1. (a) Conceptions of the nature of value are of two main types: they are either objective, or realistic, or else subjective, that is, psychological. The immediately following pages are devoted to the critical consideration of the first of these, the realistic conception of value as “an indefinable quality which attaches to things independently of consciousness.” According to this view, things have value as they have form or colour or volume. A rose, for example, has the qualities of redness, of fragrance, and also of beauty; a book has the qualities of rectangularity, of twelve-ounce weight, and also of truth; a negro has the qualities of erectness, of brownness, and also of moral goodness or badness. Beauty, truth, and moral goodness, grouped together as ‘values,’ or ‘worths,’ or ‘goods,’ are from this point of view as indefinable and ‘absolute’ as the primary and secondary qualities: indeed, they are together known as “tertiary qualities.’ In G. E. Moore's words, a value or “ ‘good’ is a simple notion, just as ‘yellow’ is a simple notion”; and “just as you cannot, by any manner of means, explain to anyone who does not already know it what yellow is, so you cannot explain what good is.”

The words “idea” and “concept” have been, and still are, the source of so much confusion in psychology that we shall do well to banish them from the vocabulary of that science. I have urged this reform and have endeavoured to promote it by writing a psychology without ideas.It has seemed to me that the word “concept” plays a no less pernicious rôle in logic. But it was not until I began to look into the matter with a view to writing this article that I became aware of the desperate degree and extent of the confusion obtaining in all that pertains to the concepts of logic.

§ 22. Logic for Bradley, who follows the Kantian tradition, means primarily a theory of judgment. His definition of judgment is made so wide that it really covers inference as well. The “reference of an ideal content to reality,” as soon as that content is taken as complex and as not atomic, covers inference denned as ideal self-development of an object. Though the definition of judgment has a subjective flavour due to the way in which Bradley finds it necessary to distinguish it from psychical fact, he does not mean to imply that it is any less objective than inference. We learn from the second edition of the Logic that judgment so far as it is mediated is inference, and that mere unmediated judgment is nothing. Judgment, he says, though distinct from inference in form, is everywhere inference really though not explicitly; and almost the first words of the Terminal Essay on Judgment are: “Whatever else and however much else an inference may be, an inference still is a judgment.”

(1) It is a commonly accepted view that men think to live, and do not live to think, that conation, and not cognition, is the primary object of living. Impression, affect, and expression constitute the complete psychic process. The term philosophy, the love of wisdom, also suggests that man's thought has a practical and not a theoretical objective. In this connection, however, two errors must be avoided: on the one hand an exaltation of the intellect as in rationalism, and on the other hand a depreciation of the intellect as in pragmatism.

This year we have been celebrating our centenary, and, when so much has been said, and justly said, of the contributions to various branches of science and learning that have emanated from University College, it seems fitting that the part which the College has played in the advancement of philosophical research should not be left out of account. For in spite of the manifold difficulties that stood in the way of instituting a school of philosophical study in London, what has been achieved here, both in the way of original investigation and of effective teaching, constitutes a record of which we may well be proud.

The life of man in society provides the subject-matter for many different sciences. It is analysed usually by reference to the kind of relation which connects men; and so, if men buy or sell one from the other, economics gives an account of the factors in such a relation; if a policeman directs traffic and the citizen obeys, political science explains government. But clearly no one of these relations between men is altogether independent of the others. Social life is the whole complex of human relations, and there is no man at all who is not thoroughly social. The fundamental fact of mental life life is not the atomic but the related individual. No mind exists which is not in contact with other minds; and there is no mind whose fundamental characteristics are not social.

It is probably true to say that the majority of philosophers have considered the universe to be mental. If the universe is really mental, it follows that matter cannot be quite real, and many philosophers have in fact brought forward cogent reasons for regarding matter as in some sense illusory. Those who hold this view are called Idealists. Idealism has historically assumed a number of different forms, between some of which there is little in common, but all forms of Idealism agree in maintaining that objects, such as chairs and tables, of which common sense believes the external world to exist, are not material.