The first illustration of this movement on a large scale was given in
the Socratic reaction against the pantheistic conclusions of early Greek
philosophy (see IONIAN SCHOOL). The whole movement of which Socrates was
a part may be said to have been in the direction of the assertion of the
rights of the subject. Its keynote is to be found in the Protagorean
"man is the measure." This seems to have been interpreted by its author
and by the Sophists in general in a subjective sense, with the result
that it became the motto of a sceptical and individualistic movement in
contemporary philosophy and ethics. It was not less against this form of
idealism than against the determinism of the early physicists that
Socrates protested. Along two lines the thought of Socrates led to
idealistic conclusions which may be said to have formed the basis of all
subsequent advance. (1) He perceived the importance of the universal or
conceptual element in knowledge, and thus at a single stroke broke
through the hard realism of ordinary common sense, disproved all forms
of naturalism that were founded on the denial of the reality of thought,
and cut away the ground from a merely sensational and subjective
idealism. This is what Aristotle means by claiming for Socrates that he
was the founder of definition. (2) He taught that life was explicable
only as a system of ends. Goodness consists in the knowledge of what
these are. It is by his hold upon them that the individual is able to
give unity and reality to his will. In expounding these ideas Socrates
limited himself to the sphere of practice. Moreover, the end or ideal of
the practical life was conceived of in too vague a way to be of much
practical use. His principle, however, was essentially sound, and led
directly to the Platonic Idealism. Plato extended the Socratic
discovery to the whole of reality and while seeking to see the
pre-Socratics with the eyes of Socrates sought "to see Socrates with the
eyes of the pre-Socratics." Not only were the virtues to be explained by
their relation to a common or universal good which only intelligence
could apprehend, but there was nothing in all the furniture of heaven or
earth which in like manner did not receive reality from the share it had
in such an intelligible idea or essence. But these ideas are themselves
intelligible only in relation to one another and to the whole.
Accordingly Plato conceived of them as forming a system and finding
their reality in the degree in which they embody the one all-embracing
idea and conceived of not under the form of an efficient but of a final
cause, an inner principle of action or tendency in things to realize the
fullness of their own nature which in the last resort was identical with
the nature of the whole. This Plato expressed in the myth of the Sun,
but the garment of mythology in which Plato clothed his idealism,
beautiful as it is in itself and full of suggestion, covered an
essential weakness. The more Plato dwelt upon his world of ideas, the
more they seemed to recede from the world of reality, standing over
against it as principles of condemnation instead of revealing themselves
in it. In this way the Good was made to appear as an end imposed upon
things from without by a creative intelligence instead of as an inner
principle of adaptation.
Aristotle.
On one side of his thought Aristotle represents a reaction against
idealism and a return to the position of common-sense dualism, but on
another, and this the deeper side, he represents the attempt to restore
the theory in a more satisfactory form. His account of the process of
knowledge in his logical treatises exhibits the idealistic bent in its
clearest form. This is as far removed as possible either from dualism or
from empiricism. The universal is the real; it is that which gives
coherence and individuality to the particulars of sense which apart from
it are like the routed or disbanded units of an army. Still more
manifestly in his _Ethics_ and _Politics Aristotle_ makes it clear that
it is the common or universal will that gives substance and reality to
the individual. In spite of these and other anticipations of a fuller
idealism, the idea remains as a form imposed from without on a reality
otherwise conceived of as independent of it. As we advance from the
logic to the metaphysics and from that to his ontology, it becomes clear
that the concepts are only "categories" or predicates of a reality lying
outside of them, and there is an ultimate division between the world as
the object or matter of thought and the thinking or moving principle
which gives its life. It is this that gives the Aristotelian doctrine in
its more abstract statements an air of uncertainty. Yet besides the
particular contribution that Aristotle made to idealistic philosophy in
his logical and ethical interpretations, he advanced the case in two
directions, (a) He made it clear that no explanation of the world could
be satisfactory that was not based on the notion of continuity in the
sense of an order of existence in which the reality of the lower was to
be sought for in the extent to which it gave expression to the
potentialities of its own nature--which were also the potentialities of
the whole of which it was a part. (b) From this it followed that
difficult as we might find it to explain the relation of terms so remote
from each other as sense and thought, the particular and the universal,
matter and mind, these oppositions cannot in their nature be absolute.
These truths, however, were hidden from Aristotle's successors, who for
the most part lost the thread which Socrates had put into their hand.
When the authority of Aristotle was again invoked, it was its dualistic
and formal, not its idealistic and metaphysical, side that was in
harmony with the spirit of the age. Apart from one or two of the
greatest minds, notably Dante, what appealed to the thinkers of the
middle ages was not the idea of reality as a progressive self-revelation
of an inner principle working through nature and human life, but the
formal principles of classification which it seemed to offer for a
material of thought and action given from another source.
Modern Idealism.
