Stern R. Hegelian Metaphysics

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330 James and Bradley on Limits of Human Understanding

experience rather than synthesizing it: for pure experiences are an interrelated

continuum of elements, from which a world of distinct and independent objects

must be carved out. According to James, we ‘add a lot of conceptual experiences’

to a ‘nucleus’ of ‘perceptual experiences’, so that ‘a lot of originally chaotic pure

experiences [become] gradually differentiated into an orderly inner and outer

world’.¹² In this way, James argues, parts of the ﬂux of experience become

‘identiﬁed and ﬁxed and abstracted’, and then the familiar conceptual structure

of ‘adjectives and nouns and propositions and conjunctions’ (and with them

the familiar Aristotelian ontology of substances, attributes and relations) can be

applied.¹³

Nonetheless, inspired here by Henri Bergson, whose work he very much

admired,¹⁴ James took the view that while this conceptual structure of ‘adject-

ives and nouns and propositions and conjunctions’ (and its accompanying

ontology) may serve a useful practical purpose in giving a ﬁxed structure to

the ﬂux of experience, in fact our concepts can never capture its essential

nature of becoming, and will inevitably fall into falsifying forms of oppositional

thinking:

The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our concepts are all

discontinuous and ﬁxed, and the only mode of making them coincide with life is

by arbitrarily supposing positions of arrest therein ....When we conceptualize, we

cut out and ﬁx, and exclude everything but what we have ﬁxed. A concept means

a that-and-no-other. Conceptually, time excludes space; motion and rest exclude each

other; approach excludes contact; presence excludes absence; unity excludes plurality;

independence excludes relativity; ‘mine’ excludes ‘yours’; this connection excludes that

connection—and so on indeﬁnitely; whereas in the real concrete sensible ﬂux of life

experiences compenetrate each other so that it is not easy to know just what is excluded

and what not.¹⁵

James argues that ‘before reﬂection shatters our instinctive world for us’, by

introducing concepts that divide up the ﬂux of experience, ‘the active sense of

living which we all enjoy ...is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes’ and

no ‘intellectual contradictions’.¹⁶ As we shall see, it is in the inability of our

conceptual thought to grasp the dynamic unity of the given that James locates

the limitations of the human intellect.

¹² Cf. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 17–18. ¹³ Ibid., 46.

¹⁴ For further details of the relationship between James and Bergson, see Ralph Barton Perry,

The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936),

Vol. 2, 599–636. For an accessible work by Bergson in which the afﬁnities with James are clear,

see ‘Introduction to Metaphysics’, in The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics,trans.

M. L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946).

¹⁵ James, A Pluralistic Universe (Cambridge Mass. and London: Harvard University Press,

1977), 113.

¹⁶ James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 45.

James and Bradley on Limits of Human Understanding 331

James’s radical empiricism therefore constitutes a form of dynamic holism,

according to which reality is not made up of stable, mutually distinct entities,

in the way that we conceptualize it, but rather all apparently ontologically

independent things are carved out from an ever-changing ﬂux of experience,

which we cut up and ﬁx using the categories of reﬂection. To use an illustration

employed by James, the division between aspects of experience as we conceptualize

them is no more a break in the ﬂux of life than a joint in a piece of bamboo

is a break in the wood: the former are breaks in a continuous ﬂux just as

much as the joint in the bamboo is a break in a continuous piece of wood.¹⁷

In this way, James argues that it is wrong to think of reality as conceptually

divisible by reﬂection, and insists that the fragmented picture implied by

traditional atomistic empiricism should be replaced by his picture of dynamic

holism.

Now, while the afﬁnity between James’s outlook and Bergson’s is clear and

well-attested on both sides, the common ground between James and Bradley is

perhaps less easy to make out. For, if James and Bergson stand with Heraclitus

in developing a metaphysics of process, Bradley stands with Parmenides, in

holding that ‘reality is one’,¹⁸ and ruling out change as a mere appearance.

