Something must have _happened_ to Francis Herbert Bradley.

He seems to have been something of a curmudgeon; at least, he was extremely reclusive and had a reputation for shooting cats. But at some point in his life he must have come to some sort of deep mystical realization.

Otherwise he couldn't have written this book, which reads like a Western version of Shankara. This is philosophy in the grand old style, and it's one of the high points of British idealism.

Bradley's argument doesn't always hold up in its precise details. He doesn't, for example, think that "relations" are real because (he says) they lead to an infinite regress. But Royce replied to this pretty adequately in an appendix to _The World and the Individual_. He also states firmly (and I think correctly) that there's no conceiving reality apart from experience and there's no duality in experience between subject and object. But support for this claim isn't exactly forthcoming. (Timothy L.S. Sprigge does a much better job with it in _The Vindication of Absolute Idealism_.)

But the essential structure of his argument is sound and could be carried through again with a different set of examples (the standard logical paradoxes, say): the world of our ordinary experience turns out upon inspection to be contradictory, so it can't be fully and finally real; what _is_ fully and finally real is a nondual Absolute in which all those apparent contradictions are resolved through that very nonduality.

Well, Bradley puts it better than that, of course, and his prose style is very pleasant to read. This work is also excerpted in James W. Allard and Guy Stock's collection of Bradley's _Writings on Logic and Metaphysics_, so if you want to read a shorter version, check that volume out.

Anyway, the point is, don't ever let anybody tell you there isn't any nondualistic wisdom here in the West. In a different time and place, Bradley would have been revered as a guru -- a prospect that in all likelihood would have made him cringe, so it's probably just as well. But he's clearly trying to articulate a vision here, and few writers have tackled "rational mysticism" with such philosophical flair.

I doubt that Shankara would have shot cats. Fortunately the similarities run deeper than that.

This book is indeed extremely important for analytic, continental, and mystic philosophers alike. Bradley's positive view, the Absolute, is proposed here as the _only way out_ of those messy analytic debates regarding topics such as appearance vs. reality, plurality, quality, and causation. Bradley's starting point: what is absurd (logically impossible) cannot exist.

I'm reviewing a book which is currently out of print. "Why bother?", one might ask. Well, Bradley's work is one of the clearest explanations of ideas which are central to our 20th century fascination with alternate religions. This is not to say that Bradley was exactly a mystic -- his belief system went beyond mysticism. Yet his emphasis on understanding the limits of our mental life finds strong parallels in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, as well as Western 'New Age' approaches. Strangely, he wrote in the 19th century. Modern academic philosophers find his work not particularly important. Yet the average reader can gain quite a lot from reading Bradley, his writing style is clear and lucid, and after finishing the book, interested readers may find their world taking on a slightly different cast. It is disappointing to find that Appearance and Reality is out of print, because it stands, especially today, as a text which explicates basic philosophical issues in a way which remains relevant. Brian Whitaker

Phillip Ferreira has here made a tremendous contribution to what seems to be a developing renaissance in Bradley studies (and Idealist studies generally). Concerned to subvert recent misunderstandings of Bradley's thought that would assimilate him to the tradition of British empiricism, Ferreira provides a detailed and highly readable exposition of Bradley's doctrines of truth, judgment, and "feeling" that restores him to his proper place in the tradition of rationalism and Idealism. This volume is an excellent introduction to Bradley's thought in general, the more so because Bradley's own writings are so difficult to find. (James Allard and Guy Stock have helpfully collected some of his central texts in _F.H. Bradley: Writings on Logic and Metaphysics_, which makes a nice companion to the present volume.) In it, Ferreira carefully examines and elaborates Bradley's understanding of _judgment_, which Ferreira describes as "_the_ basic act of cognition by which we knowingly encounter reality." The discussion turns to the relation between judgment and truth, the relation between contradition and thought, the specially Bradleian understanding of "coherence," and (very importantly) the relation between feeling and knowledge (which occupies two chapters). A closing chapter considers criticisms of Bradley levelled by Russell and James; a short conclusion argues briefly both that Bradley does not fit easily into more recent philosophical categories, and that Bradley's philosophy might provide a needed corrective to more recent views that we either have no access to the real or that such access provides no insight into universal _value_. An appendix delivers what seems to be a deathblow to recent views of Bradley as an Anglo-empiricist by considering his relations to what he regarded as the essentially empiricist view of inference: associationism. For Bradley, says Ferreira, "the truth is the whole." It would perhaps not be unfair to regard this volume as an attempt to spell out in some detail what this doctrine meant to Bradley and to suggest that its meaning should be important to us today as well. For those who, like me, have strong misgivings about the "analytic turn" in philosophy, this fine exposition of Bradley's thought will be most welcome. And for those who, also like me, regard Brand Blanshard as the finest of twentieth-century philosophers, this volume will be of interest as regards the Idealist tradition that was the strongest influence on that giant of rationalism.