Modern like ancient idealism came into being as a correction of the
view that threatened to resolve the world of matter and mind alike into
the changing manifestations of some single non-spiritual force or
substance. While, however, ancient philosophy may be said to have been
unilinear, modern philosophy had a twofold origin, and till the time of
Kant may be said to have pursued two independent courses.
All philosophy is the search for reality and rational certainty as
opposed to mere formalism on the one hand, to authority and dogmatism on
the other. In this sense modern philosophy had a common root in revolt
against medievalism. In England this revolt sought for the certainty and
clearness that reason requires In the assurance of an outer world given
to immediate sense experience; on the continent of Europe, in the
assurance of an inner world given immediately in thought. Though
starting from apparently opposite poles and following widely different
courses the two movements led more or less directly to the same results.
It is easy to understand how English empiricism issued at once in the
trenchant naturalism of Hobbes. It is less comprehensible how the
Cartesian philosophy from the starting-point of thought allied itself
with a similar point of view. This can be understood only by a study of
the details of Descartes' philosophy (see CARTESIANISM). Suffice it to
say that in spite of its spiritualistic starting-point its general
result was to give a stimulus to the prevailing scientific tendency as
represented by Galileo, Kepler and Harvey to the principle of mechanical
explanations of the phenomena of the universe. True it was precisely
against this that Descartes' immediate successors struggled. But the
time-spirit was too strong for them. Determinism had other forms besides
that of a crude materialism, and the direction that Malebranche
succeeded in giving to speculation led only to the more complete denial
of freedom and individuality in the all-devouring pantheism of Spinoza.
Berkeley.
The foundations of idealism in the modern sense were laid by the
thinkers who sought breathing room for mind and will in a deeper
analysis of the relations of the subject to the world that it knows.
From the outset English philosophy had a leaning to the psychological
point of view, and Locke was only carrying on the tradition of his
predecessors and particularly of Hobbes in definitely accepting it as
the basis of his _Essay_. It was, however, Berkeley who first sought to
utilize the conclusions that were implicit in Locke's starting-point to
disprove "the systems of impious and profane persons which exclude all
freedom, intelligence, and design from the formation of things, and
instead thereof make a self-existent, stupid, unthinking substance the
root and origin of all beings." Berkeley's statement of the view that
all knowledge is relative to the subject--that no object can be known
except under the form which our powers of sense-perception, our memory
and imagination, our notions and inference, give it--is still the most
striking and convincing that we possess. To have established this
position was a great step in speculation. Henceforth ordinary dogmatic
dualism was excluded from philosophy; any attempt to revive it, whether
with Dr Johnson by an appeal to common prejudice, or, in the more
reflective Johnsonianism of the 18th-century Scottish philosophers, must
be an anachronism. Equally impossible was it thenceforth to assert the
mediate or immediate certainty of material substance as the cause either
of events in nature or of sensations in ourselves. But with these
advances came the danger of falling into error from which common-sense
dualism and naturalistic monism were free. From the point of view which
Berkeley had inherited from Locke it seemed to follow that not only
material substance, but the whole conception of a world of objects, is
at most an inference from subjective modifications which are the only
immediately certain objects of knowledge. The implications of such a
view were first clearly apparent when Hume showed that on the basis of
it there seemed to be nothing that we could confidently affirm except
the order of our own impressions and ideas. This being so, not only were
physics and mathematics impossible as sciences of necessary objective
truth, but our apparent consciousness of a permanent self and object
alike must be delusive.
Kant.
It was these paradoxes that Kant sought to rebut by a more thoroughgoing
criticism of the basis of knowledge the substance of which is summed up
in his celebrated Refutation of Idealism,[1] wherein he sought to
undermine Hume's scepticism by carrying it one step further and
demonstrating that not only is all knowledge of self or object excluded,
but the consciousness of any series of impressions and ideas is itself
impossible except in relation to some external permanent and universally
accepted world of objects.
Leibnitz.
But Kant's refutation of subjective idealism and his vindication of the
place of the object can be fully understood only when we take into
account the other defect in the teaching of his predecessors that he
sought in his _Critique_ to correct. In continental philosophy the
reaction against mechanical and pantheistic explanations of the universe
found even more definite utterance than in English psychological
empiricism in the metaphysical system of Leibnitz, whose theory of
self-determined monads can be understood only when taken in the light of
the assertion of the rights of the subject against the substance of
Spinoza and the atoms of the materialist. But Leibnitz also anticipated
Kant in seeking to correct the empirical point of view of the English
philosophers. True, sense-given material is necessary in order that we
may have thought. "But by what means," he asks, "can experience and the
senses give ideas? Has the soul windows? Is it like a writing tablet? Is
it like wax? It is plain that all those who think thus of the soul make
it at bottom corporeal. True, nothing is in the intellect which has not
been in the senses, but we must add except the intellect itself. The
soul contains the notions of being, substance, unity, identity, cause,
perception, reasoning and many others which the senses cannot give"
(_Nouveaux essais_, ii. 1). But Leibnitz's conception of the priority of
spirit had too little foundation, and the different elements he sought
to combine were too loosely related to one another to stand the strain
of the two forces of empiricism and materialism that were opposed to his
idealism. More particularly by the confusion in which he left the
relation between the two logical principles of identity and of
sufficient reason underlying respectively analytic and synthetic,
deductive and inductive thought, he may be said to have undermined in
another way the idealism he strove to establish. It was in seeking to
close up the fissure in his system represented by this dualism that his
successors succeeded only in adding weakness to weakness by reducing the
principle of sufficient reason to that of formal identity (see WOLFF)
and representing all thought as in essence analytic. From this it
immediately followed that, so far as the connexion of our experiences of
the external world does not show itself irreducible to that of formal
identity, it must remain unintelligible. As empiricism had foundered on
the difficulty of showing how our thoughts could be an object of sense
experience, so Leibnitzian formalism foundered on that of understanding
how the material of sense could be an object of thought. On one view as
on the other scientific demonstration was impossible.
