 Another factor was logical positivism, whose representatives repudiated metaphysics in general as meaningless: in the first chapter of A.J. Ayer’s anti-metaphysical tract Language, Truth and Logic, Bradley is presented solely as a metaphysician and, on the basis of a single out-of-context sentence, selected for ridicule (p. 36). The chosen sentence (“the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress”, which Ayer in fact slightly paraphrased from p. 442 of Appearance and Reality) was Bradley’s expression of the familiar doctrine that ultimate reality, though changeless in itself, constitutes the ontological foundation of our finite world of change and becoming. Ayer offered this claim as an example of what he called ‘pseudo-propositions’, that is, English sentences seemingly expressing a meaning but actually devoid of informative content; and his malicious remark that the quoted proposition was taken ‘at random’ from Appearance and Reality was clearly designed to implant in the mind of the reader the idea that Bradley’s book largely consisted of such pseudo-propositions. Consequent upon such influences was a change, inimical to idealism, in the whole style of doing philosophy, a change characterized by the development of formal logic and the new respect paid to the deliverances of common sense and of ordinary language. Bradley’s highly wrought prose and his confidence in the metaphysician’s right to adjudicate on the ultimate truth began to seem alien to a later generation of philosophers reared on a mixture of plain talk and formalization and encouraged to defer to mathematics and empirical science. But stylistic choices are not philosophically neutral; no one engaged in producing a system of revisionary metaphysics is likely to accept limitations imposed by ordinary language.