Relations

Abstract

Even to a philosopher who has perhaps just opened this book at the current page and has no special interest in the late nineteenth-century monistic idealism which so marked British philosophy in the late nineteenth century and beyond, it is perhaps no longer news that the picture of those idealists bequeathed to us by Moore and Russell and displayed in Chapter 1 stands in [ome need of correction. But how distorted is that picture, and what should take its place? The earlier chapters of this book have begun answering these questions. In this chapter, I hope to complete the process, by focusing on perhaps the most central matter of all, the topic of relations. But despite what I have said so far, the ground for this completion has still not been entirely cleared: there are still confusing factors at work. Many of these belong to that Moore/Russell legacy, such as the effect of their presenting the idiosyncratic Bradley as representative of so-called ‘Hegelians’ in general. This effect can take two forms. What is rightly attributed to Bradley we may wrongly attribute to other idealists. But it has been more common to attribute to Bradley what is true only of others. So for many years we had a picture of Bradley which was liable to mislead us about not only him but everyone else too. The potential for confusion is compounded by the picture’s power and simplicity, and by the fact that there is textual support for crucial parts of its detail, so that it seems to survive an independent check.

’sherlock Holmes closed his eyes, and placed his elbows upon the arms of his chair, with his finger-tips together. “The ideal reasoner”, he remarked, “would, when he has once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it, but also all the results which would follow from it”.’

A. Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips’, 1892