---
title: "A History of Philosophy, Vol. VIII: Modern Philosophy — Empiricism, Idealism, and Pragmatism in Britain and America"
author: "Frederick Copleston"
year: 1966
shelf: "ancient-roots"
purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Copleston+History+of+Philosophy+Empiricism+Idealism+Pragmatism+Britain+America"
in_stock: false
related: ["copleston-history-philosophy-7", "copleston-history-philosophy-6", "james-varieties-religious-experience", "james-principles-psychology", "herrmann-william-james-and-jung"]
collections: []
content_type: "book-commentary"
key_takeaways:
  - "The eighth volume narrows what its preface had first promised: the earlier plan to cover both French and British nineteenth-century thought is set aside, and the book is devoted exclusively to British and American philosophy. Copleston grants that this is familiar ground, but holds that a general history of Western philosophy ought to cover it, and he organizes the material as a movement from empiricism through idealism to pragmatism and, finally, the revolt against idealism."
  - "Its architecture runs in five parts. Part I follows British empiricism from the utilitarian movement — Bentham and the two Mills — through J. S. Mill's logic and the empiricists, agnostics and positivists to Herbert Spencer's evolutionary system; Part II traces the idealist movement in Great Britain from Coleridge and Carlyle through T. H. Green to the absolute idealism of Bradley and Bosanquet and the turn toward personal idealism in McTaggart and Ward; Parts III and IV cross to America for its idealism, centered on Royce, and for the pragmatist movement in Peirce, James and Schiller, and Dewey."
  - "Part V gathers the revolt against idealism — realism in Britain and America, G. E. Moore and the practice of analysis, and three chapters on Bertrand Russell — and Copleston explains in the preface why Russell is treated at length within this revolt while Wittgenstein, who died in 1951, is relegated to an epilogue: Russell's thought belongs to the reaction against idealism in a way the later Wittgenstein's does not. An appendix on John Henry Newman closes the volume."
references:
  - "Copleston, F. (1966). A History of Philosophy, Vol. VIII: Modern Philosophy — Empiricism, Idealism, and Pragmatism in Britain and America. Image Books/Doubleday."
  - "Copleston, F. (1963). A History of Philosophy, Vol. VII: Modern Philosophy — From the Post-Kantian Idealists to Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. Image Books/Doubleday."
  - "James, W. (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience."
glossary_terms:
  - "the utilitarian movement"
  - "the principle of the uniformity of Nature"
  - "matter as a permanent possibility of sensations"
  - "absolute idealism"
  - "the pragmatist analysis of meaning"
  - "the revolt against idealism"
scholar_prompts:
  - "Copleston follows British empiricism from Bentham's calculus of pleasure and pain through J. S. Mill's attempt to ground even mathematics and the self in experience, ending at Mill's account of matter as a permanent possibility of sensations and the spectre of solipsism it raises. For a library that treats the psyche as real and lawful, what does this radical empiricism illuminate about the felt texture of experience, and where does its reduction of mind to associated sensations lose the depth that the inner life actually has?"
  - "The volume sets the British and American idealists — Green's eternal subject, Bradley's Absolute, Royce's fourth conception of Being — against the empiricism they meant to answer, each insisting that reality is finally spiritual and whole. Read against depth psychology's own claim that soul is not merely a name for nerves, what does the idealist wager preserve about interiority, and what does its confidence that the Absolute can be thought as one whole overlook about the particular, suffering self?"
  - "In the pragmatists — Peirce on the objectivity of truth, James on pragmatism as a theory of meaning and of truth and on belief in God, Dewey on inquiry and experience — Copleston presents a philosophy that measures ideas by their work in experience. Where does a practice that listens to the life of the psyche find kinship with the pragmatist test of meaning by consequences, and where must it insist that some truths of the soul are not settled by their usefulness?"
seo_title: "Copleston's History of Philosophy, Vol. VIII: Britain and America | Seba"
seo_description: "On Copleston's eighth volume — British and American thought from utilitarian empiricism and Spencer through the idealism of Bradley, Bosanquet and Royce to the pragmatism of Peirce, James and Dewey and the revolt against idealism in Moore and Russell."
---

**A Narrowed Scope: Britain and America**

The eighth volume opens by revising a promise. In the preface to Volume VII, Copleston had said that he hoped to give the eighth to some aspects of French and British thought in the nineteenth century; that hope, he now records, has been only partially fulfilled. The present volume contains no treatment of French philosophy and is devoted exclusively to British and American thought. He concedes that it covers rather familiar ground, yet holds that in a general history of Western philosophy this ground obviously ought to be covered. The book strays well into the twentieth century, and the preface offers an explanation for one consequence of that reach: Bertrand Russell, still living when the volume was written, is accorded relatively extensive treatment, while Ludwig Wittgenstein, who died in 1951, is relegated to the epilogue apart from a few allusions in the chapters on Russell. The reason is not neglect but placement — Russell's thought fits naturally into the context of the revolt against idealism, which is where this history's line of development leads. What follows is thus not a survey of a century but the tracing of a movement across two national traditions, from empiricism through idealism to pragmatism, and then to the reaction that turned against idealism from within.

