The Absolute

Bradley arrives at the Absolute by elimination. Having shown that all the categories of appearance — things, qualities, relations, space, time, causation, the self — generate internal contradictions when taken as ultimate, he argues that reality must be something that resolves these contradictions: a whole so complete and self-consistent that no residue of contradiction remains. This whole must be unified — not a plurality but a single thing — and it must be experiential, since the only being we know directly is experience, and to postulate a non-experiential ultimate would be to posit something utterly unknowable.

The Absolute transcends relational thought — it is not a whole made up of parts standing in relations, because Bradley has argued that all relations generate contradictions. But neither is it simply undifferentiated: the appearances that we experience — space, time, persons, things — are all real as appearances, all absorbed and preserved in the Absolute at a higher level of integration. Bradley uses the suggestive phrase "superseding": the Absolute supersedes the categories of appearance rather than annihilating them, preserving whatever reality they possess while dissolving the contradictions they generate.

Bradley's identification of the Absolute with experience is his most distinctive and controversial move. He argues that we know immediately, in feeling — in the undivided wholeness of our moment-to-moment experiential life before it is carved up by relational thought — a hint of what the Absolute is like. Feeling is not the Absolute, but it points toward it: it shows us that experience can be unified and whole, that the divisions of relational thought are imposed on rather than constitutive of what is ultimately real. The Absolute is, as Bradley puts it, a "higher supra-relational experience," one that includes all the diversity of finite experience without the mutual exclusion and contradiction that characterises it.

The Absolute is the subject of Part II of Appearance and Reality (1893). Bradley's view was vigorously attacked by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore, whose critiques of idealism and defence of pluralistic realism mark the beginning of the analytic tradition in British philosophy.