This is a digital recording of "Human Immortality" from J.M.E. McTaggart's "Studies in Hegelian Cosmology."

F. H. Bradley’s Absolute Idealism was in sharp contrast to that of McTaggart’s. Indeed, their conception of metaphysics was staunchly different. McTaggart saw metaphysics as a means of comfort, while Bradley sarcastically took metaphysics to be “the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.” In a more serious tone, he also expounds upon this in the following way: Bradley’s writings include Ethical Studies, The Principles of Logic, and Essays on Truth and Reality, but perhaps his most important contribution to British Idealism was his 1893 magnum opus, Appearance and Reality. The work is divided into two books; the first being “Appearance,” and the second being “Reality.” In “Appearance,” Bradley arms himself with a single weapon—the Law of Non-Contradiction—and proceeds to lead the reader through a pilgrim’s progress of argumentation; wherein he exposes contradictions, inconsistencies, and paradoxes embedded deep in the heart of our everyday experiences that we take prima facie to be unquestionably and absolutely real. Among the condemned include the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, relations, space, time, motion, change, causality, activity, individual things, the self, the body, physical nature, and many other phenomena that get caught in his snare. Bradley even goes so far as to say that “philosophy, as we shall find in our next chapter, is itself but appearance.” For Bradley, these phenomena are all “appearances” that fail to live up to the status of “Ultimate Reality.” After entering into the second book of Appearance and Reality (i.e. “Reality”), Bradley exchanges his heavily-used battering-ram for an eidetic canvas and paintbrush, and proceeds to draft a portrait of reality. Bradley calls his “Ultimate Reality,” the “Absolute.” In like contrast to McTaggart’s “society of eternal selves,” Bradley’s Absolute is a harmonious, supra-relational whole whose contents is nothing other than sentient experience. Bradley’s arguments for monism stem from his rejection of the reality of relations. In fact, Bradley’s legacy has largely been shaped by his notorious and eponymously named “Bradley’s Regress.” In the most dramatic passage of Appearance and Reality, Bradley calls upon the reader to perform the following ideal experiment: “Find any piece of existence, take up anything that anyone could possibly call a fact, or could in any sense assert to have being, and then judge if it does not consist in sentient experience. Try to discover any sense in which you can still continue to speak of it, when all perception and feeling have been removed; or point out any fragment of its matter, any aspect of its being, which is not derived from and is not still relative to this source. When the experiment is made strictly, I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced. Anything, in no sense felt or perceived, becomes to me quite unmeaning. And as I cannot try to think of it without realising either that I am not thinking at all, or that I am thinking of it against my will as being experienced, I am driven to the conclusion that for me experience is the same as reality. The fact that falls elsewhere seems, in my mind, to be a mere word and a failure, or else an attempt at self-contradiction. It is a vicious abstraction whose existence is meaningless nonsense, and is therefore not possible.” The radical conclusions of Bradley’s arguments for monism and a single “Absolute” that transcends, absorbs, and harmonizes all the finite and contradictory appearances of our universe, “with all its suns and galaxies,” earned him the title of “the Zeno of modern philosophy.” Bradley’s trenchant prose, humorous whit, and frequent polemics against empiricism, materialism, reductionism, and abstractionism blend together into an iconic and unique flavor of thought.