[131] See [p. 4] and [p. 237].
[132] From “Truth and Copying,” Mind, No. 62.
[133] From “Truth and Practice,” in Mind. Cf. “This denial of transcendence, this insistence that all ideas, and more especially such ideas as those of God, are true and real just so far as they work, is to myself most welcome” (Bradley, in Mind, 1908, p. 227, “Ambiguity of Pragmatism”). Mr. Bradley has of recent years made so many such concessions, and has philosophized with such an admirable degree of independence, and has (also admirably) attached so much weight to his own experience of “metaphysics,” and of other things besides, that many thinkers like Knox and Dewey and Schiller have been discussing whether he can any longer be regarded as a rationalist. One could certainly study, profitably, the whole evolution of philosophy in England during the last forty years by studying Mr. Bradley’s development. He never was, of course, a Hegelian in the complete sense (who ever was?), and he has now certainly abandoned an abstract, formalistic Rationalism.
By way of an additional quotation or two from Mr. Bradley, typical of his advance in the direction of the practical philosophy for which Pragmatism stands, we may append the following: “I long ago pointed out that theory takes its origin from practical collision [the main contention of Professor Dewey and his associates]. If Pragmatism means this, I am a pragmatist” (from an article in Mind on the “Ambiguity of Pragmatism”—italics mine). “We may reject the limitation of knowledge to the mere world of events which happen, and may deny the claim of this world to be taken as an ultimate foundation. Reality or the Good will be the satisfaction of all the wants of our nature, and theoretical truth will be the perception of ideas which directly satisfy one of those wants, and so invariably make part of the general satisfaction. This is a doctrine which, to my mind, commends itself as true, though it naturally would call for a great deal of explanation” (from Mind, July 1904, p. 325). And, as typical of the kind of final philosophy to which the philosophical reconstruction of the future must somehow attain out of the present quarrel between Pragmatism and Rationalism, the following: “If there were no force in the world but the vested love of God, if the wills in the past were one in effort and in substance with the one Will, if in that Will they are living still and still are so loving, and if again by faith, suffering, and love my will is made really one with theirs, here indeed we should have found at once our answer and our refuge. But with this we should pass surely beyond the limits of any personal individualism” (from Mind, July 1904, p. 316). Dr. Schiller, by the way, has a list of such concessions to Pragmatism on the part of Mr. Bradley in Mind, 1910, p. 35.
[134] Cf. the saying of Herbert Spencer (Autobiography, i. 253) that a “belief in the unqualified supremacy of reason [is] the superstition of philosophers.”
[136] “Truth and Practice,” Mind, No. 51.
[137] It would be easy to quote to the same effect from other Hegelian students, or, for that part of it, from Hegel himself.
[138] Elements of Metaphysics, p. 411.
[139] Ibid. p. 414.