Reading Notes: August 31st, 2022

“Nothing in the end is real but what is felt, and for me nothing in the end is real but that which I feel….We never in one sense do, or can, go beyond immediate experience. Apart from the immediacy of “this” and “now” we never have, or can have, reality. The real, to be real, must be felt. This is one side of the matter. But on the other side the felt content takes on a form which more and more goes beyond the essential character of feeling, i.e. direct and non-relational qualification. Distinction and separation into substantives and adjectives, terms and relations, alienate the content of immediate experience from the form of immediacy which still on its side persists. In other words, the ideality, present from the first, is developed, and to follow this ideality is our way to the true Reality which is there in feeling.” (Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, 190) 

“We have an object, a something given, and it is given to the subject. the subject given? No, for, if so, it would itself be an object. We seem, then, to have one term and a relation without a second term. But can there be a relation with one term? No; this appears to be self-contradictory, and, if we assert it, we must justify and defend our paradox. But, again, can a term be known only as a term of a relation or relations, while it is not, in any aspect, known otherwise? No, once more; this is impossible, and in the end unmeaning. Terms are never constituted entirely by a relation or relations. There is a quality always which is more than the relation, thought it may not be independent of it….But, once more, can we have a relation, one term of which is contained in the experienced and the other not? No; for a term, which is not in some sense experienced, seems nothing at all. If in itself it falls outside the experienced, then it appears to be unmeaning, and it cannot therefore consistently be said to exist….And now, leaving the terms, consider the relation. Is there, in the end, such a thing as a relation which is merely between terms? Or, on the other hand, does not a relation imply an underlying unity and an inclusive whole? And then, once again, must not this whole be experienced or be nothing? Here are points surely which at least require some discussion. But consciousness must lead to self-consciousness, where possibly these difficulties are lessened. If the object is given to me, then I also must be given, and on reflection I so find myself. I find myself given not in the abstract but as concrete experienced matter. Both terms are now objects, experienced with their relation, and the question is whether the difficulties are now less. We must reply in the negative. The correlated terms are for a subject which itself is not given. The correlation falls in the experience of this new subject, which itself remains outside that object. And of the relation to this new subject the old puzzles are true. This relation must have two terms, terms more than their relation; and the “more” again must be experienced, or else be nothing. Any attempt to pass from within the experienced to that which in itself is not experienced, seems quite suicidal. The distinction between the experienced and experience seems in the end totally inadmissible. And the infinite regress is but an actual unremoved contradiction. It is itself an absolute irrational limit.” (Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, 192-193) 

“If what is given is a Many without a One, the One is never attainable. And, if what we had at first were the mere correlation of subject and object, then to rise beyond that would be impossible. From such premises there is in my opinion no road except to total scepticism.” (Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, 199) 

“For the whole of our knowledge may be said to depend upon immediate experience. At bottom the Real is what we feel, and there is no reality outside feeling. And in the end Reality (whatever else we say of it) is experience. Our fundamental fact is immediate experience or feeling. We have here a many in one where, so far, there is no distinction between truth and fact. And feeling again is mine, though of course it is not merely my feeling. It is reality and myself in unbroken unity. We in a sense transcend this unity; that is clear, for we could not otherwise speak of it. But that we should ever in any way reach a reality outside of it, seems impossible. And if this is so, as I have contended more fully elsewhere, then experience is reality. For in attempting to deny this thesis, or to assert something else, we find on experiment that we have asserted this thesis or nothing. We have here a matter for observation and experiment and not for long trains of reasoning. [Footnote: In Mind, No. 75, p. 335, I notice, for instance that Prof. Perry, while uprooting Idealism, demolishes in passing myself. He takes me to argue to a conclusion which I do not hold, from a basis which I have rejected as an error, and then wonders at the unnamable vice of the process. But, if Prof. Perry wishes to get an idea as to the view which he is anxious to refute, why should he not suppose (for a moment) that on my side there is no argument at all, and that on his side there is an inference by way of vicious abstraction?]” (Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, 316) 

“The theoretical criterion, for myself, is in theory supreme. The truth for any man is that which at the time satisfies his theoretical want, and “more or less true” means more or less of such satisfaction.” (Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality, 317) 

