Reading Notes: September 23rd, 2024

“Reality or real, Mr. Bradley maintains, cannot be a predicate because Reality is the subject in all judgment, and thus the ideal content of the judgment is ipso facto by judging pronounced real. This view forms a remarkable contrast with Lotze’s saying, “In fact, however, real is an adjectival or predicative conception,” and has, I should imagine, been formulated partly by way of criticism on the latter. We must remember that Mr. Bradley’s reality is not simply presentation, but is the systematic whole with which we come in contact through presentation. It appears to follow from this that Reality owes something to the judgment which analyzes it, besides lending something to that judgment. It gives a good name, but receives solid cash. Reality is for us such as our judgments have made it and maintain it. Our consciousness may be regarded as a permanent judgment, which is constantly, with more or less wakefulness, predicating the detailed content which is our ideally constructed world, as an interpretation and extension of the present perception and general self-feeling in which we from time to time find our contact with reality.” (Bosanquet, Knowledge and Reality, 45-46)

“We have noticed that for Bradley the identity of a quality is what it is by virtue of the relations by which it is differentiated. Since any quality is that quality, rather than this one, by virtue of its relations, it will be clear that any alterations in those differentiations ipso facto is an alteration in the quality they differentiate. For those differentiations contribute to constitute the identity of that quality. We have noticed also that the character of a relation is what it is by virtue of the qualities which it differentiates. The infinite process of quality and relation is reciprocal. Qualities are determined to be what they are by the relations which differentiate them. And relations are determined to be the differentiations they are by the qualities they differentiate. Consequently, any alteration in those qualities ipso facto alters those relations.” (Church, An Analysis of Resemblance, 46-47)

“If an alleged being were not distinct from something or other, it would not be distinct from anything else. Hence, “it” would be nothing at all. To be determinate is to be this being rather than that being. A being that were not this rather than that would be no being. That is why to be determinate is equivalent to to be.” (Church, An Analysis of Resemblance, 66)

Reading Notes: September 18th, 2024

“Inches, feet, &c. are settled, stated lengths, whereby we measure objects and estimate their magnitude. We say, for example, an object appears to be six inches, or six foot long. Now, that this cannot be meant of visible inches, &c. is evident, because a visible inch is itself no constant determinate magnitude, and cannot therefore serve to mark out and determine the magnitude of any other thing. Take an inch marked upon a ruler; view it successively, at a distance of half a foot, a foot, a foot and a half, &c. from the eye: at each of which, and at all the intermediate distances, the inch shall have a different visible extension, i.e., there shall be more or fewer points discerned in it. Now, I ask which of all these various extensions is that stated determinate one that is agreed on for a common measure of other magnitudes? No reason can be assigned why we should pitch on one more than another….Farther, an inch and a foot, from different distances, shall both exhibit the same visible magnitude, and yet at the same time you shall say that one seems several times greater than the other.” (Berkeley, An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, §61)

“The Absolute must synthesize the diversity which it contains into a harmonious system. All inconsistency and incoherence must somehow be eliminated. Appearances, which at the level of appearance are in open conflict, must be reconciled and harmonized. How in detail the Absolute achieves this self-consistent synthesis of the manifold, Bradley does not pretend to show. But we know that reality must unmake the contradictions of what appears in thought, since reality must satisfy thought’s criterion of self-consistency. We also know that the Absolute may remove these contradictions, since there are no differences which are, as such, contradictory. There is no contradiction when one attempts to unite differences without a ground of union and distinction, but the contradiction will be resolved when the necessary ground is supplied. And what may be, if it also must be, certainly is.” (MacLachlan, Epistemological Realism and Metaphysical Pluralism, 124-125)

Reading Notes: September 15th, 2024

“I remember now Lewis Carroll’s paper. He sent it around with a request for answers. I told him, I remember, I could see in it nothing but a case of hypothetical judgment where the conditions had been made self-contradictory. I agreed that the hypothetical judgment opened perhaps all the hardest problems of philosophy, but I saw nothing whatever in his puzzle but what was quite familiar & arose in any case of hypothetical judgment from an impossible or unreal foundation. (I may be wrong but that is all I see in it now.) I told him, if he wanted paradox, I would offer him this (which I was prepared to maintain). “No conclusion can be drawn from any premise which is not false”. For, if it is true, what possible excuse have you for deserting it? What I did not (so far as I remember) add was that, while all truth must in the end be categorical, all implication must necessarily be hypothetical. For what is is, & what is not is not, & neither is implied. And this applies certainly to the fact of implication, so far as it is the fact of implication, & not some other & different fact. Or, to put it otherwise, in a world of mere facts there could not possibly be a fact of implication.” (Bradley, Letter to Bertrand Russell, 17th February 1904) [Editor’s Note: Bradley [here] recalls his exchange with Lewis Carroll in May 1894 when Carroll was developing ‘A Logical Paradox’.]

