ABSTRACT
(1) Not least among the many philosophical achievements of Bertrand Russell was his highly successful critique of the kind of idealist philosophy which dominated Great Britain in his youth. This was not merely a matter of detailed argument, for it was a matter largely of establishing a different tone in philosophising, something which was in many respects desirable. Not only was the British Idealism (unlike the German Idealism from which it derived) of such as Bradley and McTaggart increasingly distancing itself from any involvement in the ferments of contemporary science, but it purveyed a kind of metaphysical, almost Panglossian, optimism which Russell was right to find offensive and perhaps detrimental to social progress. (Compare in this connection Oxford as viewed by Bradley and as viewed by Jude the Obscure.) 1 Over all hung the feeling that the higher intellectual and emotional states of dons were the heart of, perhaps the one real thing in, the universe, and a stuffy unawareness of the mass of human suffering and of the non-human immensities surrounding it. In spite of the fact that in a strangely transmuted form some of these features have been present in more recent Oxford philosophy, Russell’s achievement was considerable, more so in the respects I have mentioned than that of Moore with whom one naturally pairs him as an opponent of Bradleyism.
