ABSTRACT

It is of course Chapters II and III of Appearance and Reality which offer the classical expression of Bradley’s doctrine of relations and which, for some ninety years, have been the centre of critical attention—the point from which the rest of that work, and indeed the whole of Bradley’s metaphysics, is usually approached. In his theory of feeling Bradley denies that sensation is atomistic in nature. He maintains, rather, that it is a non-discrete continuum of sense-contents. One term is internally related to another if in the absence of the relation it could not be what it is. One term is externally related to another if the relation could equally be present or absent while the term remains the same. For in Bradley’s view the doctrine of internal relations neither requires independent proof of its own, nor is it an axiom which he takes for granted at the outset.