Kant.
The extremity to which philosophy had been brought by empiricism on the
one hand and formalism on the other was Kant's opportunity. Leibnitz's
principle of the "nisi intellectus ipse" was expanded by him into a
demonstration the completest yet effected by philosophy of the part
played by the subject not merely in the manipulation of the material of
experience but in the actual constitution of the object that is known.
On the other hand he insisted on the synthetic character of this
activity without which it was impossible to get beyond the circle of our
own thoughts. The parts of the _Critique of Pure Reason_, more
particularly the "Deduction of the Categories" in which this theory is
worked out, may be said to have laid the foundation of modern
idealism--"articulum stantis aut cadentis doctrinae." In spite of the
defects of Kant's statement--to which it is necessary to return--the
place of the concepts and ideals of the mind and the synthetic
organizing activity which these involve was established with a
trenchancy which has been acknowledged by all schools alike. The
"Copernican revolution" which he claimed to have effected may be said to
have become the starting-point of all modern philosophy. Yet the
divergent uses that have been made of it witness to the ambiguity of his
statement which is traceable to the fact that Kant was himself too
deeply rooted in the thought of his predecessors and carried with him
too much of their spirit to be able entirely to free himself from their
assumptions and abstractions. His philosophy was more like
Michaelangelo's famous sculpture of the Dawn, a spirit yet encumbered
with the stubble of the material from which it was hewn, than a clear
cut figure with unmistakable outlines. Chief among these encumbering
presuppositions was that of a fundamental distinction between perception
and conception and consequent upon it between the synthetic and the
analytic use of thought. It is upon this in the last resort that the
distinction between the phenomenal world of our experience and a
noumenal world beyond it is founded. Kant perceives that "perception
without conception is blind, conception without perception is empty,"
but if he goes so far ought he not to have gone still further and
inquired whether there can be any perception at all without a concept,
any concept which does not presuppose a precept, and, if this is
impossible, whether the distinction between a world of appearance which
is known and a world of things-in-themselves which is not, is not
illusory?
Hegel.
It was by asking precisely these questions that Hegel gave the finishing
strokes to the Kantian philosophy. The starting-point of all valid
philosophy must be the perception that the essence of all conscious
apprehension is the union of opposites--of which that of subject and
object is the most fundamental and all-pervasive. True, before
differences can be united they must have been separated, but this merely
proves that differentiation or analysis is only one factor in a single
process. Equally fundamental is the element of synthesis. Nor is it
possible at any point in knowledge to prove the existence of a merely
given in whose construction the thinking subject has played no part nor
a merely thinking subject in whose structure the object is not an
organic factor. In coming, as at a certain point in its development it
does, to the consciousness of an object, the mind does not find itself
in the presence of an opponent, or of anything essentially alien to
itself but of that which gives content and stability to its own
existence. True, the stability it seems to find in it is incomplete. The
object cannot rest in the form of its immediate appearance without
involving us in contradiction. The sun does not "rise," the dew does not
"fall." But this only means that the unity between subject and object to
which the gift of consciousness commits us is incompletely realized in
that appearance: the apparent truth has to submit to correction and
supplementation before it can be accepted as real truth. It does not
mean that there is anywhere a mere fact which is not also an
interpretation nor an interpreting mind whose ideas have no hold upon
fact. From this it follows that ultimate or absolute reality is to be
sought not beyond the region of experience, but in the fullest and most
harmonious statement of the facts of our experience. True a completely
harmonious world whether of theory or of practice remains an ideal. But
the fact that we have already in part realized the ideal and that the
degree in which we have realized it is the degree in which we may regard
our experience as trustworthy, is proof that the ideal is no mere idea
as Kant taught, but the very substance of reality.
Stumbling blocks in Hegel's statements.