Moreover, as part of this monistic picture, Bradley notoriously rejected the

reality of relations, while James (as we have seen) based his radical empiricism

on the claim that relations are given in experience and should be treated as

real. Bradley showed no sympathy for James’s construal of life as a plurality of

interconnected elements forming a dynamic unity of ﬂux, and always held that

‘plurality as appearance ...must fall within, must belong to, and must qualify

the unity’,¹⁹ thereby rejecting James’s conception of reality in favour of the

Parmenidean One.

However, while not denying that this difference in outlook is substantial,

this should not obscure the important afﬁnities that James (and Bergson) had

with Bradley, of which James himself was keenly aware. In his article ‘Bradley

or Bergson?’, James refers to three important similarities: First, they all treat

immediate experience as ‘an immediately intuited much-at-once’; second they all

reject the Kantian notion of synthesis; and third, they agree that ‘the conceptual

function’ of thought is inadequate as a tool for comprehending the unity of

things.²⁰ This is, I think, an accurate assessment of the extent of the common

ground between these thinkers, and it is not insubstantial, as I will now show.

The central similarity between the approach adopted by James and Bradley

lies in their rejection of the atomistic assumptions lying behind Kantian idealism.

¹⁷ James, Principles of Psychology,Vol.1,233–4.

¹⁸ Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay, 2nd edn., 9th impression (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1930), 460.

¹⁹ Ibid. ²⁰ James, Essays in Philosophy, 151–2.

332 James and Bradley on Limits of Human Understanding

Whereas James, as we have seen, came to this position as part of his radicalization

of empiricism, Bradley came to it via Hegel, and his critique of Kant’s doctrine

of synthesis: but, as I have mentioned earlier and elaborated elsewhere,²¹ Hegel’s

critique shares much with James’s radical rejection of the claim that it is necessary

to begin with atomistic assumptions in the construction of our experience of the

material world. While James himself was (perhaps not unnaturally) unwilling

to recognize his closeness to Hegel in this respect, Bradley rightly insisted on

making this point, commenting in a letter to James of 1910, ‘I don’t think

the fastening together of an originally discrete datum is really Hegelian. I think

myself that Hegel is far more on your side’.²² Bradley puts the point even more

clearly and forcefully in his ‘Disclaimer’ published in response to James’s article

‘Bradley or Bergson?’ later in the same year:

The too ﬂattering notice of myself by Professor James in the Journal [of Philosophy]

(January), contains a statement which I think I should ask leave to correct. Professor

James credits me with ‘breaking loose from the Kantian tradition that immediate feeling

is all disconnectedness’. But all that I have really done here is to follow Hegel. In this and

in some other points I saw long ago that English psychology had a great deal to learn from

Hegel’s teaching. To have seen this, and to some extent to have acted on it, is all that

common honesty allows me to claim. How far Hegel himself in this point was original,

and how again M. Bergson conceives his own relation to post-Kantian philosophy, are

matters that here do not concern me. I write merely to disclaim for myself an originality

which is not mine. It belongs to me no more than does that heroical perversity or perverse

heroism with which I ﬁnd myself credited.²³

Bradley’s point here is an entirely fair one. In the third book of his Encyclopaedia

of the Philosophical Sciences, The Philosophy of Mind, Hegel begins his discussion

of the evolution of mind not with the experience of atomistic sense-perception,

but with a discussion of ‘the feeling soul’ (die f¨uhlende Seele), which (like James)

Hegel associates with states of mind lacking in self-consciousness, prior to the

division of subject from object, and awareness of space, time, self, and an

external world of discrete particulars.²⁴ In placing this mode of experience prior

to sense-perception, Hegel (like Bradley and James) treats the atomism of the

latter as a development out of a felt totality, and so refuses to treat the content

of sense-perception as providing the basic atomistic elements out of which our

experience of reality is constructed.