“I look forward to my future dealings with your Appearance and Reality as the great task of the rest of my life. I have only read it once, and must confess to a temperamental mistrust of the dialectics and inner inconsistencies of things and their relations, the “between” business, etc. Nevertheless that is the central pivot of metaphysics, and you have for the first time brought it fairly and squarely into the middle of English philosophy, from which henceforward it can never be removed. Your nuts must first be cracked, and as I say, I haven’t yet cracked them. My colleague Royce has (as you doubtless know) been using your book as the text of a very successful course on metaphysics [at Harvard]. He too is a dialectician and an absolutist, only his Absolute is a Mind. Don’t you know his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, and his Spirit of Modern Philosophy? He is a wonderful genius, to me as Hyperion to a Satyr!” (William James, Letter to F.H. Bradley, July 9th, 1895)

Reading Notes: September 11th, 2024

“Though earth and moon were gone / And suns and universes ceased to be / And Thou wert left alone / Every Existence would exist in thee // There is not room for Death / Nor atom that his might could render void / Since thou art Being and Breath / And what thou art may never be destroyed.” (Brontë, No Coward Soul is Mine, lines 21-28)

“In the first place, we must ask what is a sign or symbol? To say that A is a symbol of B implies, of course, that A is something different from B, but (and this is often forgotten) it also implies that it is in some respect the same as B. The most remote, far-fetched symbol in the world must have something in common with that which it symbolizes; i.e., the person to whom it has the symbolic meaning must have some (however little it may be) of the same feeling or experience when he experiences the symbol, as he has when he experiences that which it symbolizes. In other words, there are such things as symbols just because the most different things in the world have something in common.” (Nettleship, Philosophical Lectures and Remains, Vol. I, 23-24)

“In the first place, ‘testing’ clearly implies that the test we employ is something different from the thing tested; we cannot in strictness speak of testing a thing by itself.” (Nettleship, Philosophical Lectures and Remains, Vol. I, 181)

“The first truth to be noticed in considering the nature of all objective measurement is this: such measurement is always an affair of relations; it is a relating activity on the mind’s part, which implies, however, some sort of a correlation belonging to the real being and actual arrangement of the things measured….Let it be noticed, also, what are the things that are measured—the existent “that-which,” to which the measuring process is thus naïvely applied.” (Ladd, A Theory of Reality, 302-303)

Reading Notes: September 9th, 2024

“Axioms may be said all to come from will. Act so. But so far as act is thought, Act so means Think so. Act as if for thought means It is.” (Bradley, Collected Works, Vol. II, 118)

“Act so with thought means Think so, and Think so means It is. Psychological origin of a base impulse may be what you please. Point is thinking means trying to satisfy it, and the attempt to satisfy it actually is the assumption that reality is of a certain character.” (Bradley, Collected Works, Vol. II, 195)

Reading Notes: September 4th, 2024

“Thus, a plane surface is a number of straight lines, in contact, in the direction called a plane. It is of greater or less extent, according as these lines are longer or shorter from a central point; it is of one shape or another shape, according as these lines are of the same length, or of different lengths. When they are all of one length, the surface is called a circle. As they may be of different lengths in endless variety, the surface may have an endless variety of shapes, of which only a few have received names. The square is one of these names, the triangle another, the parallelogram another, and so on.” (Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, Vol. II, 49)

“Bulk, which is the other great modification of extension, is lines from a central point in every direction. This bulk is greater or less, according as the lines are longer or shorter. The figure or shape of this bulk is different, according as the lines are of the same or different lengths. If they are of the same length, the bulk is called round, or, in one word, a sphere; sphere meaning exactly round bulk. As the lines, when they differ in length, may differ in endless ways; figures, or the shapes of bulk, are also endless, as our senses abundantly testify. Of these but a small number have received names. In this number are the cube, the cylinder, the cone.” (Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, Vol. II, 49-50)

“Pressure, as we have already fully seen, is the name we apply, when we have certain sensations in the muscles, just as green is the name we apply when we have a certain sensation in the eye. As green is the name of the sensation in the eye, pressure is the name of the sensation in the muscles.” (Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, Vol. II, 50)

“We ascribe qualities to an object on account of our sensations. We call an object green, on account of the sensation green; hard, on account of the sensation hard; sounding, on account of the sensation sounding. The names of all qualities of objects, then, are names of sensations. Are they anything else? Yes; they are the names of our sensations, with the connotation of a supposed unknown cause of those sensations. As far, however, as our knowledge goes, they are names of sensations, and nothing else. The supposed cause is never known; the effects alone are known to us.” (Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, Vol. II, 55)