Intelligible as this development of Kantian idealism seems in the light
of subsequent philosophy, the first statement of it in Hegel was not
free from obscurity. The unity of opposites translated into its most
abstract terms as the "identity of being and not-being," the principle
that the "real is the rational," the apparent substitution of
"bloodless" categories for the substance of concrete reality gave it an
air of paradox in the eyes of metaphysicians while physicists were
scandalized by the premature attempts at a complete philosophy of nature
and history. For this Hegel was doubtless partly to blame. But
philosophical critics of his own and a later day are not hereby absolved
from a certain perversity in interpreting these doctrines in a sense
precisely opposite to that in which they were intended. The doctrine of
the unity of contraries so far from being the denial of the law of
non-contradiction is founded on an absolute reliance upon it. Freed from
paradox it means that in every object of thought there are different
aspects or elements each of which if brought separately into
consciousness may be so emphasized as to appear to contradict another.
Unity may be made to contradict diversity, permanence change, the
particular the universal, individuality relatedness. Ordinary
consciousness ignores these "latent fires"; ordinary discussion brings
them to light and divides men into factions and parties over them;
philosophy not because it denies but because it acknowledges the law of
non-contradiction as supreme is pledged to seek a point of view from
which they may be seen to be in essential harmony with one another as
different sides of the same truth. The "rationality of the real" has in
like manner been interpreted as intended to sanctify the existing order.
Hegel undoubtedly meant to affirm that the actual was rational in the
face of the philosophy which set up subjective feeling and reason
against it. But idealism has insisted from the time of Plato on the
distinction between what is actual in time and space and the reality
that can only partially be revealed in it. Hegel carried this principle
further than had yet been done. His phrase does not therefore sanctify
the established fact but, on the contrary, declares that it partakes of
reality only so far as it embodies the ideal of a coherent and stable
system which it is not. As little is idealism responsible for any
attempt to pass off logical abstractions for concrete reality. The
"Logic" of Hegel is merely the continuation of Kant's "Deduction" of the
categories and ideas of the reason which has generally been recognized
as the soberest of attempts to set forth the presuppositions which
underlie all experience. "What Hegel attempts to show is just that the
categories by which thought must determine its object are stages in a
process that, beginning with the idea of 'Being,' the simplest of all
determinations is driven on by its own dialectic till it reaches the
idea of self-consciousness. In other words the intelligence when it once
begins to define an object for itself, finds itself launched on a
movement of self-asserting synthesis in which it cannot stop until it
had recognized that the unity of the object with itself involves its
unity with all other objects and with the mind that knows it. Hence,
whatever we begin by saying, we must ultimately say 'mind'" (Caird,
_Kant_, i. 443).
While the form in which these doctrines were stated proved fatal to
them in the country of their birth, they took deep root in the next
generation in English philosophy. Here the stone that the builders
rejected was made the head of the corner. The influences which led to
this result were manifold. From the side of literature the way was
prepared for it by the genius of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Carlyle;
from the side of morals and politics by the profound discontent of the
constructive spirit of the century with the disintegrating conceptions
inherited from utilitarianism. In taking root in England idealism had
to contend against the traditional empiricism represented by Mill on
the one hand and the pseudo-Kantianism which was rendered current by
Mansel and Hamilton on the other. As contrasted with the first it
stood for the necessity of recognizing a universal or ideal element as
a constitutive factor in all experience whether cognitive or
volitional; as contrasted with the latter for the ultimate unity of
subject and object, knowledge and reality, and therefore for the
denial of the existence of any thing-in-itself for ever outside the
range of experience. Its polemic against the philosophy of experience
has exposed it to general misunderstanding, as though it claimed some
a priori path to truth. In reality it stands for a more thoroughgoing
and consistent application of the test of experience. The defect of
English empiricism from the outset had been the uncritical acceptance
of the metaphysical dogma of a pure unadulterated sense-experience as
the criterion of truth. This assumption idealism examines and rejects
in the name of experience itself. Similarly it only carried the
doctrine of relativity to its logical conclusion in denying that there
could be any absolute relativity. Object stands in essential relation
to subject, subject to object. This being so, it is wholly illogical
to seek for any test of the truth and reality of either except in the
form which that relation itself takes. In its subsequent development
idealism in England has passed through several clearly marked stages
which may be distinguished as (a) that of exploration and tentative
exposition in the writings of J. F. Ferrier,[2] J. Hutchison
Stirling,[3] Benjamin Jowett,[4] W. T. Harris;[5] (b) of confident
application to the central problems of logic, ethics and politics,
fine art and religion, and as a principle of constructive criticism
and interpretation chiefly in T. H. Green,[6] E. Caird,[7] B.
Bosanquet;[8] (c) of vigorous effort to develop on fresh lines its
underlying metaphysics in F. H. Bradley,[9] J. M. E. McTaggart,[10] A.
E. Taylor,[11] Josiah Royce[12] and others. Under the influence of
these writers idealism, as above expounded though with difference of
interpretation in individual writers, may be said towards the end of
the 19th century to have been on its way to becoming the leading
philosophy in the British Isles and America.
New Dualism and Pragmatism.