²¹ See Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object, 7–29.

²² Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, Vol. 2, 643.

²³ Bradley, ‘A Disclaimer’.

²⁴ Cf. for example, EM, §406Z, 110 [Werke, X: 144]: ‘But in so far as I am at ﬁrst only a feeling

soul, not as yet awakened, free self-consciousness, I am aware of this actuality of mine, of this world

of mine, in a purely immediate,quiteabstractly positive manner, since, as we have already remarked,

at this stage I have not as yet posited the world as separate from me, not as yet posited it as an

external existence, and my knowledge of it is therefore not as yet mediated by the opposition of

subjectivity and objectivity and by the removal of this opposition.’

James and Bradley on Limits of Human Understanding 333

Moreover, it is Hegel whom Bradley is following when, like James and Bergson,

he argues that it is reﬂective thought that leads us to view the world atomistically,

and that concepts employed by such forms of thought are inadequate as tools

for grasping the unity of reality. Just as Hegel had criticized the categories of

the understanding and the forms of judgment as one-sidedly dividing up the

differentiated unity contained in experience, so too Bradley argues that this unity

appears paradoxical to our ways of thinking, thereby adopting a position with

which (as we have seen) James and Bergson would also agree. In this respect, it

is striking to note how far the standpoint of Bradley’s anti-Kantian Hegelianism

coincides with that of James’s radical empiricism.

However, these similarities in outlook notwithstanding, it must now be shown

how there is a central divergence in approach between Bradley on the one hand

and James (and Bergson) on the other, and this (I will argue) made it impossible

for their views to ‘coalesce’.²⁵ I will now suggest that the fundamental contrast

between Bradley and James is not between the former’s monism and the latter’s

dynamic holism, on which I have already remarked, and of which James only

made much in his more popular and polemical writings: rather, I will suggest,

the fundamental contrast is that between two views of the ends of man, and of

the ‘theoretical interest’,²⁶ which in their letters and more considered exchanges

emerges as the clear point of difference that lay between them. It is this difference

that must now be explored.

Beginning now with Bradley, his conception of the ends of man and of the

theoretical interest may best be characterized as that of a pessimistic Hegelian:

for although he shared Hegel’s belief that from an absolute perspective real-

ity must be ultimately intelligible, coherent, and rational, he departed from

Hegel in denying that it could ever be so for us. The contrast can be brought

out clearly by comparing the following passages, the ﬁrst from Hegel’s Lec-

tures on the History of Philosophy, the second from Bradley’s Appearance and

Reality:

The love of truth, faith in the power of mind, is the ﬁrst condition in Philosophy. Man,

because he is Mind, should and must deem himself worthy of the highest; he cannot

think too highly of the greatness and power of his mind, and, with this belief, nothing will

be so difﬁcult and hard that it will not reveal itself to him. The Essence of the universe,

at ﬁrst hidden and concealed, has no power which can offer resistance to the search for

²⁵ Cf. Letter to Bradley from James, January 1910; in Kenna, ‘Ten Unpublished Letters’,

329–30.

²⁶ This phrase is used by Bradley: cf. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James,Vol.2,

489.

334 James and Bradley on Limits of Human Understanding

knowledge; it has to lay itself open before the seeker—to set before his eyes and give for

his enjoyment, its riches and its depths.²⁷

This intellectual ideal, we know, is not actual fact. It does not exist in our world, and,

unless that world were changed radically, its existence is not possible. It would require

an alteration of the position in which the intellect stands, and a transformation of its

whole connection with the remaining aspects of experience. We need not cast about for

arguments to disprove our omniscience, for at every turn through these pages our weakness

has been confessed. The universe in its diversity has been seen to be inexplicable ....Our

system throughout its detail is incomplete.²⁸

Hegel’s faith in the possibilities of human understanding is here rejected by

Bradley in his more limited assessment of our rational powers. But, as we shall

see, Bradley never doubts that the universe itself is rational; he just denies that

we can ever grasp its rationality, given the limitedness of the human intellect and

the system of knowledge it can construct.

