Abstract

Bradley's essay, first published in 1874, is considered the earliest significant application of British idealism to philosophy of history and an exemplar of Anglo-American analytical philosophy of history. The editor of the present edition goes much further. He credits Bradley with being one of the chief sources of the twentieth-century idea of history and more particularly, of Collingwood's expression of that idea. Rubinoff makes out a good case for the identity between Collingwood and Bradley. Collingwood's concept of history as the re-enactment of past thought has its counterpart in Bradley's "identification of consciousness," and Collingwood's idea of history as an attempt to organize the thought of the past into a dynamically developing scale of forms parallels Bradley's theory of reality as a concrete universal which appears in finite centers. Bradley evidently had no knowledge of Dilthey, yet his reactions to history were essentially the same. Both viewed history as an autonomous discipline requiring its own methodology, and both rejected the "dehumanized" approach of positivism, on the one hand, and the relativism and skepticism of primitive historicism on the other hand. Similarly, both had recourse to the concept of re-experience of past experience by the historian. The line from Bradley to Collingwood is clear enough. What seems cloudy is Rubinoff's claim that Dilthey lapsed back into positivism by presupposing the uniformity of human nature as the ground for understanding self and others, while Bradley escaped this lapse by making the historian the criterion of historical knowledge. It seems more accurate to describe Dilthey's concept as the continuity of human nature, not its uniformity. Uniformity would suggest that primitive man could understand modern society. Dilthey could hardly have been suggesting such a possibility! And, clearly, Bradley's concept of the historian as criterion of historical knowledge is only comprehensible within the framework of the continuity of human nature.--H. B.