BRADLEY' S DIALECTIC

Abstract

THERE is real satisfaction for a lifelong student of philosophy, when he finds the loyalties of his youth emerging from obloquy and arresting the attention of a generation whose temper of mind is inevitably alien to his own. It. is thus at the present time with Bradley. As Hegel said, it is a tribute to the greatness of a philosopher that he compels his successors to refute him. During the half-century that has passed since Bradley dazzled the academic world into submission by “Appearance and Reality”, a host of critics, mostly hostile and destructive- Moore, Cook Wilson, Russell, Broad, Alexander and Whitehead-have done their damnedest, until it had become almost a cliehd with younger thinkers to dismiss Bradley as a back number in metaphysics. They were tired of monism and the absolute and of idealist epistemology in general. Yet Bradley is still a living force, and now even the youngest, disillusioned with the new gods, are beginning to be interested in discovering for themselves what it was he had to say. Indeed, the two greatest in the above-mentioned list, Alexander and Whitehead, frankly confessed their indebtedness to Bradley's teaching, and have thereby contributed not a little to stimulate this revival of interest. The book before us, like Prof. Blanshard's more elaborate work“ The Nature of Thought”, bears witness to its vigour in the United States.

Bradley's Dialectic

By Dr. Ralph Withington Church. Pp. 189. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1942.) 10s. 6d. net.