Bradley’s position here may perhaps better be understood when compared

with the more optimistic rationalism of the seventeenth and early eighteenth

centuries, of which Hegel’s faith in the power of the human mind is an echo.

Edward Craig has argued that this rationalism was driven by two central beliefs:

that man is made in the image of God (the Similarity Thesis) and that the

world is thoroughly intelligible to the human mind (the Insight Ideal). The

connection between the two is straightforward: as the world has been created

by God according to a rational plan, and our reason resembles the rationality of

the creator, nothing could lie beyond human understanding. In this way, our

progress in the comprehension of the universe is assured.

Now, while Bradley did not deny that the world was at bottom rationally

ordered, and would appear so to some absolute intelligence, he rejected the

vital Similarity Thesis, and so denied that we could approximate to this inﬁnite

intellect. He therefore went on to deny that we could understand the ultimate

nature of the world, and so could fulﬁl the promise of the Insight Ideal. Our

position is both tragic and absurd: we are destined always to strive for the

enlightenment that could come from the absolute standpoint, but also destined

never to reach that standpoint, thanks to the unavoidable limitedness of our form

of intellect.

But in what way, then, is our form of intellect limited, and what is it about

reality that, according to Bradley, we can never understand? In answering this

question, we will see how far Bradley departs from the assumptions of the

seventeenth-century Insight Ideal, by incorporating an Hegelian notion of what

rational insight consists in.

²⁷ LHP, I, xiii (trans. modiﬁed) [Werke, XVIII: 13–14].

²⁸ Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 458.

James and Bradley on Limits of Human Understanding 335

For the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century rationalists, as Craig ex-

plains,²⁹ rendering the world intelligible meant understanding why one thing

happened rather than another, and (ultimately) why there is something rather

than nothing. In other words, it is our ability to explain the reasons and causes

of things that makes the world rationally transparent, and only if no such causes

could be found or if no explanation of the operation of causes could be reached,

would the world be rendered unintelligible. Behind this ideal of explanation

clearly lies a conception of God as creator: for, as creator God must have had

reasons for bringing t hings about as they happen, and in so far as we can

approximate to the intellect of God, it is these explanations, which render causal

connections ‘intelligible’, that will be vouchsafed to us.³⁰ To the seventeenth-

and early eighteenth-century rationalists, therefore, questions concerning the

rationality of the world came down to questions concerning the intelligibility

of causation, while the human intellect could only be limited if the latter could

not be fathomed. It was this problem (as Craig explains) that the pre-Humean

notion of causation was designed to overcome.

It is important to see, however, that for Bradley questions concerning the

rationality of the world do not centre around the intelligibility or otherwise of

causation, and our ability (or inability) to explain why one thing happens rather

than another, or why this cause has this effect. Rather, for Bradley, questions

concerning the intelligibility of the world resolve themselves into questions

regarding our ability (or inability) to grasp the unity-in-difference of reality using

our concepts and modes of thought: this matters to him more than questions

concerning causation. Put slightly differently, whether or not the world can be

rendered rationally transparent to us does not depend upon our making the

causal connections we experience intelligible; rather, it depends on us reaching

a uniﬁed conception of reality, which is free of contradiction and dialectical

tension, and it is this we cannot do, or properly understand:

We have seen that the various aspects of experience imply one another, and that all point

to a unity which comprehends and perfects them. And I would urge next that the unity

of these aspects is unknown. By this I certainly do not mean to deny that it essentially is

experience, but it is an experience of which, as such, we have no direct knowledge. We

never have, or are, a state which is the perfect unity of all aspects; and we must admit that

in their special natures they remain inexplicable. An explanation would be a reduction of

²⁹ Craig, TheMindofGodandtheWorksofMan, 37–44.