3. _Reaction against Traditional Idealism._--But it was not to be
expected that the position idealism had thus won for itself would remain
long unchallenged. It had its roots in a literature and in forms of
thought remote from the common track; it had been formulated before the
great advances in psychology which marked the course of the century; its
latest word seemed to involve consequences that brought it into conflict
with the vital interest the human mind has in freedom and the
possibility of real initiation. It is not, therefore, surprising that
there should have been a vigorous reaction. This has taken mainly two
opposite forms. On the one hand the attack has come from the old ground
of the danger that is threatened to the reality of the external world
and may be said to be in the interest of the object. On the other hand
the theory has been attacked in the interest of the subject on the
ground that in the statuesque world of ideas into which it introduces us
it leaves no room for the element of movement and process which recent
psychology and metaphysic alike have taught us underlies all life. The
conflict of idealism with these two lines of criticism--the accusation
of subjectivism on the one side of intellectualism and rigid objectivism
on the other--may be said to have constituted the history of Anglo-Saxon
philosophy during the first decade of the 20th century.
I. Whatever is to be said of ancient Idealism, the modern doctrine may
be said notably in Kant to have been in the main a vindication of the
subjective factor in knowledge. But that space and time, matter and
cause should owe their origin to the action of the mind has always
seemed paradoxical to common sense. Nor is the impression which its
enunciation in Kant made, likely to have been lightened in this country
by the connexion that was sure to be traced between Berkeleyanism and
the new teaching or by the form which the doctrine received at the hands
of T. H. Green, its leading English representative between 1870 and
1880. If what is real in things is ultimately nothing but their
relations, and if relations are inconceivable apart from the relating
mind, what is this but the dissolution of the solid ground of external
reality which my consciousness seems to assure me underlies and eludes
all the conceptual network by which I try to bring one part of my
experience into connexion with another? It is quite true that modern
idealists like Berkeley himself have sought to save themselves from the
gulf of subjectivism by calling in the aid of a universal or infinite
mind or by an appeal to a total or absolute experience to which our own
is relative. But the former device is too obviously a _deus ex machina_,
the purpose of which would be equally well served by supposing with
Fichte the individual self to be endowed with the power of
subconsciously extraditing a world which returns to it in consciousness
under the form of a foreign creation. The appeal to an Absolute on the
other hand is only to substitute one difficulty for another. For
granting that it places the centre of reality outside the individual
self it does so only at the price of reducing the reality of the latter
to an appearance; and if only one thing is real what becomes of the
many different things which again my consciousness assures me are the
one world with which I can have any practical concern? To meet these
difficulties and give back to us the assurance of the substantiality of
the world without us it has therefore been thought necessary to maintain
two propositions which are taken to be the refutation of idealism. (1)
There is given to us immediately in knowledge a world entirely
independent of and different from our own impressions on the one hand
and the conceptions by which we seek to establish relations between them
upon the other. The relation of these impressions (and for the matter of
that of their inter-relations among themselves) to our minds is only one
out of many. As a leading writer puts it: "There is such a thing as
greenness having various relations, among others that of being
perceived."[13] (2) Things may be, and may be known to be simply
different. They may exclude one another, exist so to speak in a
condition of armed neutrality to one another, without being positively
thereby related to one another or altered by any change taking place in
any of them. As the same writer puts it: "There is such a thing as
numerical difference, different from conceptual difference,"[14] or
expressing the same thing in other words "there are relations not
grounded in the nature of the related terms."
In this double-barrelled criticism it is important to distinguish what
is really relevant. Whatever the shortcomings of individual writers may
be, modern idealism differs, as we have seen, from the arrested idealism
of Berkeley precisely in the point on which dualism insists. In all
knowledge we are in touch not merely with the self and its passing
states, but with a real object which is different from them. On this
head there is no difference, and idealism need have no difficulty in
accepting all that its opponents here contend. The difference between
the two theories does not consist in any difference of emphasis on the
objective side of knowledge, but in the standard by which the nature of
the object is to be tested--the difference is logical not
metaphysical--it concerns the definition of truth or falsity in the
knowledge of the reality which both admit. To idealism there can be no
ultimate test, but the possibility of giving any fact which claims to be
true its place in a coherent system of mutually related truths. To this
dualism opposes the doctrine that truth and falsehood are a matter of
mere immediate intuition: "There is no problem at all in truth and
falsehood, some propositions are true and some false just as some roses
are red and some white."[15] The issue between the two theories under
this head may here be left with the remark that it is a curious comment
on the logic of dualism that setting out to vindicate the reality of an
objective standard of truth it should end in the most subjective of all
the way a thing appears to the individual. The criticism that applies to
the first of the above contentions applies _mutatis mutandis_ to the
second. As idealism differs from Berkeleyanism in asserting the reality
of an "external" world so it differs from Spinozism in asserting the
reality of difference within it. Determination is not merely negation.
On this head there need be no quarrel between it and dualism. Ours is a
many-sided, a many-coloured world. The point of conflict again lies in
the nature and ground of the assigned differences. Dualism meets the
assertion of absolute unity by the counter assertion of mere difference.
