ABSTRACT
F. H. Bradley’s name, more than any other, stands for the effort to deliver British philosophy from the spell that Kant and Hegel had cast upon it. While it may be said that there was no “precritical period” in Bradley’s published work, it is possible to trace certain definite phases in the development of the ideas which were peculiarly his own, corresponding in general to the date of the publication of his chief books. Although Bradley’s essay in Ethical Studies upon “Pleasure for Pleasure’s Sake” had been written, as he tells us, before the appearance of The Methods of Ethics, it was not yet in print. Taking these early essays together, they may be said, as Bradley himself put it, to have contained nothing that had not been before the world for years and been calling either for admission or refutation.
