PEIRCE TO STRAWSON the United Kingdom were dominated by a British version of Hegelian idealism British Idealism and its Critics After the death of John Stuart Mill a reaction had set in against the tradition of British empiricism of which he had been such a distinguished exponent In 1874, a year after Mill’s death, a Balliol tutor, T H Green (1836–82), brought out an edition of David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature with a substantial introduction subjecting the presuppositions of empiricism to devastating criticism In the same year there appeared the first of a long series of English translations of the works of Hegel, which had first been introduced to Oxford in the 1840s by Benjamin Jowett (1817–93), the Master of Green’s college Two years later F H Bradley of Merton published Ethical Studies, a founding classic of British Hegelianism In 1893 Bradley completed Appearance and Reality, the fullest and most magisterial statement of British idealism Shortly afterwards at Cambridge the methods and some of the doctrines of Hegel’s Logic were expounded in a series of treatises by the Trinity College philosopher J M E McTaggart Green’s idealism, like James’s pragmatism, was partly motivated by religious concerns ‘There is one spiritual and self-conscious being of which all that is real is the activity and expression,’ he wrote in Prolegomena to Ethics, published the year after his death in 1882; ‘we are all related to this spiritual being, not merely as parts of the world which is its expression, but as partakers in some inchoate measure of the self-consciousness through which it at once constitutes itself and distinguishes itself from the world.’ This participation, he maintained, was the source of morality and religion Bradley and McTaggart, however, evacuated idealism of any remotely Christian content, and the latter went so far as to deny that there was any Absolute other than a community of finite selves It was common ground among the British idealists, however, that reality was essentially spiritual in nature: they rejected the dualist idea that mind and matter were two equal and independent realms of being But Bradley’s ‘monism’ had another fundamental aspect: the claim that reality is to be considered as a totality Truth belongs not to individual, atomistic proposi- 47