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This conception of the concrete universal has the advantage that it avoids the

peculiar conﬂation of individuality with universality that we saw earlier,

universal of an abstraction from the particular and diﬀerent, but the unity which is

immanent in them and ﬁnds in them its own necessary expression; not an arbitrary

invention of the observing and classifying mind unifying in its own imagination things

which are yet essentially diﬀerent, but an idea which expresses the inner dialectic, the

movement or process towards unity, which exists in and constitutes the being of the

objects themselves. This deeper and truer universality is that which may be designated

ideal or organic universality.

(John Caird, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion

(Glasgow, 1904) 217–18)

Cf. also Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, 37:

A world or cosmos is a system of members, such that every member, being ex hypothesi

distinct, nevertheless contributes to the unity of the whole in virtue of the peculiarities

which constitute its distinctness. And the important point for us at present is the

diﬀerence of principle between a world and a class. It takes all sorts to make a world; a

class is essentially of one sort only. In a word, the diﬀerence is that the ultimate principle

of unity and community is fully exempliﬁed in the former, but only superﬁcially in the

latter. The ultimate principle, we may say, is sameness in the other; generality is sameness

in spite of the other; universality is sameness by means of the other.

Similar comments include Bernard Bosanquet, ‘Life and Philosophy’, in Contemporary British

Philosophy, edited by J. H. Muirhead, ﬁrst series (London, 1924) 51–74, esp. p. 62: ‘The universal,

the very life and spirit of logic, did not mean [to me] a general predicate, but the plastic unity of an

inclusive system’; and Bernard Bosanquet, The Distinction Between Mind and its Objects

(Manchester, 1913) 34: ‘a universal is a working connection within particulars’. Cf. also Richard

Lewis Nettleship, Philosophical Remains of Richard Lewis Nettleship, edited by A. C. Bradley, 2nd

edn (London, 1901) 158–9:

The universal is said to contain or include its particulars. This, of course, is a spatial

metaphor, and we always have to guard against the inﬂuence of spatial associations.

But the metaphor helps some minds to realize the truth, and it is convenient as bringing

out the fact that particulars, while excluding one another, also make up, or are included

in, one whole. To say, for example, that humanity includes all men may help one to

realize the truth that, though men exclude one another, they still form a unity.

and R. G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis (Oxford, 1924) 220–1:

This absolute whole is the concrete universal; for concrete universality is indivi-

duality, the individual being simply the unity of the universal and the particular.

The absolute individual is universal in that it is what it is throughout, and every part

of it is as individual as itself. On the other hand it is no mere abstraction, the abstract

quality of individualness, but an individual which includes all others. It is the system

of systems, the world of worlds.

This view of the concrete universal persists in the thinking of later generations of British writers

on Hegel, such as T. M. Knox: see, e.g. his translator’s notes to his translation of Hegel’s

Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952) 323–4 [my emphasis]:

An abstract universal has no organic connexion with its particulars. Mind, or reason,

as a concrete universal, particularizes itself into diﬀerences which are interconnected by

its universality in the same way in which parts of the organism are held together by the

single life which all things share. The parts depend on the whole for their life, but on

the other hand the persistence of life necessitates the diﬀerentiation of the part.

Cf. also T. L. S. Sprigge, ‘Bradley’ in Routledge History of Philosophy VII: The Nineteenth

Century, edited by C. L. Ten (London, 1994) 437–58, esp. p. 440: ‘[P]roponents of the concrete

universal usually take the totality of its instances as itself the universal in question, arguing that

it is a kind of whole which is present in each of its parts’.

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