But if it is an error to treat the unity of the world as its only real
aspect, it is equally an error to treat its differences as something
ultimately irreducible. No philosophy founded on this assumption is
likely to maintain itself against the twofold evidence of modern
psychology and modern logic. According to the first the world, whether
looked at from the side of our perception or from the side of the object
perceived, can be made intelligible only when we accept it for what it
is as a real continuity. Differences, of course, there are; and, if we
like to say so, every difference is unique, but this does not mean that
they are given in absolute independence of everything else, "fired at us
out of a cannon." They bear a definite relation to the structure of our
physical and psychical nature, and correspond to definite needs of the
subject that manifests itself therein. Similarly from the side of logic.
It is not the teaching of idealism alone but of the facts which logical
analysis has brought home to us that all difference in the last resort
finds its ground in the quality or content of the things differentiated,
and that this difference of content shows in turn a double strand, the
strand of sameness and the strand of otherness--that _in_ which and that
_by_ which they differ from one another. Idealism has, of course, no
quarrel with numerical difference. All difference has its numerical
aspect: two different things are always two both in knowledge and in
reality. What it cannot accept is the doctrine that there are two things
which are two in themselves apart from that which makes them two--which
are not two _of something_. So far from establishing the truth for which
dualism is itself concerned--the reality of all differences--such a
theory can end only in a scepticism as to the reality of any difference.
It is difficult to see what real difference there can be between things
which are differences of nothing.
II. More widespread and of more serious import is the attack from the
other side to which since the publication of A. Seth's _Hegelianism and
Personality_ (1887) and W. James's _Will to Believe_ (1903) idealism has
been subjected. Here also it is important to distinguish what is
relevant from what is irrelevant in the line of criticism represented by
these writers. There need be no contradiction between idealism and a
reasonable pragmatism. In so far as the older doctrine is open to the
charge of neglecting the conative and teleological side of experience it
can afford to be grateful to its critics for recalling it to its own
eponymous principle of the priority of the "ideal" to the "idea," of
_needs_ to the conception of their object. The real issue comes into
view in the attempt, undertaken in the interest of freedom, to
substitute for the notion of the world as a cosmos pervaded by no
discernible principle and in its essence indifferent to the form
impressed upon it by its active parts.
To the older idealism as to the new the essence of mind or spirit is
freedom. But the guarantee of freedom is to be sought for not in the
denial of law, but in the whole nature of mind and its relation to the
structure of experience. _Without mind no orderly world_: only through
the action of the subject and its "ideas" are the confused and
incoherent data of sense-perception (themselves shot through with both
strands) built up into that system of things we call Nature, and which
stands out against the subject as the body stands out against the soul
whose functioning may be said to have created it. On the other hand,
_without the world no mind_: only through the action of the
environment upon the subject is the idealizing activity in which it
finds its being called into existence. Herein lies the paradox which
is also the deepest truth of our spiritual life. In interpreting its
environment first as a world of things that seem to stand in a
relation of exclusion to one another and to itself, then as a natural
system governed by rigid mechanical necessity, the mind can yet feel
that in its very opposition the world is akin to it, bone of its bone
and flesh of its flesh. What is true of mind is true of will. Idealism
starts from the relativity of the world to purposive consciousness.
But this again may be so stated as to represent only one side of the
truth. It is equally true that the will is relative to the world of
objects and interests to which it is attached through instincts and
feelings, habits and sentiments. In isolation from its object the will
is as much an abstraction as thought apart from the world of percepts,
memories and associations which give it content and stability. And
just as mind does not lose but gain in individuality in proportion as
it parts with any claim to the capricious determination of what its
world shall be, and becomes dominated by the conception of an order
which is immutable so the will becomes free and "personal" in
proportion as it identifies itself with objects and interests, and
subordinates itself to laws and requirements which involve the
suppression of all that is merely arbitrary and subjective. Here, too,
subject and object grow together. The power and vitality of the one is
the power and vitality of the other, and this is so because they are
not two things with separate roots but are both rooted in a common
reality which, while it includes, is more than either.
