A fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, carried tenure for life and no teaching duties; it was forfeit only on marriage. Bradley was elected to one in December 1870, at twenty-four, after more than one earlier failure. He never married, and he held it for the next fifty-three years. The following June a severe inflammation of the kidneys left him permanently liable to be laid low by cold or exhaustion, and he lived from then on in retirement. R. G. Collingwood, later Oxford's Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, lived a few hundred yards away for sixteen years and never once, by his own account, set eyes on him.
What he did with that freedom was go after the philosophy his countrymen had been raised on. English thinking ran on association: ideas were mental pictures, the self a bundle of them, morality a sum of pleasures to be maximised. Ethical Studies (1876) took the ethics of it. Against the utilitarians, John Stuart Mill above all, Bradley argued that their separate individual does not exist: a person becomes a person through the place a community gives him and the duties attached to it. He did not stop there, though his readers did — no man can simply take his morality from the moral world he is in, and morality, pressed hard enough, defeats its own aim. Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge utilitarian whose The Methods of Ethics (1874) the book dismisses in a note, reviewed it in the journal Mind and called it propagandist. Bradley replied in a pamphlet on Sidgwick's hedonism the next year, then let the text stand unaltered for the rest of his life.
The Principles of Logic (1883) took the logic, handling textbook Aristotelianism roughly and Mill with open contempt. Its central move is that a judgement is not two mental images fastened together but an act referring a content to a reality beyond the act. Bertrand Russell acknowledged openly that Bradley's argument convinced him that universal statements are hypothetical in form. Bernard Bosanquet, a fellow idealist, published a book-length criticism in 1885; Bradley answered it thirty-seven years later, in a second edition that left the original text almost as it stood.
Appearance and Reality (1893) carries the claim he is remembered for. Take two things and the relation between them — a book and a table, a cause and its effect. If that relation is itself real, something has to join it to the two things it relates, and that joining is a further relation needing joins of its own, without end. Relations therefore cannot be ultimately real; and since everything we say about the world is said in relations, nothing we say about it is ever quite true. Reality is one experience, taking everything in, never assembled out of parts. The world of separate things is appearance.
Truth then comes in degrees, some statements distorting less than others. In Essays on Truth and Reality (1914) he turned on William James and the pragmatists, and gave up the copy theory of truth, the idea that a true thought reproduces a fact standing outside it. Coherence, in his hands, tests how true a thing is; it does not say what truth consists in, and readers have gone on missing the distinction.
Nothing in the life answers to that intellectual pressure. There is no crisis, no conversion, no repudiation of an earlier position; what pressed was a doctrine he thought false and a body he could not rely on. He was liked and a little feared by the small circle who knew him, and deafness closed him in further as he aged. In 1924 George V gave him the Order of Merit, making him the first British philosopher to receive it; he died of blood poisoning that September and lies in Holywell Cemetery.
T. S. Eliot, then a graduate student at Harvard, wrote his doctoral thesis on Bradley and never took the degree, having missed the viva, the oral examination. Russell and his Cambridge ally G. E. Moore attacked the whole idealist position, and British idealism never recovered its standing in the universities. Serious discussion of Bradley resumed in the nineteen-seventies. His argument about relations is still being fought over in metaphysics today.