that ‘religieux’ has no English equivalent”.  But a later note says:  “This is not true except of Modern English only.  And, in any case, it won’t do, and was wrong and due to ignorance.  However secluded the religious life, it may be practical indirectly if through the unity of the spiritual body it can be taken as vicarious”.  The “if” here saves the principle that all values must be social, and that the social organism is the sole moral reality:  yet how near this bubble comes to being pricked!  We seem clearly to feel that the question is not whether spiritual life subserves animal society, but whether animal society ever is stirred and hallowed into spiritual life.

All this, however, in that age of progress, was regarded as obsolete:  there was no longer to be any spirit except the spirit of the times.  True, the ritualists might be striving to revive the latent energies of religious devotion, with some dubious help from aestheticism:  but against the rising tide of mechanical progress and romantic anarchy, and against the mania for rewriting history, traditional philosophy then seemed helpless and afraid to defend itself:  it is only now beginning to recover its intellectual courage.  For the moment, speculative radicals saw light in a different quarter.  German idealism was nothing if not self-confident; it was relatively new; it was encyclopaedic in its display of knowledge, which it could manipulate dialectically with dazzling, if not stable, results; it was Protestant in temper and autonomous in principle; and altogether it seemed a sovereign and providential means of suddenly turning the tables on the threatened naturalism.  By developing romantic intuition from within and packing all knowledge into one picture, the universe might be shown to be, like intuition itself, thoroughly spiritual, personal, and subjective.

The fundamental axiom of the new logic was that the only possible reality was consciousness.

“People find”, writes Bradley, “a subject and an object correlated in consciousness....  To go out of that unity is for us literally to go out of our minds....  When mind is made only a part of the whole, there is a question which must be answered....  If about any matter we know nothing whatsoever, can we say anything about it?  Can we even say that it is?  And if it is not in consciousness, how can we know it?...  And conversely, if we know it, it cannot be not mind.”

Bradley challenged his contemporaries to refute this argument; and not being able to do so, many of them felt constrained to accept it, perhaps not without grave misgivings.  For was it not always a rooted conviction of the British mind that knowledge brings material power, and that any figments of consciousness (in religion, for instance) not bringing material power are dangerous bewitchments, and not properly knowledge?  Yet it is no less characteristic of the British mind to yield occasionally, up to a certain