ABSTRACT
In the Logic F. H. Bradley had seemed to be committed to the existence of “floating ideas” in the sense of ideas “divorced” from existing reality. Bernard Bosanquet’s criticism in Knowledge and Reality had cut away the ground beneath this doctrine, and by the beginning of the ’nineties the question of the existence of ideal worlds of various shades had passed into psychology. Bradley apologizes in the Preface for the space devoted to pragmatism, but deprecates the idea that it occupied a corresponding place in his mind. But while Bradley found nothing but ambiguity and error in William James’s pragmatism, there was much in his “radical empiricism” which fell into line with his own doctrine that “there is no reality but experience, and that what falls outside of what is experienced is not real”. As contrasted with pragmatism, the form of realism advocated by Bertrand Russell, in spite of his fundamental difference with it, had a singular attraction for Bradley.
