point, to some such enthusiastic fancy, provided that its incompatibility with honest action may be denied or ignored.  So in this case British idealists, in the act of defining knowledge idealistically, as the presence to consciousness of its own phenomena, never really ceased to assume transcendent knowledge of a self-existing world, social and psychological, if not material:  and they continued scrupulously to readjust their ideas to those dark facts, often more faithfully than the avowed positivists or scientific psychologists.

What could ethics properly be to a philosopher who on principle might not trespass beyond the limits of consciousness?  Only ethical sentiment.  Bradley was satisfied to appeal to the moral consciousness of his day, without seeking to transform it.  The most intentionally eloquent passage in his book describes war-fever unifying and carrying away a whole people:  that was the summit of moral consciousness and of mystic virtue.  His aim, even in ethics, was avowedly to describe that which exists, to describe moral experience, without proposing a different form for it.  A man must be a man of his own time, or nothing; to set up to be better than the world was the beginning of immorality; and virtue lay in accepting one’s station and its duties.  The moralist should fill his mind with a concrete picture of the task and standards of his age and nation, and should graft his own ideals upon that tree; this need not prevent moral consciousness from including a decided esteem for non-political excellences like health, beauty, or intelligence, which are not ordinarily called virtues by modern moralists.  Yet they were undeniably good; better, perhaps, than any painful and laborious dutifulness; so that the strictly moral consciousness might run over, and presently lose itself in “something higher”.  Indeed, even health, beauty, and intelligence, which seemed at first so clearly good, might lose their sharpness on a wider view.  In the panorama that would ultimately fill the mind these so-called goods and virtues could not be conceived without their complementary vices and evils.  Thus all moral consciousness, and even all vital preference might ultimately be superseded:  they might appear to have belonged to a partial and rather low stage in the self-development of consciousness.

With this dissolution of his moral judgments always in prospect, why should Bradley, or any idealist, have pursued ethical studies at all?  Since all phases of life were equally necessary to enrich an infinite consciousness, which must know both good and evil in order to merge and to transcend them, he could hardly nurse any intense enthusiasm for a different complexion to be given to the lives of men.  His moral passion—­for he had it, caustic and burning clear—­was purely intellectual:  it was shame that in England the moral consciousness should have been expressed in systems dialectically so primitive as those of the positivists and utilitarians.