**Part I — British Empiricism**

The first part follows the empiricist current at its most self-conscious. It begins with the utilitarian movement across two chapters: the life and principles of Bentham and the associationist psychology of James Mill, and then the development of utilitarian ethics in John Stuart Mill, together with his account of civil liberty, government, and psychological freedom. A third chapter gives Mill's logic and empiricism their full measure — names and propositions, the nature of mathematics, syllogistic reasoning, induction and the principle of the uniformity of Nature, the law of causation, and method in the moral sciences — before arriving at the two positions that most sharply test empiricism as a metaphysic: matter analyzed as a permanent possibility of sensations, and the analysis of mind that raises the spectre of solipsism, with Mill's remarks on religion and natural theology appended. The part then widens to the empiricists, agnostics, and positivists — Bain's associationism, Sidgwick, Darwin and the philosophy of evolution, Huxley on evolution, ethics, and agnosticism, the scientific materialists, and the Comtist positivist groups — and closes with the system of Herbert Spencer, his general law of evolution as the alternation of evolution and dissolution, his sociology and ethics, and the Unknowable he places at the point where religion and science meet.

**Part II and III — The Idealist Movement in Britain and America**

The second part turns to the idealist reaction against that empiricism as it arose in Great Britain. It opens with the beginnings of the movement — the literary pioneers Coleridge and Carlyle, Ferrier on the subject-object relation, John Grote's attack on phenomenalism and hedonism, and the revival of interest in Greek philosophy and in Hegel. From there Copleston follows the development of idealism proper: T. H. Green's doctrine of the eternal subject and his ethical and political theory, and then absolute idealism in its two major figures — Bradley, whose distinction between appearance and reality issues in an Absolute beyond the relational thought that everywhere breaks down, and Bosanquet, with his logic, his metaphysics of individuality, and his philosophy of the State. The part ends with the turn toward personal idealism in Pringle-Pattison's defense of the value of the human person, McTaggart's pluralistic idealism, and Ward's spiritualism. The third part carries the same movement across the Atlantic, sketching the beginnings of philosophy in America, the Enlightenment there, the influence of the Scottish philosophy, and Emerson's Transcendentalism, before centering on Josiah Royce — his meaning of Being and of ideas, his fourth conception of Being, and the finite self set in relation to the Absolute — and closing with the personal idealists who criticized and prolonged his work.

**Part IV and V — Pragmatism and the Revolt against Idealism**

The fourth part presents the pragmatist movement as America's most distinctive contribution. Peirce is given a chapter on the objectivity of truth, the rejection of universal doubt, and the pragmatist analysis of meaning, held carefully apart from the positivism it can resemble. James and Schiller follow, with James's radical empiricism and pure experience, pragmatism taken both as a theory of meaning and as a theory of truth, and the bearing of all this on belief in God; Schiller's humanism is treated alongside. Dewey then receives the experimentalism that turns philosophy toward inquiry — naturalistic empiricism, instrumentalist logic, moral theory, and religion within a naturalistic frame. The fifth part is the revolt against idealism proper: realism in Britain and America, the world-view of Samuel Alexander and a reference to Whitehead; G. E. Moore's common-sense realism and his practice of analysis, illustrated by the sense-datum theory; and three chapters on Russell — the theory of types and of descriptions and the reduction of mathematics to logic, logical atomism and neutral monism, the limits of empiricism and the analysis of language, and finally his moral philosophy and his conception of philosophy itself. An epilogue on Wittgenstein and an appendix on Newman's approach to religious belief complete the volume.

For this library the volume records the tradition from which much of the modern vocabulary of mind descends. It shows experience pressed until it nearly dissolves the self, idealism answering that reality is spiritual and whole, pragmatism testing meaning by its work in life, and analysis turning to dismantle the systems that came before — the several ways, on one side of philosophy's map, that the modern age tried to say what the psyche is and how its truths are known.