 In addition to his discussion of the nature of ideas, judgment and reference, the emphasis he gives to the notion of truth is another main way in which he helped shaping the agenda of later analytic philosophy. At this point Bradley’s attempt to write a book on logic without getting entangled in metaphysics begins to succumb to his doubts about the notion of truth. He holds that logic presupposes a correspondence theory of truth (he calls it the ‘copy’ theory), but it is apparent that he thinks this theory metaphysically inadequate: indeed, he marshals against it counter-examples drawing on, e.g., disjunctions, counter-examples which had to await the theory of truth-functions before they could be accommodated. In Essays on Truth and Reality he takes these ideas further, arguing for ‘the identity of truth knowledge and reality’ (p. 113) and vehemently rejecting all alternatives, including not solely the copy-theory, but also any understanding of the concept of truth in terms of pragmatic success. It could hardly be clearer that Bradley holds an identity theory of truth, and although he is commonly believed to have been a supporter of a coherence theory of truth (and is standardly identified as such in the textbooks), this common belief is at the very least greatly misleading. However, the combination of the identity theory and his metaphysical doctrine that reality is a unified whole enables coherence to be deduced from his views as a consequence, and he himself thought the test of truth to be ‘system’, a notion under which he included what is commonly meant by coherence; this explains why he has so often been thought to be a coherence theorist. It might be thought that his famous attack on the Hegelian idea that the rational is the real (Principles Bk III, Pt II, Ch. IV, sec. 16) is inconsistent with his holding an identity theory of truth: but the two are reconciled through his doctrine of degrees of truth, a doctrine which has to be understood within the context of his metaphysics.