aracteristic of the British mind to yield
occasionally, up to a certain point, to some such enthusiastic fancy,
provided that its incompatibility with honest action may be denied or
ignored. So in this case British idealists, in the act of defining
knowledge idealistically, as the presence to consciousness of its own
phenomena, never really ceased to assume transcendent knowledge of a
self-existing world, social and psychological, if not material: and they
continued scrupulously to readjust their ideas to those dark facts, often
more faithfully than the avowed positivists or scientific psychologists.

What could ethics properly be to a philosopher who on principle might not
trespass beyond the limits of consciousness? Only ethical sentiment.
Bradley was satisfied to appeal to the moral consciousness of his day,
without seeking to transform it. The most intentionally eloquent passage
in his book describes war-fever unifying and carrying away a whole people:
that was the summit of moral consciousness and of mystic virtue. His aim,
even in ethics, was avowedly to describe that which exists, to describe
moral experience, without proposing a different form for it. A man must be
a man of his own time, or nothing; to set up to be better than the world
was the beginning of immorality; and virtue lay in accepting one's station
and its duties. The moralist should fill his mind with a concrete picture
of the task and standards of his age and nation, and should graft his own
ideals upon that tree; this need not prevent moral consciousness from
including a decided esteem for non-political excellences like health,
beauty, or intelligence, which are not ordinarily called virtues by modern
moralists. Yet they were undeniably good; better, perhaps, than any
painful and laborious dutifulness; so that the strictly moral
consciousness might run over, and presently lose itself in "something
higher". Indeed, even health, beauty, and intelligence, which seemed at
first so clearly good, might lose their sharpness on a wider view. In the
panorama that would ultimately fill the mind these so-called goods and
virtues could not be conceived without their complementary vices and
evils. Thus all moral consciousness, and even all vital preference might
ultimately be superseded: they might appear to have belonged to a partial
and rather low stage in the self-development of consciousness.

With this dissolution of his moral judgments always in prospect,