BOSANQUET, BERNARD. - Philosopher, b. in Northumberland on 14 June 1848, d. on 8 Feb. 1923 in London, where he lived continuously from 1881 onward, except for the brief interlude (1903-1908) in which he taught philosophy at St. Andrews. He entered Balliol College (Oxford) in 1867, at the time when Green's influence was at its strongest. Besides that of Plato and Hegel, he also underwent the influence of Lotze (whom he translated into English) and of his contemporary Bradley, with whom B. represents the best of English absolute idealism.
An open mind, B. sympathizes easily with all spiritual movements, and is attracted by almost all speculative problems: logical (Logic, Oxford 1888; The essential of Logic, London 1895); aesthetic (History of Aesthetic, ibid. 1892; Three Lectures on Aesthetic, ibid. 1905); moral (Psychology of the Moral Self, ibid. 1897; Principle of Individuality and Value, ibid. 1912; Value and Destiny of the Individual, ibid. 1913; Some suggestion in Ethics, ibid. 1918); political-social (Aspects of the Social Problems, ibid. 1895; Philosophical Theory of the State, ibid. 1899; Social and International Ideals, ibid. 1917); religious (What Religion is, ibid. 1920).
B. (as, for that matter, Bradley and Baillie) insists on the dualistic motifs of experience and on the transcendence of the Absolute. His is an idealism of Hegelian origin, but not properly Hegelian. The Platonic dualism of the two worlds is not to be understood as a clear-cut separation, but as a unity that does not exclude their distinction and the transcendence of the intelligible with respect to the sensible, in which it is present. The presence of the intelligible in the sensible is art, whose essence is very close to that of religious experience: the one and the other, in fact, grasp reality in its concrete unity, without ever expressing it perfectly and totally. No form of experience (not even thought, which is the self-revelation of reality), however elevated, can ever be adequate to the Absolute, which is therefore always transcendent.