Passing by these contentions as unmeaning or irrelevant and seeing
nothing but irreconcilable contradiction between the conceptions of
the world as immutable law and a self-determining subject pragmatism
(q.v.) seeks other means of vindicating the reality of freedom. It
agrees with older forms of libertarianism in taking its stand on the
fact of spontaneity as primary and self-evidencing, but it is not
content to assert its existence side by side with rigidly determined
sequence. It carries the war into the camp of the enemy by seeking to
demonstrate that the completely determined action which is set over
against freedom as the basis of explanation in the material world is
merely a hypothesis which, while it serves sufficiently well the
limited purpose for which it is devised, is incapable of verification
in the ultimate constituents of physical nature. There seems in fact
nothing to prevent us from holding that while natural laws express the
average tendencies of multitudes they give no clue to the movement of
individuals. Some have gone farther and argued that from the nature of
the case no causal explanation of any real change in the world of
things is possible. A cause is that which contains the effect ("causa
aequat effectum"), but this is precisely what can never be proved with
respect to anything that is claimed as a real cause in the concrete
world. Everywhere the effect reveals an element which is
indiscoverable in the cause with the result that the identity we seek
for ever eludes us. Even the resultant of mechanical forces refuses to
resolve itself into its constituents. In the "resultant" there is a
new direction, and with it a new quality the component forces of which
no analysis can discover.[16]
It is not here possible to do more than indicate what appear to be the
valid elements in these two conflicting interpretations of the
requirements of a true idealism. On behalf of the older it may be
confidently affirmed that no solution is likely to find general
acceptance which involves the rejection of the conception of unity and
intelligible order as the primary principle of our world. The assertion
of this principle by Kant was, we have seen, the corner-stone of
idealistic philosophy in general, underlying as it does the conception
of a permanent subject not less than that of a permanent object. As
little from the side of knowledge is it likely that any theory will find
acceptance which reduces all thought to a process of analysis and the
discovery of abstract identity. There is no logical principle which
requires that we should derive qualitative change by logical analysis
from quantitative difference. Everywhere experience is synthetic: it
gives us multiplicity in unity. Explanation of it does not require the
annihilation of all differences but the apprehension of them in organic
relation to one another and to the whole to which they belong. It was,
as we have seen, this conception of thought as essentially synthetic for
which Kant paved the way in his polemic against the formalism of his
continental predecessors. The revival as in the above argument of the
idea that the function of thought is the elimination of difference, and
that rational connexion must fail where absolute identity is
indiscoverable merely shows how imperfectly Kant's lesson has been
learned by some of those who prophesy in his name.
Finally, apart from these more academic arguments there is an undoubted
paradox in a theory which, at a moment when in whatever direction we
look the best inspiration in poetry, sociology and physical science
comes from the idea of the unity of the world, gives in its adhesion to
pluralism on the ground of its preponderating practical value.
On the other hand, idealism would be false to itself if it interpreted
the unity which it thus seeks to establish in any sense that is
incompatible with the validity of moral distinctions and human
responsibility in the fullest sense of the term. It would on its side
be, indeed, a paradox if at a time when the validity of human ideals and
the responsibility of nations and individuals to realize them is more
universally recognized than ever before on our planet, the philosophical
theory which hitherto has been chiefly identified with their vindication
should be turned against them. Yet the depth and extent of the
dissatisfaction are sufficient evidence that the most recent
developments are not free from ambiguity on this vital issue.
What is thus suggested is not a rash departure from the general point of
view of idealism (by its achievements in every field to which it has
been applied, "stat mole sua") but a cautious inquiry into the
possibility of reaching a conception of the world in which a place can
be found at once for the idea of unity and determination and of movement
and freedom. Any attempt here to anticipate what the course of an
idealism inspired by such a spirit of caution and comprehension is
likely to be cannot but appear dogmatic.
Yet it may be permitted to make a suggestion. Taking for granted the
unity of the world idealism is committed to interpret it as spiritual
as a unity of spirits. This is implied in the phrase by which it has
sought to signalize its break with Spinozism: "from substance to
subject." The universal or infinite is one that realizes itself in
finite particular minds and wills, not as accidents or imperfections
of it, but as its essential form. These on their side, to be subject
in the true sense must be conceived of as possessing a life which is
truly their own, the expression of their own nature as
self-determinant. In saying subject we say self, in saying self we say
free creator. No conception of the infinite can therefore be true
which does not leave room for movement, process, free creation.
Oldness, sameness, permanence of principle and direction, these must
be, otherwise there is _nothing_; but newness of embodiment,
existence, realization also, otherwise nothing _is_.
Now it is just to these implications in the idea of spirit that some
of the prominent recent expositions of Idealism seem to have failed to
do justice. They have failed particularly when they have left the idea
of "determination" unpurged of the suggestion of time succession. The
very word lends itself to this mistake. Idealists have gone beyond
others in asserting that the subject in the sense of a being which
merely repeats what has gone before is timeless. This involves that
its activity cannot be truly conceived of as included in an
antecedent, as an effect in a cause or one term of an equation in the
other. As the activity of a subject or spirit it is essentially a new
birth. It is this failure that has led to the present revolt against a
"block universe." But the difficulty is not to be met by running to
the, opposite extreme in the assertion of a loose and ramshackle one.
This is merely another way of perpetuating the mistake of allowing the
notion of determination by an _other_ or a preceding to continue to
dominate us in a region where we have in reality passed from it to the
notion of determination by self or by self-acknowledged ideals. As the
correction from the one side consists in a more whole-hearted
acceptance of the conception of determination by an ideal as the
essence of mind, so from the other side it must consist in the
recognition of the valuelessness of a freedom which does not mean
submission to a self-chosen, though not self-created, law.
