F. H. Bradley

“ To try to be good not in science, art, or any other ideal pursuit, nor to be good socially, but to be virtuous simply in oneself, or to realize the good will with no content to it, is not to be moral in any way. A mere formal harmony is not a moral end: the end is not system, but the systematic realization of the self whose will is in harmony with the ideal. For example, if the question arises, Am I to advance as a good man or a good artist? morality says, ‘Of course as a good man;’ but then the whole matter turns on this, What line of action, the doing of what, does make me the best man? ”

“ Finite centres of feeling, while they last, are (so far as we know) not directly pervious to one another. But, on the one hand, a self is not the same as such a centre of experience; and, on the other hand, in every centre the whole Reality is present. Finite experience never, in any of its forms, is shut in by a wall. It has in itself, and as an inseparable aspect of its own nature, the all-penetrating Reality. And there never is, and there never was, any time when in experience the world and self were quite identical. ”

“ To be free from everything is to be—nothing. Only nothing is quite free, and freedom is abstract nothingness. If in death we cease to be anything, then there first we are free, because there first we are—not.
Every one sees this is not the freedom we want. ‘“Free” is “free from,” but then I am to be free. It is absurd to think that I am to be free from myself. I am to be free to exist and to assert myself.’ Well and good; but this is not what we began with. Freedom now means the self-assertion which is nothing but self-assertion. ”

“ With religion we may here compare science and art. The artist and poet, however obscurely, do feel and believe that beauty, where it is not seen, yet somehow and somewhere is and is real; though not as a mere idea in people’s heads, nor yet as anything in the visible world. And science, however dimly, starts from and rests upon the preconception that, even against appearances, reason not only ought to be, but really is.
Is then religion a mere mode of theoretic creation and contemplation, like art and science? ”

“ Religion seems to have included and reduced to harmony every aspect of life. It appears to be a whole which has embraced, and which pervades, every detail. But in the end we are forced to admit that the contradiction remains. For, if the whole is still good, it is not harmonious; and, if it has gone beyond goodness, it has carried us also beyond religion. The whole is at once actually to be good, and, at the same time, is actually to make itself good. Neither its perfect goodness, nor yet its struggle, may be degraded to an appearance. ”

“ For the object of natural science is the full world in all its sensible glory, while the essence of Nature lies in this poor fiction of primary qualities, a fiction believed not to be idea but solid fact. Nature then, while unexplained, is still left in its sensuous splendour, while Nature, if explained, would be reduced to this paltry abstraction. On one side is set up the essence—the final reality—in the shape of a bare skeleton of primary qualities; on the other side remains the boundless profusion of life which everywhere opens endlessly before our view. ”

“ One should give to the poor—in what cases and how much? Should sacrifice oneself—in what way and within what limits? Should not indulge one’s appetites—except when it is right. Should not idle away one’s time—except when one takes one’s pleasure. Nor neglect one’s work—but for some good reason. All these points we admit are in one way matter of law; but if you think to decide in particular cases by applying some “categorical imperative,” you must be a pedant, if not a fool.’
Ordinary morality does not hold to each of its laws as inviolable, each as an absolute end in itself. ”

“ Let us first go to the moral consciousness, and see what that tells us about its end.
Morality implies an end in itself: we take that for granted. Something is to be done, a good is to be realized. But that result is, by itself, not morality: morality differs from art, in that it can not make the act a mere means to the result. Yet there is a means. There is not only something to be done, but something to be done by me—I must do the act, must realize the end. Morality implies both the something to be done, and the doing of it by me ”

“ Happiness is the end? Yes, happiness is the end which indeed we all reach after; for what more can we wish than that all should be well with us—that our wants should be filled, and the desire of our hearts be gratified? And happiness can not escape us, we must know it when we find it? Oh yes, it would be strange indeed to come to such a consummation, and never to know it. And happiness is real and palpable, and we can find it by seeking it? Alas! the one question, which no one can answer, is, What is happiness?—which every one in the end can answer, is, what happiness is not. ”

