BAILLIE, JAMES. - English philosopher, b. 24 Oct. 1872, d. at Weybridge on 9 June 1940. From 1902 to 1924 he was professor of moral philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, and from 1924 to 1938 vice-chancellor of the University of Leeds. He belonged to the English neo-Hegelian school (absolute idealism with religious hues), but with a personal note, especially in the second phase of his thought, when he moved away from pure Hegelianism (represented by the works The origin and significance of Hegel's logic, London-New York 1901; An outline of the idealistic construction of experience, ibid. 1906), and was led to reflect on the problem of the nature and destiny of concrete man, grasped in his problematic nature and his limitations, without the presupposition of the universal rationality of the real (Studies in human nature, London 1921). He translated Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (rev. ed., ibid. 1931).
According to Baillie, philosophy is «the attempt to reach a single and full vision of man and his world» which stand in a relationship of active reciprocity. This relationship constitutes the whole of human experience in all its forms, none of which (sensible, moral, scientific experience, etc.) determines another or exhausts man and his world in their totality. Truth for man is a gradual, risky conquest, always incomplete. No single form can escape the dangers of error or represent the fullness of individuality, even if one form realizes it better than another. Religion, understood as «awareness of relation to the transcendent», in which the individual attains a greater fullness, represents the highest form of experience.