Note 21 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY

The idea of a left wing is generally associated in the minds of British students with the destructive criticism of Mr. Bradley in Appearance and Reality, in which many, or most, of our ordinary ways of regarding reality (our beliefs in “primary” and “secondary” qualities of matter, in “space” and “time,” in “causation,” “activity,” a “self,” in “things in themselves,” etc.) are convicted of “fatal inconsistencies.” See, however, Professor Pringle-Pattison’s instructive account of his book in Man’s Place in the Cosmos, bringing out the positive side. The “left” is represented too, now, in Dr. Bosanquet’s Individuality and Value, which we examine below as the last striking output of British transcendentalism or absolutism. See in this entire connexion Professor James Seth’s recent account of the “Idealist Answers to Hume” in his English Philosophy and Schools of Philosophy.