³⁰ As Craig puts it: ‘...causal connections had to be ‘‘intelligible’’. There had to be something,

in principle detectable by reason, which made that effect suited to that, that lawlike relationship

between those two variables appropriate rather than any other. If it were not so, there would be

facts about the course of events which were intrinsically inexplicable; and this thought, because of

its position in the complex of ideas composing the epistemological version of the Image of God

doctrine, was in the seventeenth century widely felt to be intolerable’ (ibid., 39–40).

336 James and Bradley on Limits of Human Understanding

their plurality to unity, in such a way that the relation between the unity and the variety

was understood. And everywhere an explanation of this kind in the end is beyond us.³¹

In essence, Bradley’s position is this: In trying to understand the unity that

we ﬁnd in our original experience of preconceptual feeling, we conceptual-

ize and analyse the world into different elements, which we can then never

reintegrate into the kind of uniﬁed picture with which we began, and which

then becomes unintelligible to us. We are therefore left with a view of the

world that appears contradictory to our intellect, for we can never comprehend

how it is that apparently diverse aspects of our experience constitute a unity,

due to the limited and oppositional nature of our concepts and modes of

thought.

Bradley’s position here is clearly Hegelian, in that great emphasis is placed

on the way in which our modes of thought and concepts lead us to see the

world in a manner that generates contradictions and incoherence by imposing

one-sided distinctions on the unity of reality; but Bradley departs from Hegel

in not offering any real hope that our modes of thought and concepts might

be transformed, in such a way as to make a coherent world view possible for

us as thinking beings. Thus, whereas Hegel postulated reason as a form of

human comprehension that might succeed in making reality transparent to our

intellect,³² Bradley suggests that only in some kind of transcendence of human

thinking altogether might such a vision be possible, and he offers no real hope

that for us this could be attained. Nonetheless, as I have said, Bradley remains

a rationalist in that he does not deny that to some form of apprehension the

contradictions that appear so insuperable to our mode of understanding would

be resolved, and so never denies that viewed aright, everything is thoroughly

intelligible, though not in a way that we could ever grasp. In this way, like

Hegel, Bradley makes room for a mode of comprehension that lies beyond

the dialectical contradictions of ﬁnite human understanding; but, unlike Hegel,

he never explains what such a mode of comprehension might be like, and

never suggests that we could attain it, arguing that only in the prereﬂective

and preconceptual experience of feeling do we gain some unreﬂective sense of

the unity-in-difference which in our reﬂective thought we can never render

intelligible:

That on which my view rests is the immediate unity which comes in feeling, and in a

sense this unity is ultimate. You have here a whole which at the same time is each and

all of its parts, and you have parts each of which makes a difference to all the rest and to

the whole. This unity is not ultimate if that means that we are not forced to transcend it.

But it is ultimate in the sense that no relational thinking can reconstitute it, and again

in the sense that in no relational thinking can we ever get free from the use of it. And

³¹ Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 414–15.

³² For a discussion of Hegel’s position, see my Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object, 54–7.

James and Bradley on Limits of Human Understanding 337

an immediate unity of one and many at a higher remove is the ultimate goal of our

knowledge and of every endeavour.³³

Thus, as I see it, Bradley’s Weltanschauung may be summarized as follows:

Although at the preconceptual level of feeling we gain some prereﬂective insight

into the way in which reality is in fact coherent and uniﬁed, as soon as we begin

to seek conceptual understanding we are faced with contradictions and apparent

absurdities that we cannot resolve, in so far as we cannot transcend the forms

of limited thinking and reﬂection that constitute our form of intellectual appre-

hension. In this way, Bradley argues, our efforts at philosophical understanding

and comprehension must always remain in vain, and our intellectual quest to

resolve the deep problems raised by our way of viewing the world will always be

frustrated, leaving the promises of rationalistic philosophy forever unfulﬁlled.

