F. H. Bradley Quotes on Truth
F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893) and the long essays collected in Essays on Truth and Reality (1914) gave late nineteenth-century British idealism its most rigorous statement of the coherence theory of truth. The central thesis is that no judgment is wholly true except as it is integrated into the single all-comprehensive system of judgments that articulates the Absolute — the apparent truth of ordinary judgments is always partial, abstract, and corrigible by the further determinations through which the system as a whole approaches its ideal completeness. The framework, developed against the prevailing common-sense and empiricist accounts of truth, supplied the principal philosophical target of the analytic revolt by Russell and Moore at the turn of the twentieth century and remains the canonical statement of British absolute idealism.
Quotes
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Attributed to F. H. Bradley:
“Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.”
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“Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.”
Appearance and Reality , preface (1893). -
Attributed to F. H. Bradley:
“The Absolute is one system, and its contents are nothing but sentient experience.”
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Attributed to F. H. Bradley:
“The world of relations is a world of appearance.”
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Attributed to F. H. Bradley:
“Reality is one and unchanging; it is appearance that gives the world its diversity.”
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“Eclecticism. Every truth is so true that any truth must be false.”
No. 6. -
“True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.”
No. 10. -
“We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.”
Aphorisms(1930) | No. 23. -
“There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.”
Aphorisms(1930) | No. 88.