reality: yet how near this bubble comes to being
pricked! We seem clearly to feel that the question is not whether
spiritual life subserves animal society, but whether animal society ever
is stirred and hallowed into spiritual life.

All this, however, in that age of progress, was regarded as obsolete:
there was no longer to be any spirit except the spirit of the times. True,
the ritualists might be striving to revive the latent energies of
religious devotion, with some dubious help from aestheticism: but against
the rising tide of mechanical progress and romantic anarchy, and against
the mania for rewriting history, traditional philosophy then seemed
helpless and afraid to defend itself: it is only now beginning to recover
its intellectual courage. For the moment, speculative radicals saw light
in a different quarter. German idealism was nothing if not self-confident;
it was relatively new; it was encyclopaedic in its display of knowledge,
which it could manipulate dialectically with dazzling, if not stable,
results; it was Protestant in temper and autonomous in principle; and
altogether it seemed a sovereign and providential means of suddenly
turning the tables on the threatened naturalism. By developing romantic
intuition from within and packing all knowledge into one picture, the
universe might be shown to be, like intuition itself, thoroughly
spiritual, personal, and subjective.

The fundamental axiom of the new logic was that the only possible reality
was consciousness.

"People find", writes Bradley, "a subject and an object correlated
in consciousness.... To go out of that unity is for us literally to
go out of our minds.... When mind is made only a part of the whole,
there is a question which _must_ be answered.... If about any
matter we know nothing whatsoever, can we say anything about it?
Can we even say that it is? And if it is not in consciousness, how
can we know it?... And conversely, if we know it, it cannot be not
mind."

Bradley challenged his contemporaries to refute this argument; and not
being able to do so, many of them felt constrained to accept it, perhaps
not without grave misgivings. For was it not always a rooted conviction of
the British mind that knowledge brings material power, and that any
figments of consciousness (in religion, for instance) not bringing
material power are dangerous bewitchments, and not properly knowledge?
Yet it is no less ch