“We must pass on to enquire as to the sense which we give to the Meaningless. The Meaningless, I should reply, is some object which, first (a), taken as itself, is positive, but which further (b) offers a meaning—an idea which it contains—though this meaning and idea is really none. The Meaningless is the absence of meaning from that which is before us as an object which owns meaning and offers it. We have thus a thinking which is empty and is no real thought, not because it excludes its object, but because the object fails. That which is offered as contained in the object, and deprived of which thought is helpless, proves trial to be lacking. Of the ideas which we were to examine there remains the Self-contradictory….It is this character of self-discrepancy and internal strife which, when we abstract it, is held as our idea of the Self-contradictory. It consists in a conjunction of jarring elements, that everywhere tends to dissolve itself on scrutiny, except so far as it remains fixed externally by error or artifice. For merely as and by itself, and apart from a conjunction which superadds a unity from without, the Self-contradictory is unthinkable. But, like the other negative idea which we have discussed, the Self-contradictory has everywhere in experience a positive side. And it is held together and maintained in existence by this foreign bond, from which, in order to become truly itself, it must abstract, but apart from which, it could not even appear as a fact in experience.” (Bradley, The Principles of Logic, Vol. II, 671-672) 

“I cannot argue the point here, but to me Realism and Pluralism (so far as denying what I hold) each essentially consists in an abstraction—an abstraction which is not only untenable but is downright illusory. The assertion of the Pluralist vitally depends on the unity which he rejects, and the doctrine of the Realist is thinkable only so long as it still involves that experience from which it claims to be free….I, on my side, find, not only that Realism and Pluralism maintain what is self-contradictory and in the end unthinkable, but, again and also, that they leave unexplained not a less but a far greater part of the undeniable facts.” (Bradley, The Principles of Logic, Vol. II, 682-684) 

“Everything, that in any sense is experienced, is felt, and what in particular is felt is always in feeling. It falls, that is, within an immediate experienced whole, which whole is not itself relational, and is not subject to any strict application of the category of Whole and Parts. Attempting here in predication to apply that category, you are forced to recognize that something in the end has been left outside. You have omitted, that is, the aspect of immediate inclusive oneness. There is, and there can be, no such given thing as a mere object, of whatever kind. There is experienced always with the object a content not included in the object, a content which is positively felt. An object therefore, as an object, is never more than an abstraction. And no feeling, emotion, desire, or volition, can ever by any device be resolved in objects or terms in relation.”  (Bradley, The Principles of Logic, Vol. II, 693) 

“How could I possibly deny the existence of the soul?” (Bradley, A Reply to a Criticism, 149) 

“Mr. Strange, like some other advocates of realism, fails to understand the position which he is anxious to attack. The contention which he has to meet is this, that he is taking a mere abstraction for reality, and that the burden of showing that what we contend is an abstraction is really more, rests properly with him. Such an idea seems not to have occurred to him, but he will find that it is perhaps more worth his attention than the ingenious arguments which, I must acknowledge, he does not attribute to myself.” (Bradley, A Reply to a Criticism, 150) 

“The primary form of experience may, I think, be best called “immediate experience” or “feeling”….I mean here by “feeling” such a mode of experience of sameness and difference in one as in an awareness direct and non-relational of that which is at once one and many. If we may permit ourselves to speak here prematurely of a whole and parts, then in immediate experience the whole qualifies every part while the parts qualify all and each both one both another and the whole.” (Bradley, Relations, 631) 

“Logical Positivism…is, as we have hinted, a descendant of Hume’s sensationalism, a mode of considering the world to which the English mind, it would seem, is naturally prone. Thought sets itself, positivism informs us, to construct satisfying propositions; and all propositions not founded on or capable of being established through sense experience are unmeaning; e.g. that the sensible world is unreal, or that there is a transcendent God….On the other hand, propositions founded on sense experience have meaning; but they can never be known to be true or false; they are either probable or improbable. The only true propositions are mathematical or logical; analytic, not synthetic. This is why the task of thought is to analyse propositions; to make them say exactly what they mean; and this involves the use of symbols. As early as 1881, J. Venn, in his Symbolic Logic, extending the earlier operations of the quantification of the predicate, had transformed into quasi-mathematical equations the traditional logical forms of propositions, A, E, I, and O, and of syllogisms, Barbara, Celarent, and the rest. But the process has been carried far beyond Venn by Carnap and Wittgenstein….If, however, we are to reach what Russell calls the habit of basing our beliefs on observations purely impersonal, we shall have to be prepared for Russell’s transformation of the sentence “Scott was the author of Waverly” into “One and only one man wrote Waverly, and that man was Scott”; or, more fully, “There is an entity c such that the statement x wrote Waverly is true if x is c, and false otherwise; moreover, c is Scott”. No wonder that Whitehead has remarked that if our remote ancestors had been wise positivists they would never have sought for reasons, they would never have apprehended connexions or consequences, and civilization would have ended before it had begun.” (Lofthouse, F.H. Bradley, 114-115) 