“ The delights and pains of the flesh, the agonies and raptures of the soul, these are fragmentary meteors fallen from thought’s harmonious system. But these burning experiences—how in any sense can they be mere pieces of thought’s heaven? For, if the fall is real, there is a world outside thought’s region, and, if the fall is apparent, then human error itself is not included there. ”

“ But seriously, is it not strange that men can believe in a world of universal self-seeking, and men whose theories (the phrase is not mine) have not come from ‘raking into that filthiest of all jakes, a bad mind,’ but whose lives in many cases were self-denying, and who were better and wiser than ourselves? This on one side is a fact, just as, on the other side, the common belief in self-sacrifice is a fact; and such facts as these should engage our attention. For what we most want, more especially those of us who talk most about facts, is to stand by all the facts. ”

“ At any given period to know more than he did, man must have been more than he was; for a human being is nothing if he is not the son of his time; and he must realize himself as that, or he will not do it at all.
Morality is ‘relative,’ but is none the less real. At every stage there is the solid fact of a world so far moralized. There is an objective morality in the accomplished will of the past and present, a higher self worked out by the infinite pain, the sweat and blood of generations, and now given to me by free grace and in love and faith as a sacred trust. ”

“ The Reality comes into knowledge, and, the more we know of anything, the more in one way is Reality present within us. The Reality is our criterion of worse and better, of ugliness and beauty, of true and false, and of real and unreal. It in brief decides between, and gives a general meaning to, higher and lower. It is because of this criterion that appearances differ in worth; and, without it, lowest and highest would, for all we know, count the same in the universe. And Reality is one Experience, self-pervading and superior to mere relations. ”

“ We can find no province of the world so low but the Absolute inhabits it. Nowhere is there even a single fact so fragmentary and so poor that to the universe it does not matter. There is truth in every idea however false, there is reality in every existence however slight; and, where we can point to reality or truth, there is the one undivided life of the Absolute. Appearance without reality would be impossible, for what then could appear? And reality without appearance would be nothing, for there certainly is nothing outside appearances. ”

“ And, if it is not to be an element in experience, it will be nothing. And I doubt if any one would urge a claim so suicidal and so absurd, unless for the sake of, and in order to defend, a preconceived doctrine. Because phenomena in time are not real, there must be something more than temporal. But because we wrongly assume that nothing is real, unless it exists as a thing, therefore the element, which transcends time, must be somehow and somewhere beside it. This element is a world, or a soul, or an Ego, which never descends into our series. ”

“ I am content here to admit the distinction between direct and indirect experience. And the question is whether reality can go beyond the former? Has a man a right to say that something exists, beside that which at this moment he actually feels? And is it possible, on the other side, to identify reality with the immediate present?
This identification, we have seen, is impossible; and the attempt to remain within the boundary of the mere “this” is hopeless. The self-discrepancy of the content, and its continuity with a “what” beyond its own limits, at once settle the question. ”

“ For we have found that ideal conditions, to be complete and in this way to become real, must transcend themselves. They have to pass beyond the world of mere thought. And we have seen, in the second place, that every idea must possess a certain amount both of truth and reality. The ideal content must appear in the region of existence; and we have found that we have no right ever to regard it as unreal, because it is unable, as such, to show itself and to occupy a place there. We may now apply this principle both to the capacities of the soul, and to the unseen part of Nature. ”

“ Then I possess my world, and I do not possess it until I find my will in it; and I do not find that, until what I have is a harmony or a whole in system.
Both in theory and practice my end is to realize myself as a whole. But is this all? Is a consistent view all that we want in theory? Is a harmonious life all that we want in practice? Certainly not. A doctrine must not only hold together, but it must hold the facts together as well. We can not rest in it simply because it does not contradict itself. The theory must take in the facts, and an ultimate theory must take in all the facts. ”