"In Britain today a general education in philosophy will give students a broad familiarity with native thinkers from Francis Bacon up to David Hume and Thomas Reid, but typically after that all eyes turn to the continent, until attention is called back to these shores by the rise of analytic philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century. As a result, British philosophy in the nineteenth century continues to be a thoroughly neglected subject. Indeed, so much so, that besides John Stuart Mill and perhaps Cardinal Newman, many people seem surprised to learn that there were any philosophers in nineteenth century Britain! But, of course, the age was as philosophically rich as any other, and this brief history seeks to demonstrate that fact. The philosophy of the period is of intrinsic interest to anyone at all stirred by philosophical questioning, whilst understanding its shapes also helps us to grasp nineteenth century culture in Britain more generally, for this was an age - far more so than our own - in which the problems and promise of philosophy loomed large in general consciousness. Obviously, there can be no such thing as the history of nineteenth century philosophy in Britain, for there are an endless number of ways of selecting, arranging and commenting on the material which this period offers, and hence as many different histories as there are historians. The right of any given narrative to be heard lies in the interest of the tale it has to recount. The story I have tried to tell in these pages concerns the transition from a pattern of debate which, for all its significance, is fundamentally archaic - far distant from anything to which a philosopher of today could imagine themselves as actually contributing - to the emergence of a style of thinking that is recognisably continuous with the contemporary discipline; for contrary to what the modern subject likes to tell itself, philosophy did not 'begin anew' in the twentieth century with Bertrand Russell and G.E.Moore"--