III

Turning now to James, we are faced with a thinker with a less exalted but

more vigorous philosophical temperament, who can accept the limitations of

the human intellect with greater equanimity because his pragmatism enabled

him to come to terms with them. While (as we have seen) Bradley felt the

pull of the ideals of intellectualist rationalism, without being able to see how

those ideals could be attained, James’s pragmatist empiricism meant that he was

never under the spell of such hopes, and so could not identify with the note of

melancholic exile that Bradley so often struck. The reason for this difference is

quite simple: James saw in what Craig has called ‘the practice ideal’ a way out

of the predicament of ‘purely theoretic rationality’,³⁴ sothatwhileheinvariably

agreed with Bradley’s negative conclusions regarding the human intellect, this

was viewed by James in a rather different light, one that contrasts sharply with

Bradley’s ‘rather ascetic doctrine’.³⁵

The clearest juxtaposition of the insight and practice ideals offered by James

himself comes in the following passage from The Meaning of Truth,whichis

worth quoting at some length:

As I understand the pragmatist way of seeing things, it owes its being to the break-down

which the last ﬁfty years have brought about in the older notions of scientiﬁc truth.

‘God geometrizes’, it used to be said; and it was believed that Euclid’s elements literally

³³ Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, 230–1. The view that the unity-in-difference of reality is

hard for us to grasp is nicely put by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his notebook for October 1803: ‘I

would make a pilgrimage to the Deserts of Arabia to ﬁnd the man who could make me understand

how the one can be many! Eternal universal mystery! It seems as if it were impossible, yet it is —and

it is every where’.

³⁴ James, ‘The Sentiment of Rationality’, in The Will to Believe (Cambridge, Mass. and London:

Harvard University Press, 1979), 65.

³⁵ James, A Pluralistic Universe, 96.

338 James and Bradley on Limits of Human Understanding

reproduced his geometrizing. There is an eternal and unchangeable ‘reason’; and its voice

was supposed to reverberate in Barbara and Celarent.Soalsoofthe‘lawsofnature’,

physical and chemical, so of natural history classiﬁcations—all were supposed to be exact

and exclusive duplicates of pre-human archetypes buried in the structure of things, to

which the spark of divinity hidden in our intellect enables us to penetrate. The anatomy

of the world is logical, and its logic is that of a university professor, it was thought. Up

to about 1850 almost everyone believed that sciences expressed truths that were exact

copies of a deﬁnite code of non-human realities. But the enormously rapid multiplication

of theories in these latter days has well-nigh upset the notion of any one of them being

a more literally objective kind of thing than another. There are so many geometries, so

many logics, so many physical and chemical hypotheses, so many classiﬁcations, each one

of them good for so much and yet not good for everything, that the notion that even

the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript has dawned upon

us. We hear scientiﬁc laws now treated as so much ‘conceptual shorthand’, true so far

as they are useful but no farther ....It is to be doubted whether any theorizer to-day,

either in mathematics, logic, physics or biology, conceives himself to be literally re-editing

processes of nature or thoughts of God. The main forms of our thinking, the separation of

subjects from predicates, the negative, hypothetic and disjunctive judgments, are purely

human habits. The ether, as Lord Salisbury said, is only a noun for the verb to undulate;

and many of our theological ideas are admitted, even by those who call them ‘true’, to be

humanistic in like degree.³⁶

There are several points to be noted about this passage. First, in a way that Craig

explains and we have already commented upon, James associates the Insight

Ideal with the Similarity Thesis: only in so far as a person ‘conceives himself

to be literally re-editing processes of nature or thoughts of God’ could he or

she think that ‘there is an eternal and unchangeable ‘‘reason’’ ...buried in the

structure of things, to which the spark of divinity hidden in our intellect enables

