred in 1871, compelled him to lead a retiring life. This, combined with his forceful literary style, his love of irony, the dedication of three of his books to an unknown woman, and acclaim as the greatest British idealist since Berkeley, has lent an aura of mystery to his personal life. The aim of Bradley’s first important work, Ethical Studies (1876), is not to offer guidance for dealing with practical moral problems (Bradley condemned this as casuistry), but rather to explain what makes morality as embodied in the consciousness of individuals and in social institutions possible. Bradley thought it was the fact that moral agents take morality as an end in itself which involves identifying their wills with an ideal (provided in part by their stations in society) and then transferring that ideal to reality through action. Bradley called this process ‘selfrealization.’ He thought that moral agents could realize their good selves only by suppressing their bad selves, from which he concluded that morality could never be completely realized, since realizing a good self requires having a bad one. For this reason Bradley believed that the moral consciousness would develop into religious consciousness which, in his secularized version of Christianity, required dying to one’s natural self through faith in the actual existence of the moral ideal.
In Ethical Studies Bradley admitted that a full defense of his ethics would require a metaphysical system, something he did not then have. Much of Bradley’s remaining work was an attempt to provide the outline of such a system by solving what he called ‘the great problem of the relation between thought and reality.’ He first confronted this problem in The Principles of Logic (1883), which is his description of thought. He took thought to be embodied in judgments, which are distinguished from other mental activities by being true or false. This is made possible by the fact that their contents, which Bradley called ideas, represent reality. A problem arises because ideas are universals and so represent kinds of things, while the things themselves are all individuals. Bradley solves this problem by distinguishing between the logical and grammatical forms of a judgment and arguing that all judgments have the logical form of conditionals. They assert that universal connections between qualities obtain in reality. The qualities are universals, the connections between them are conditional, while reality is one individual whole that we have contact with in immediate experience. All judgments, in his view, are abstractions from a diverse but non-relational immediate experience. Since judgments are inescapably relational, they fail to represent accurately non-relational reality and so fail to reach truth, which is the goal of thought. From this Bradley concluded that, contrary to what some of his more Hegelian contemporaries were saying, thought is not identical to reality and is never more than partially true.
Appearance and Reality (1893) is Bradley’s description of reality: it is experience, all of it, all at once, blended in a harmonious way. Bradley defended this view by means of his criterion for reality. Reality, he proclaimed, does not contradict itself; anything that does is merely appearance. In Part I of Appearance and Reality Bradley relied on an infinite regress argument, now called Bradley’s regress, to contend that relations and all relational phenomena, including thought, are contradictory. They are appearance, not reality. In Part II he claimed that appearances are contradictory because they are abstracted by thought from the immediate experience of which they are a part. Appearances constitute the content of this whole, which in Bradley’s view is experience. In other words, reality is experience in its totality. Bradley called this unified, consistent all-inclusive reality ‘the Absolute.’ Today Bradley is mainly remembered for his argument against the reality of relations, and as the philosopher who provoked Russell’s and Moore’s revolution in philosophy. He would be better remembered as a founder of twentiethcentury philosophy who based metaphysical conclusions on his account of the logical forms of judgments. See also BOSANQUET , IDEALISM. J.W.A.