Footnote hp35

 

hp35. F.H. Bradley argued that pluralism, as advocated by James, is flawed.

For, if in change something really is altered, and, if the alteration can consist merely in difference of position, and if in this difference the terms and the relations are neither of them altered then either we have an alteration where nothing is changed, or else our premisses have been wrong. Something, if so (we shall have to allow), is concerned in the change, which something is more than and other than the elements admitted by Pluralism. If (to repeat) you hold to reality in the form of external terms and relations, you must deny the ultimate reality of change as actually given. If, on the other hand, you affirm this latter, you must insist that the experience of change is a non-relational totality. And, if so, terms and relations become, as such, abstractions, constructions, true perhaps or perhaps vicious, but assuredly in neither case things, as such, actually experienced. How it is possible to avoid this dilemma and simply to maintain both theses at once, I myself do not know, but apparently nothing less is required for the position taken by Prof. James.

Bradley's criticism also applied to another pluralist, Russell, with whom he held a long-running controversy over the reality of relations. Bradley's remark above appeared in "Appendix III to Chapter V" in his Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford 1914). Bradley was challenging James's views as expressed in Essays in Radical Empiricism, "Essay III"  (published posthumously by Longmans, Green in 1912) and in A Pluralistic Universe (Longmans, Green 1909).

Bradley went on to say,

The doctrine which Prof. James would, I think, have preferred is the view that given experience is non-relational, that it is an unbroken fluid totality containing in one now an undivided lapse, and is in itself foreign to any terms or relations as such. This I also have taken to be the true account of the matter; and what I would notice here is the fact, that, while urging this view as a fatal objection ignored by Absolutism and Idealism, Prof. James might, like others, have himself learnt it at the very source where according to him it is most unknown. The doctrine in question, Prof. James stated very candidly, has been advocated by myself since 1883. He seems even to give me the credit of having broken away here from the tradition of my school, and of having, conjointly with M. Bergson though at perhaps an earlier date, originated in modern times the true view ignored by and fatal to idealistic Monism. Now for myself (I am of course not concerned with M. Bergson's attitude) I at once, in the same journal, disclaimed, and I now again emphatically disclaim any such originality.

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