Abstract

John Watson arrived at Queens University Kingston, Ontario, in 1872. In the Preface to the first volume of The Gifford Lectures, The Interpretation of Religious Experience, John Watson expresses his indebtedness to his former teacher, Dr. Edward Caird, and to Dr. F.H. Bradley: “…to those [works of Dr. Bradley and the late Dr. Edward Caird] I owe more than I can well estimate”. But he had previously qualified this debt as one of inspired doubt, not considered apprenticeship. “With the Absolutism of Dr. Bradley, as I need hardly say, I have the greatest sympathy; but I do not think that it successfully avoids in all cases the vice of Spinozism — though, in insisting upon the idea of ‘degrees of reality’, it seems to me to come very clear to an abandonment of the abstract Absolutism elsewhere apparently contended for”.