ABSTRACT
F. H. Bradley stresses the scientific element in the historian’s knowledge – which is to say, the scientific knowledge available to him. The brunt of Bradley’s attack on psychologism and the “school of experience” was that meaning and “facts” or the alleged contents of the mind are different things. His acerbic insistence on the difference was prompted by what he saw as bad theory, an exercise in simple-minded reductionism which resulted in a unity where differences had been merely obliterated. Bradley’s mature work contains occasional oblique references to G. W. F. Hegel, J. F. Herbart and Hermann Lotze, Ethical Studies, he quotes Hegel twice at length and cites a number of other passages from the Phenomenology of Mind and the Philosophy of Right. Bradley rested his case upon the “common moral consciousness” and the “vulgar notion of responsibility,” neither of which have ever been noted for their tolerance of social protest or eccentric individual conduct.
