BAILLIE, JAMES. – English philosopher, born on 24 October 1872, died 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 overtones), but with a personal note, especially in the second phase of his thought, in which 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, there 1906), and was led to reflect on the problem of the nature and destiny of concrete man, grasped in his problematic character and limitations, without the presupposition of the universal rationality of reality (Studies in human nature, London 1921). He translated Hegel’s Fenomenologia dello spirito (revised ed., there 1931).
Philosophy, according to B., is “the attempt to attain a single and complete vision of man and his world”
which stand in a relationship of active and reciprocal interaction. All human experience in its various forms is reducible to this relationship; none of these forms (sensory, moral, scientific experience, etc.) determines the others or exhausts man and his world in their totality. For man, truth is a gradual, hazardous, ever-incomplete conquest. No 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 “consciousness of the relationship with the transcendent,” in which the individual attains a greater fullness, represents the highest form of experience.