“[In] Mr. Hobhouse’s work on the Theory of Knowledge, I find an argument against “subjective idealism” which it may be well to consider briefly. The same argument would appear also suited, if not directed, to prove the reality of primary qualities taken as bare. And though this is very probably not intended…I will criticize it…from both points of view. The process seems to consist, as was natural, in an attempt at removal by elimination of all the conditions of a relation A—B, until A—B is left true and real by itself. And A—B in the present case is to be a relation of naked primary qualities, or again a relation of something apart from and independent of myself. After some assertions as to the possibility of eliminating in turn all other psychical facts but my perceptive consciousness assertions which seem to me, as I understand them, to be wholly untenable and quite contrary to fact the naked independence of A—B appears to be proved thus. Take a state of things where one term of the connection is observed, and the other is not observed. We have still here to infer the existence of the term unobserved, but an existence, because unobserved, free (let us say first) from all secondary qualities. But I should have thought myself that the conclusion which follows is quite otherwise. I should have said that what was proved from the premises was not that A—B exists naked, but that A—B, if unconditioned, is false and unreal, and ought never to have been asserted at all except as a useful working fiction. In other words, the observed absence of one of the terms from its place, i.e. the field of observation, is not a proof that this term exists elsewhere, but is rather here a negative instance to disprove the assumed universal A—B, if that is taken unconditionally. Of course, if you started by supposing A—B to be unconditionally true, you would at the start have assumed the conclusion to be proved.” (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 614-615) 

“And, taken as directed against Solipsism, the argument once more is bad, as I think any argument against Solipsism must be, unless it begins by showing that the premises of Solipsism are in part erroneous. But any attempt at refutation by way of elimination seems to me even to be absurd. For in any observation to find in fact the absence of all Cœnesthesia and inner feeling of self is surely quite impossible. Nor again would the Solipsist lightly admit that his self was co-extensive merely with what at any one time is present to him. And if further the Solipsist admits that he cannot explain the course of outward experience, any more than he can explain the sequence of his inmost feelings, and that he uses all such abstract universals as your A—B simply as useful fictions, how can you, by such an argument as the above, show that he contradicts himself? A failure to explain is certainly not always an inconsistency, and to prove that a view is unsatisfactory is not always to demonstrate that it is false, Mr. Hobhouse’s crucial instance to prove the reality of A—B apart from the self could to the Solipsist at most show a sequence that he was unable to explain. [Footnote: The position of the Solipsist I understand to be is this, that no reality or fact has any existence or meaning except the reality of his self…] How in short in this way you are to drive him out of his circle I do not see unless of course he is obliging enough to contradict himself in advance by allowing the possibility of A—B existing apart, or being real or true independently and unconditionally.” (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 615) 

“The Solipsist, while he merely maintains the essential necessity of his self to the Universe and every part of it, cannot in my opinion be refuted, and so far certainly he is right. For, except as a relative point of view, there is no apartness or independence in the Universe. It is not by crude attempts at elimination that you can deal with the Solipsist, but rather (as in this chapter I have explained) by showing that the connection which he maintains, though really essential, has not the character which he assigns to it. You may hope to convince him that he himself commits the same fault as is committed by the assertor of naked primary qualities, or of things existing quite apart from myself—the fault, that is, of setting up as an independent reality a mere abstraction from experience. You refute the Solipsist, in short, by showing how experience, as he has conceived it, has been wrongly divided and one-sidedly narrowed.” (Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 615-616)