us to penetrate’. Secondly, James assumes that no right-thinking person could

now take this picture seriously, and must instead adopt ‘the pragmatist way of

seeing things’, according to which ‘even the truest formula may be a human

device and not a literal transcript’. Thirdly, James suggests that the reason why

the pragmatist’s picture has replaced that of the rationalist is the proliferation

of competing logics, geometries, classiﬁcatory schemes, physical and chemical

hypotheses, so that ‘the enormously rapid multiplication of theories in these

latter days has well-nigh upset the notion of any one of them being a more

literally objective kind of thing than another’. From this, James draws the radical

but familiar conclusion that ‘the main forms of our thinking, the separation of

subjects from predicates, the negative, the hypothetic and disjunctive judgments,

are purely human habits.’

From this passage, it appears that James predicated the move to pragmatism

on the collapse of the Similarity Thesis and the Insight Ideal, and that like a

³⁶ James, ‘Pragmatism’ and ‘The Meaning of Truth’ , 206–7 [40–1].

James and Bradley on Limits of Human Understanding 339

wide range of ﬁn de si`ecle thinkers, ³⁷ he based his diagnosis of that collapse on

our inability to determine which of several competing theoretical conceptions is

valid. It seems that James’s adoption of pragmatism was motivated by a failure

of the rationalist attempt to provide one coherent picture that might ‘ﬁt’ reality,

and by the realization that it is impossible to establish which of several different

theories correspond to the way things really are.

James then goes on to make the move, which has become so familiar to us,

of arguing that our concepts and categories have emerged in order to serve our

practical purpose in negotiating our way around the world, and not because they

are grounded in some insight into the nature of things:

The notions of one Time and of one Space as single continuous receptacles; the

distinction between thoughts and things, matter and mind; between permanent subjects

and changing attributes; the conception of classes with sub-classes within them; the

separation of fortuitous from regularly causal connections; surely all these were once

deﬁnite conquests made at historic dates by our ancestors in their attempts to get the

chaos of their c rude individual experiences into a more shareable and manageable shape.

They proved of such sovereign use as denkmittel that they are now a part of the very

structure of our mind. We cannot play fast and loose with them. No experience can upset

them. On the contrary, they apperceive every experience and assign it to its place.

To what effect? That we may better foresee the course of our experiences, communicate

with one another, and steer our lives by rule. Also that we may have a cleaner, clearer,

more inclusive mental view.³⁸

We have here all the essential characteristic of Craig’s ‘practice ideal’: our modes

of thought have evolved in such a way as to enable us to act in the world and

communicate with each other about it, and in so far as we can do this efﬁciently

and effectively, there is nothing further required. Other creatures, in response to

differing practical imperatives and as a result of different forms of experience,

may have conceptualized the world differently, and no way of conceptualizing the

world can have any claim to be ‘absolute’, in the sense of constituting some ﬁnal,

objective, determinate insight into ‘the truth’.³⁹ Viewed in this way, Bradley’s

claim, that there is one absolute standpoint and conception of the world from

which it is utterly intelligible, begins to look less likely and less troubling: less

likely, because we now have many competing conceptions of the world, all of

³⁷ Cf. John Skorupski, ‘The Legacy of Modernism’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 91,

1990–1, 1–19.

³⁸ James, ‘Pragmatism’ and ‘The Meaning of Truth’, 208 [42].

³⁹ Cf. James, Ibid., 209 [43]: ‘ ...we respond [to experience in its pristine purity] by ways of

thinking which we call ‘‘true’’ in proportion as they facilitate our mental or physical activities and

bring us outer power and inner peace. But whether the Other, the universal That, has itself any

deﬁnite inner structure, or whether, if it have any, the structure resembles any of our predicted

whats, this is a question which humanism leaves untouched. For us, at any rate, it insists, reality is

an accumulation of our own intellectual inventions, and the struggle for ‘‘truth’’ in our progressive

dealings with it is always a struggle to work in new nouns and adjectives while altering as little as

possible the old.’