ABSTRACT
The last great English-language philosophical work of the nineteenth century was Bertrand Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics, whose …rst draft was completed on that century’s last day, 31st December 1900. Earlier the same year, he had published A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz. Both books exhibit an uncompromising rejection of British Idealism, to a form of which he had previously adhered (see e.g. Russell 1897). This break, partly because of Russell’s own eventual in¶uence, marked the start of the decline of Absolute Idealism in Britain. (In this chapter, all unquali…ed references to idealism should be understood as references to Absolute Idealism as exempli…ed in Britain.) We shall see that, to grasp the dialectic of the debate between idealists and the critics who were responsible for their eclipse, it is just as important to understand Russell’s conception of what he was breaking with, as it is to understand idealism itself. The causes of the break are complex; we shall consider them in more detail later. But a crucial element in them is the question of the truth of mathematics. As Russell conceived idealism, its adherents denied the absolute and unquali…ed truth of any statement, whether it be one of, for example, common discourse, of science, or of mathematics, no matter how carefully phrased, how conscientiously established, or how simple, these may be. For various reasons, Russell came to hold that mathematical statements are simply and absolutely true: not just partly true; not merely temporarily true as one moment of a dialectical transition; not just true as part of a wider whole; not merely empirically true while being transcendentally false; not just relatively or conditionally true. This view of the status of mathematics, Russell thought, requires a certain kind of metaphysics, whose components can look as if they have been formulated by denying their idealist counterparts. This metaphysics is marked by a lack of epistemic restrictions: the mind has direct and unmediated contact with many separate propositions
and their many separate constituents; propositions are truth-bearers; they are real entities, not linguistic, ideal or mental, as much part of the world as cats and dogs, and can be quanti…ed over; they are objective and independent of our formulating them; their constituents are likewise real, and include not only physical objects but universals which in turn include relations such as (to use Russell’s favorite example) greater than. The question of the status of relations, in particular, became the principal issue between the idealists and their critics. The arguments Russell used in justifying his repudiation of his former views display in perhaps their clearest form the theoretical questions on which the fate of idealism turned, in metaphysics, the philosophy of logic, and what was eventually to become known as the philosophy of language. His chosen focus of criticism was the most famous of the idealists, F. H. Bradley, whom he treated as their representative. Although Bradley himself was too idiosyncratic for this role, his arguments shaped the beliefs of later idealists, e.g. Bernard Bosanquet (1895, 1911), H. H. Joachim (1906) and Brand Blanshard (1939). And clearly discernible in his writings are some of the views of his idealistically more orthodox Oxford teacher, T. H. Green. Russell’s focus, then, is not completely misplaced. Evident in both Green and Bradley is a conscious rejection of the tradition of their earlier compatriots, such as Locke, Hume and Mill, together with a positive though not uncritical response to the work of Kant and Hegel.
In so far as there is a single event which can be regarded as the origin of British Idealism, it is the introduction of Hegel to Anglophone philosophers. The crucial date seems to have been around 1857, when Green …rst encountered Hegel’s writings at Oxford through his tutor Benjamin Jowett, one of the …rst people to have brought a set of them into Britain. It was principally because of the activity of Green that the idealists came to prominence in the closing decades of the nineteenth century (Quinton 1971). The theoretical issues which the idealists themselves emphasized resulted in part from something they shared with Russell. This was a natural, though from the point of view of more recent logicians, naïve account of the nature of logic: “[L]ogic,” Russell held, “is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and general features” (Russell 1919: 169). It is universal, ranging over everything, and its aim is to …nd the most general truths of all. This conception, shared despite their more obvious differences with Russell over e.g. technical apparatus and formal methods, gave rise to what the idealists themselves called the problem of the relation of thought and reality. The problem takes two principal forms: truth and inference. In the case of truth, the question arises, how is it possible for a mind to attain truth about a reality that is non-mental? In the case of inference, the question is, how is it possible to infer with deductive validity from one matter of fact to another when the reality about which the deduction is being made does not itself contain logical relations between its components? J. S. Mill (1843) e.g. had in effect responded to the latter question by answering that it is not so possible: valid deductive inference
is circular and any inference to new knowledge must be inductive. Hume’s thought that deductive inference could relate only ideas gives the same answer: one cannot validly reason from one matter of fact to another. It should not, then, be particularly surprising that Green chose Hume as the focus for his …rst and most signi…cant contribution to the discussion of these matters (Green 1874), nor that his lectures contained a comparably searching examination of Mill (Green 1885-8: Vol. 2, 195-333). But Hume had an extra signi…cance for Green, who regarded him as the culmination of the empiricist tradition (by this stage a kind of orthodoxy in British philosophy), the …rst philosopher to think through with rigor the consequences of the school’s fundamental assumptions and to eradicate completely the inconsistencies arising from Locke’s attempts to reconcile those assumptions with common sense (Green 1874: 5). Green argued that Hume’s view, that there is nothing in the mind but the “impressions” of experience and “ideas” derived therefrom, makes it impossible to give an account of relations between the mind’s ingredients. For example, after quoting a famous passage in Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739: Bk 1, pt 1, §6), in which Hume criticizes the traditional account of substance by arguing that it cannot “be deriv’d from the impressions of sensation or re¶exion,” Green later draws the same conclusion concerning the idea of a relation, asking,
