Appearance and Reality. A Metaphysical Essay.

First edition. 8vo. xxiv, 558 pp. Original red cloth, spine lettered and ruled in gilt, ruling continued boards in blind, black coated endpapers, edges untrimmed (small bookseller's label to front pastedown, extremities rubbed and bumped, rear hinge slightly cracked, but firmly holding, otherwise a very good copy). London, Swan Sonnenschein.

The principal philosophical work of the most famous, original and philosophically influential proponents of British idealism. 'Appearance and Reality is divided into two books. The first, ‘Appearance’, is brief, and its aim destructive, arguing that ‘the ideas by which we try to understand the universe’ all bring us ultimately to contradictions when we try to think out their implications. Some of these ideas belong especially to philosophy, such as the view that only the primary qualities are real and the Kantian notion of a thing-in-itself; others, for instance the notions of cause, motion, self, space, thing and time, are deployed in everyday life. The second book, ‘Reality’, is long; its aim is to provide a positive account of the Absolute — the ultimate, unconditioned reality as it is in itself, not distorted by projection through the conceptual mechanisms of thought. A large proportion of his discussion is devoted to consideration of natural objections to this positive account' (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy).

Bradley served as the principle antagonist for the British analytic tradition, in what was called 'the revolt against idealism' staged at the turn of the twentieth century by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, a critique that continued in A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic (1936).

Stock Code: 234057