The solution here suggested is probably more likely to meet with
opposition from the side of Idealism than of Pragmatism. It involves,
it will be said, the reality of time, the dependence of the Infinite
in the finite, and therewith a departure from the whole line of
Hegelian thought. (1) It does surely involve the reality of time in
the sense that it involves the reality of existence, which it is
agreed is process. Without process the eternal is not complete or, if
eternity means completeness, is not truly eternal. Our mistake lies in
abstraction of the one from the other, which, as always, ends in
confusion of the one with the other. Truth lies in giving each its
place. Not only does eternity assert the conception of the hour but
the hour asserts the conception of eternity--with what adequacy is
another question. (2) The second of the above objections takes its
point from the contradiction to religious consciousness which seems to
be involved. This is certainly a mistake. Religious consciousness
asserts, no doubt, that God is necessary to the soul: from Him as its
inspiration, to Him as its ideal are all things. But it asserts with
equal emphasis that the soul is necessary to God. To declare itself an
unnecessary creation is surely on the part of the individual soul the
height of impiety. God lives in the soul as it in Him. He also might
say, from it as His offspring, to it as the object of His outgoing
love are all things. (3) It is a mistake to attribute to Hegel the
doctrine that time is an illusion. If in a well-known passage (_Logic_
§ 212) he seems to countenance the Spinoxistic view he immediately
corrects it by assigning an "actualizing force" to this illusion and
making it a "necessary dynamic element of truth." Consistently with
this we have the conclusion stated in the succeeding section on the
Will. "Good, the final end of the world, has being only while it
constantly produces itself. And the world of the spirit and the world
of nature continue to have this distinction, that the latter moves
only in a recurring cycle while the former certainly also makes
progress." The mistake is not Hegel's but ours. It is to be remedied
not by giving up the idea of the Infinite but by ceasing to think of
the Infinite as of a being endowed with a static perfection which the
finite will merely reproduces, and definitely recognizing the forward
effort of the finite as an essential element in Its self-expression.
If there be any truth in this suggestion it seems likely that the last
word of idealism, like the first, will prove to be that the type of
the highest reality is to be sought for not in any fixed Parmenidean
circle of achieved being but in an ideal of good which while never
fully expressed under the form of time can never become actual and so
fulfil itself under any other.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.--(A) General works besides those of the writers
mentioned above: W. Wallace, _Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel_
(1894), and Hegel's _Philosophy of Mind_ (1894); A. Seth and R. B.
Haldane, _Essays in Phil. Criticism_ (1883); John Watson, _Kant and
his English Critics_ (1881); J. B. Baillie, _Idealistic Construction
of Experience_ (1906); J. S. Mackenzie, _Outlines of Metaphysics_
(1902); A. E. Taylor, _Elements of Metaphysics_ (1903); R. L.
Nettleship, _Lectures and Remains_ (1897); D. G. Ritchie,
_Philosophical Studies_ (1905).
(B) Works on particular branches of philosophy: (a) _Logic_--F. H.
Bradley, _Principles of Logic_ (1883); B. Bosanquet, _Logic_ (1888)
and _Essentials of Logic_ (1895). (b) _Psychology_--J. Dewey,
_Psychology_ (1886); G. F. Stout, _Analytic Psychology_ (1896); B.
Bosanquet, _Psychology of the Moral Self_ (1897). (c) _Ethics_--F. H.
Bradley, _Ethical Studies_ (1876); J. Dewey, _Ethics_ (1891); W. R.
Sorley, _Ethics of Naturalism_ (2nd ed., 1904); J. S. Mackenzie,
_Manual of Ethics_ (4th ed., 1900); J. H. Muirhead, _Elements of
Ethics_ (3rd ed., 1910). (d) _Politics and Economics_--B. Bosanquet,
_Philosophical Theory of the State_ (1899), and _Aspects of the Social
Problem_ (1895); B. Bonar, _Philosophy and Political Economy in their
historical Relations_ (1873); D. G. Ritchie, _Natural Rights_ (1895);
J. S. Mackenzie, _An Introd. to Social Phil._ (1890); J. MacCunn, _Six
Radical Thinkers_ (1907). (e) _Aesthetic_--B. Bosanquet, _History of
Aesthetic_ (1892), and _Introd. to Hegel's Phil. of the Fine Arts_
(1886); W. Hastie, _Phil. of Art by Hegel and Michelet_ (1886). (f)
_Religion_--J. Royce, _Religious Aspect of Philosophy_ (1885), and
_The Conception of God_ (1897); R. B. Haldane, _The Pathway to
Reality_ (1903); E. Caird, _Evolution of Religion_ (1893); J. Caird,
_Introd. to the Phil. of Religion_ (1880); H. Jones, _Idealism as a
Practical Creed_ (1909).
(C) Recent Criticism. Besides works mentioned in the text: W. James,
_Pragmatism_ (1907), _A Pluralistic Universe_ (1909), _The Meaning of
Truth_ (1909); H. Sturt, _Personal Idealism_ (1902); F. C. S.
Schiller, _Humanism_ (1903); G. E. Moore, _Principia Ethica_; H.
Rashdall, _The Theory of Good and Evil_ (1907).