teaching of his next and greatest work, Appearance and Reality (1893), which has been allowed to pass through several editions.

This remarkable book has probably exerted more influence upon philosophical thinking in English-speaking countries than any other treatise of the last thirty years. But no summary can convey a clear idea of its teaching. The conceptions of popular thought and of metaphysics alike are in it subjected to detailed, relentless criticism. Even the distinction, within the book, between the chapters devoted to "appearance" and those described as "reality" seems artificial, for everything is found to be riddled with contradictions. And these contradictions all belong to our thought because it is relational. Green had held that experience requires relations, and had argued thence to the need for a relating mind as the principle of reality. Bradley, too, insists that "for thought what is not relative is nothing" but he draws the very different conclusion that "our experience, where relational, is not true." Of this doctrine all the brilliant disquisitions that follow are applications, with the exception of the author's own assertions about the absolute, which, being relational, must be affected by the same vice of contradiction. If his argument about relations is valid, the idealism of Green and Caird falls to the ground. His method is more akin to Hegel's than theirs was; but he also ignores the Hegelian triad; he does not attempt any consecutive evolution of the categories; even his doctrine of "degrees of reality" is more Spinozistic than Hegelian. As a whole, the book is a great original achievement—a highly abstract dialectical exercise, in which the validity of every argument depends upon the fundamental position that relations necessarily involve contradiction. A later book, Essays on Truth and Reality (1914), deals in great part with controversies which belong to the twentieth century; without deserting the positions of the earlier work, it is less purely negative in its tendency and more devoted to the discovery of elements of truth than to the exposure of contradictions.

IX. OTHER WRITERS

In the latter part of the nineteenth century there were other philosophical tendencies at work than those already mentioned.

There were idealist writers whose idealism was of a different type, resembling Berkeley's rather than Hegel's, and who are sometimes called personal idealists; there was a movement of reaction from the type of idealism last described in the direction of philosophical realism or naturalism; and there were the first indications of the new movements of thought which have characterised the early years of the twentieth century.

Among the writers classed as personal idealists may be counted Alexander Campbell Fraser. His philosophical career, as student, professor and thinker, began before the Victorian era and lasted into the present reign. He was a pupil of Hamilton at Edinburgh, was for ten years professor of philosophy in New college there and succeeded to the university chair on Hamilton's death in 1856. His first book, Essays in Philosophy, was published in 1856, his last, a small monograph entitled Berkeley and Spiritual Realism, in 1908. Apart from minor works, among which special mention should be made of his monographs on Locke (1890) and Berkeley (1881), he is best known as the editor of the standard editions of Berkeley's Works (1871) and of Locke's Essay (1894), and as the author of Gifford lectures The Philosophy of Theism (1896). He also wrote an interesting and valuable account of his life and views entitled Biographia Philosophica (1904).

For a great many years, Fraser, Caird and Bain powerfully affected philosophical thought in Scotland through their university teaching. Owing to the position of philosophy in the academic curriculum, their influence upon the wider intellectual life of the country was almost equally great, though less easy to trace with any exactness. From Bain, his pupils learned precision in thinking and an interest in psychology as a science, together with, perhaps, a somewhat limited comprehension of metaphysical problems. Caird gave an insight into the history of thought and provided a point of view from which the world and man's life might be understood; many of his pupils have shown in their writings that they had learned his great language and were able to develop and apply his ideas. Fraser did not teach a system or found a school; he awakened and stimulated thought, without controlling its direction; he called forth in his hearers a sense of the mysteries of existence,

and he encouraged in many the spirit of reflection. He had no system; but his thought was essentially constructive, though the construction was based on an almost Humean scepticism. On one point, however, he never yielded to sceptical analysis-the reality of the self as conscious activity. He found the same thought in Berkeley, and he may almost be said to have rediscovered Berkeley for modern readers. Of the world beyond self he could find no theory which could be satisfactorily established by strict reasoning. But he saw (as Hume saw in his first work) that science has its assumptions as well as theology. In particular, he looked upon the postulate of uniformity as an act of moral faith in the rationality of the universe, and it was as a “venture of faith" that he interpreted the universe as grounded in the reason and goodness of God.

The reaction from idealism is most strikingly illustrated in the writings of Robert Adamson. The most learned of his contemporary philosophers, his earlier works are written from the standpoint of a neo-Hegelian idealism. These works are a small volume On the Philosophy of Kant (1879), a monograph on Fichte (1861), and an article on logic (1882), long afterwards (1911) republished in book form. The fundamental opposition of philosophical doctrines he regarded as "the opposition between Hegelianism on the one hand and scientific naturalism or realism on the other"; and he rejected the latter doctrine because its explanation of thought as the product of antecedent conditions was incompetent to explain thought as self-consciousness. The problem which he set himself was to re-think from the former point of view the new material concerning nature, mind and history provided by modern science. He came gradually to the opinion that this could not be done -that idealism was inadequate. His posthumously published lectures The Development of Modern Philosophy (1903) show that he was engaged in working out a reconstruction from the point of view which he had at first held incompetent-that of realism. But his suggestions do not point to a theory of mechanism or materialism. Although mind has come into being, it is as essential as nature: both are partial manifestations of reality. But he had not an opportunity fully to work out his constructive theory or to examine its adequacy and coherence.

The new tendencies which distinguish more recent philosophy illustrate also the increasing reaction of the literature of the United States of America upon English thought. The theory known as pragmatism is definitely of trans-Atlantic origin, and forms of what is called the new realism seem to have been started independently in the United States and in this country. The latter theory is, largely, a revival of older views: both the natural realism of Reid and the scholastic doctrine of the reality of universals appear to have contributed to its formation. Pragmatism is a more original doctrine; but its seeds also lie in the past: it has been connected with the prevailingly practical tone of much English thought; and more definite anticipations of its leading idea might be found in some of the later English writers of the nineteenth century.

CHAPTER II

Historians, Biographers and Political Orators

A. WRITERS ON MEDIEVAL AND MODERN HISTORY'

N a comparison of English historical literature in the nineteenth with that in the eighteenth century, nothing is more striking than the advance and the expansion of the study of the national past. As was remarked in an earlier volume,' Hume's was the first history of England by a native historian worthy to be classed as literature; and, after him, the subject fell largely into the hands of professed political or ecclesiastical partisans. Robertson's History of Scotland is not wholly exempt from such a charge; Smollett's continuation of Hume is certainly open to it; and no other work in the field of national history can be said to have been produced in the course of the century which has survived it except as material for subsequent use. A reason for the unproductiveness, on this head, of the closing years of the eighteenth century, and the early years of its successor, might, of course, be sought in the great national struggle against the French revolution and the conquering power to which it gave birth. This struggle finds its counterpart in the endeavours of the romanticists to break up the literary and artistic solidarity of classicism, and to trace the diversity of actual life in the specific features presenting themselves in national, provincial or local institutions, forms of government, social ways and manners. Scott, more

For writers on ancient history and early ecclesiastical history, see, ante, Vol. XII, Chap. XIV.

'See, ante, Vol. X, p. 317.