TO MY WIFE
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reface From October 1911 until June 1914 1 was a student in the HarvardGraduate School as a candidate for the degree of Doctor ofPhilosophy. This degree was to be attained in three stages . at theend of the second year by Preliminary Examinations in whichone was tested in all the branches of philosophy which one hadstudied, and in the ability to translate French and Germanphilosophical work into English; later by the presentation of a dis-sertation on a subject approved by the heads of the department;and finally a viva^ in which the aspirant defended his thesis andwas again tested for his command of logic, psychology and thehistory of philosophy. The dissertation which is here published for the first time, wasprepared during those years and during a year in which, thanksto the award of a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship by HarvardUniversity, I was at Merton College as a pupil of Harold Joachim,the disciple of Bradley who was closest to the master. To HaroldJoachim I owe a great deal: the discipline of a close study of theGreek text of the Posterior Analytics^ and, through his criticismof my weekly papers, an understanding of what I wanted to sayand of how to say it. On going down from Oxford in 1915 I madethe decision to stay in England, and had to seek a source of liveli-hood. From the autumn of 1915 until the end of 1916 1 earned myliving as a schoolmaster. I did not, however, abandon immediatelythe intention of fulfilling the conditions for the doctor'^s degree.Harvard had made it possible for me to go to Oxford for a year;and this return at least I owed to Harvard. So, amongst my otherlabours, I completed the first draft of my dissertation, and des-patched it across the Atlantic for the judgment of the HarvardDepartment of Philosophy. In April 1916, when this work wascompleted, I was a junior master at the Highgate Junior School, 9 Preface So mucli for the origins of this study of the theory of knowledgeaccording to the philosophy of Francis Herbert Bradley. I did notreturn to Harvard to complete the requirements for the doctor’sdegree, and I did not see that University again for seventeenyears after I had left it. Nor did I give any further thought to thisdissertation after learning that it had been officially approved.A few years ago Professor Hugh Kenner of California in hisbook The Invisible Poet drew attention to it in a chapter on mydebt to Bradley. My curiosity, however, was first stimulated by avisit from Professor Anne Bolgan of the University of Alaska,who had read the script in the Harvard University archives, andhad obtained, with my permission, a photostatic copy. She had alsoseen there the carbon copy of a letter to me from Professor J. H.Woods written shortly after my dissertation had been presented,in which he said that Josiah Royce, the doyen of American philo-sophers, had spoken of it "as the work of an expert’. Mr WilliamJackson, curator of the Houghton Library at Harvard, suppliedme with a photostatic copy of the text (the original typescriptbeing, of course, the property of the University). To Professor Bolgan, who has made a close study of this essay,I am deeply indebted She has read the present text and made im-portant corrections and suggestions ; she has most painstakinglyedited the text. We have endeavoured, however, only to removesuch errors and blemishes as appear to have been due to careless-ness or haste. She has also checked my references (as far as is nowpossible) and has prepared a select bibliography, the index, andvaluable notes. I wish also to thank Mr Peter Heath of the University of StAndrews, for translating the passages quoted from Germanauthors. Forty-six years after my academic philosophizing came to anend, I find myself unable to think in the terminology of this essay.Indeed, I do not pretend to understand it. As philosophizing, itmay appear to most modern philosophers to be quaintly anti-quated. I can present this book only as a curiosity of biographicalinterest, which shows, as my wife observed at once, how closely 10 Preface my own prose style was formed on that of Bradley and how littleit has changed m all these years. It was she who urged me topublish it ; and to her I dedicate it. There is evidently a page or so missing from chapter VI. thegap occurs after the last sentence of the paragraph which hereends at the top of page 146. What may at first appear moreserious is the loss of one or several pages of the conclusion of theessay. The last page of the typescript ends with an unfinishedsentence: For if all objectivity and all knowledge is relative, ... Ihave omitted this exasperating clause it is suitable that a disser-tation on the work of Francis Herbert Bradley should end with thewords ^the Absolute’. Mr. Jackson tells me that these pages weremissing when the script came into his care This does not seem tome to matter . the argument, for what it is worth, is there. But at Professor Bolgan’s suggestion I have appended, as partialcompensation for the loss of the concluding page or pages, twoessays which I wrote m 1916, and which appeared in The Monist^ aphilosophical periodical published in Chicago. It was PhilipJourdain, the British correspondent of that journal (to whom, Iremember, I had been introduced by Bertrand Russell) whokindly commissioned these articles. They appeared in a numberdevoted to the celebration of the bi-centenary of the death ofLeibniz. The original title of tliis dissertation was Experience and theObjects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F. H, Bradley with thesub-title A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the require-ments for candidates for the doctorate of philosophy in philosophy atHarvard University.
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