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WorkF. H. Bradley

Appearance and Reality

Things, space, time, cause and the self each shown to contradict itself — and behind the wreckage one sentient experience Bradley called the Absolute.

by F. H. Bradley656 passages held

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First published
(aged 47)
Original language
English

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Overview

A fellowship at Merton College, Oxford, won in December 1870, gave Francis Herbert Bradley an income for life and no teaching duties, on terms he could forfeit only by marrying; he never married. A severe kidney inflammation the following June left him liable to be laid out by cold or exhaustion for the rest of his days. He wrote slowly, in college, answerable to no one, and in 1893 Swan Sonnenschein published the result. Its first book takes the ordinary furniture of thought — a thing and its qualities, space, time, motion, cause, the self — and shows each to be contradictory. The argument that does the damage concerns relations. A lump of sugar is white and sweet and hard; whatever relates those qualities must itself stand in some relation to them, and that relation in some further relation, without end. Nothing relational, Bradley concluded, can be finally true. The second book then argues that reality is nonetheless one thing, a single sentient experience he named the Absolute, in which every appearance is preserved and transformed rather than discarded. Two idealists, J. M. E. McTaggart in England and Josiah Royce in America, reviewed it in 1894, and the book was later credited with pulling the philosophical initiative back from the Continent to Britain. A graduate student at Harvard, T. S. Eliot, wrote his doctoral thesis on Bradley. A second edition in 1897 added an appendix answering critics. The next generation, Russell and Moore among them, attacked the whole position, and British idealism never recovered its standing in the universities. Bradley's regress about relations is still argued over in metaphysics today.

Key concepts

What does Bradley mean by appearance?

Something reality actually presents, but not in a form that can be thought through without contradiction. An appearance is not an illusion and is not discarded: it has to be accounted for, because reality is what shows itself there. Space, time, motion, cause and the self are all appearances in this sense, which is the work the title's first word does.

What test does Bradley use to demote something to appearance?

Self-contradiction. Whatever cannot be thought without dividing against itself cannot be ultimately real, and that single criterion drives the whole first book. Time is pressed until it needs a present both extended and indivisible; causation until the link is neither the cause nor the effect nor a third thing between them. No familiar category is granted an exemption.

Why can relations not be ultimately real?

Because a relation can neither stand apart from its terms nor dissolve into them. Take the qualities of a lump of sugar: whatever joins them must itself be joined to them, and that link joined in turn. Since terms and relations can be neither separated nor fused, Bradley concludes that no relational account of anything is finally true.

What are degrees of reality, and what ranks highest among appearances?

Appearances are graded by how much they hold together and how much they take in. Nothing is simply unreal; each thing stands nearer to or further from the whole. The self ranks highest of all appearances, which is a genuine rank and still short of reality, while space and cause fall well below it. Error and evil keep places on the same scale.

What does Bradley mean by the Absolute?

One sentient experience that includes everything there is. It is not a God standing over the world, nor a mind thinking about it, but the whole taken as a single felt unity in which every appearance is kept and transformed rather than cancelled. Feeling supplies the model, since in feeling a diversity is had without being split into related terms.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The regress of relations

How can one thing hold its qualities together? Whatever relates white, sweet and hard must itself be related to them, and that relation related in turn — a regress Bradley takes to show that nothing relational is finally true.

Far from a puzzle about lumps of sugar, the argument works as a solvent applied to every structure thought builds: qualities and their bearers, subjects and their predicates, anything standing in an “and”. No stopping place is conceded, since a relation treated as a further term restarts the series while a relation treated as nothing at all leaves the terms unjoined. Russell and Moore attacked the conclusion and built their pluralism on relations being real; metaphysicians argue the regress still.

  • relations
  • contradiction
  • unity
  • identity
  • metaphysics
  • abstraction
  • thought

Enter a dialogue

Space, time and cause as appearance

Take the ordinary furniture of thought — space, time, motion, change, causation — and ask whether any of it can be thought through without contradiction. The first book answers that none of it can, which is where the title's first word is earned.

Each category is pressed until it divides against itself: time needs a present both extended and indivisible, causation a link that is neither the cause nor the effect nor a third thing between them. Condemning them as appearance is not calling them illusions — an appearance is something reality actually presents, and so must be accounted for rather than dismissed. The destructive half therefore sets the task the constructive half has to meet: whatever reality is, it must make room for all of this.

  • appearance and reality
  • appearance
  • time
  • change
  • causation
  • nature
  • perception
  • knowledge
  • epistemology

Enter a dialogue

The self is not exempt

If things, space and cause dissolve under examination, does the self at least stand? Bradley refuses it the exemption, and the cost is the one survival a reader most wants left untouched.

Candidate after candidate is tried — the body, a stream of experience, the monad, the will, the self as it feels itself — and each turns out either relational or too thin to be anyone. Personal identity fares no better than the identity of a thing. The refusal is aimed at the personal idealists among his contemporaries, who kept finite selves as ultimate; here the self is the highest appearance there is, which is a real rank and still short of reality.

  • self
  • personal identity
  • psychology
  • will
  • experience
  • identity
  • idealism

Enter a dialogue

The Absolute as one experience

What could reality be, if every distinction thought makes falls short of it? Bradley's answer is a single sentient experience in which appearances are not deleted but absorbed and transformed, every one of them needed.

Feeling supplies the model: in immediate experience diversity is had without being split into related terms, and the Absolute is that unity recovered at the top instead of the bottom. Nothing in it is annihilated, so error, evil, religion and ethics are all real as degrees and all altered. Against a God who is one being among others, and against pluralism, the position keeps reality perfect and complete while leaving finite life its grades of truth.

  • absolute
  • absolute idealism
  • idealism
  • experience
  • feeling
  • unity
  • perfection
  • reality
  • religion
  • ethics
  • truth

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
656
distinct concepts
575
by passages held, corpus-wide
#106

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “appearance and reality” and “metaphysics”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 86 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
appearance and realitymetaphysics33
absoluteexperience20
absolutemetaphysics19
absoluteappearance and reality15
metaphysicsrelations14
absolutereality12
absoluterelations10
appearance and realityrelations10
experiencereality10
epistemologymetaphysics8
epistemologyreality8
metaphysicsreality8
causationmetaphysics7
appearance and realityepistemology6
absoluteepistemology4
epistemologyrelations4
experiencemetaphysics4
experiencerelations4
absolutecausation3
appearance and realityexperience3
causationrelations3
epistemologyexperience3
causationepistemology2
causationexperience2
realityrelations2
appearance and realitycausation1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1876 Ethical Studies

    Not a treatise but a chain of essays, and the only book Bradley gave to morals. He never revised the text in the remaining forty-eight years of his life, so this is his ethics entire; the posthumous second edition only added matter around it.

     EN
  2. 1883 The Principles of Logic

    Ten years separate this book from Appearance and Reality, and the metaphysics grows out of it. The later book applies what the logic establishes about judgment — that it always refers beyond itself to a reality — to space, time, cause and the self.

     EN
  3. 1893 Appearance and Reality you are here EN
  4. 1914 Essays on Truth and Reality

    Pragmatism is the occasion: these are the papers Bradley wrote against it in the journals, collected in 1914 and the last new book he published. The arguments arrive dated and aimed at named opponents, as controversy rather than as a system.

     EN
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