ABSTRACT
POLITICAL, historical and civic questions were far from filling up the sum of Bridges’ interests during those Bradford years. “ Of all his colleagues,” writes Frederic Harrison, in his preface to Essays and Addresses, “ he was the first to master the encyclopaedic system of Auguste Comte, as he was the one who most truly and thoroughly absorbed it in conception and in practice. His translation and editing with analyses of Comte's Politique Positive could not have been accomplished by any one who had not had a general training in the sciences, as well as in philosophy. “ It is reserved for you,” writes Harrison in 1869, “ to write concerning Positivism in its attitude towards the actual scientific world and the attitude of the actual scientific world towards Positivism. No one but you can do it.” Bridges had made a deep study of Asiatic peoples and religions. China, as we have seen, vividly coloured his imagination and he was saturated with the philosophy and literature of France. Though German philosophy appealed less to him, he was well acquainted with Kant and Hegel, and was a student of Goethe and Heine. In Spanish, which he read easily, he studied Calderon and Cervantes. “ I am reading Calderon in leisure moments,” he writes to Harrison in 1864. “ I find he does me good. He takes you into another world than this, and one different from that of Corneille and Ariosto. The conception of honour is only to be found in its ideal severity in the Spanish school. Calderon's manner is altogether that of Velasquez; large, strong and noble.” Don Quixote cast a spell over him, and he seldom let a year go by without re-reading it. But Dante he worshipped. Great portions of the Divina Commedia he knew by heart; “ he had a memory,” says a friend, “ from which little worth keeping ever vanished,” and the Paradiso appealed to his imagination as did nothing else. “ Dante ” he wrote in 1889, “ was the singer of ten silent centuries. He was the morning star of the Renaissance. He was all this; but he was for us yet more. He is the herald of the wider and loftier Church of which the foundations are already laid, and which the coming centuries will complete. Meanwhile let us be content to lodge very simply and poorly in the builders’ huts, and work heartily along with them.” 11
