Yet, under favourable circumstances, such
suggestion or revelation of experience, without ever becoming science, may
become public unanimity in sentiment, and may produce a truthful and
lively dramatic literature.
All modern philosophy, in so far as it is a description of experience and
not of nature, therefore seems to belong to the sphere of literature, and
to be without scientific value.
II
FIFTY YEARS OF BRITISH IDEALISM[10]
After fifty years, an old milestone in the path of philosophy, Bradley's
_Ethical Studies_, has been set up again, as if to mark the distance which
English opinion has traversed in the interval. It has passed from insular
dogmatism to universal bewilderment; and a chief agent in the change has
been Bradley himself, with his scornful and delicate intellect, his wit,
his candour, his persistence, and the baffling futility of his
conclusions. In this early book we see him coming forth like a young David
against every clumsy champion of utilitarianism, hedonism, positivism, or
empiricism. And how smooth and polished were the little stones in his
sling! How fatally they would have lodged in the forehead of that
composite monster, if only it had had a forehead! Some of them might even
have done murderous execution in Bradley's own camp: for instance, this
pebble cast playfully at the metaphysical idol called "Law": "It is
_always_ wet on half-holidays because of the Law of Raininess, but
_sometimes_ it is _not_ wet, because of the Supplementary Law of
Sunshine".
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