Idealism

IDEALISM, a term generally used for the attitude of mind which is prone to represent things in an imaginative light and to lay emphasis exclusively or primarily on abstract perfection (i.e., on "ideals") (from Gr. iB a, archetype or model, through Fr. idealisme). With this meaning the philosophical use of the term has little in common.

To understand the philosophical theory that has come to be known under this title, we may ask (I) what in general it is and how it is differentiated from other theories of knowledge and real ity, (2) how it has risen in the history of philosophy, (3) what position it occupies at the present time in the world of specu lation.

General Definition of Idealism.

Idealism as a philosophical doctrine conceives of knowledge or experience as a process in which the two factors of subject and object stand in a relation of entire interdependence on each other as warp and woof. Apart from the activity of the self or subject in sensory reaction, mem ory and association, imagination, judgment and inference, there can be no world of objects. A thing-in-itself which is not a thing to some consciousness is an entirely unrealizable, because self-contradictory, conception. But this is only one side. It is equally true that a subject apart from an object is unintelligible. As the object exists for knowledge through the constructive activ ity of the subject, so the subject lives in the construction of the object. To seek for the true self in any region into which its oppo site in the form of a not-self does not enter is to grasp a shadow. It is in seeking to realize its own ideas in the world of knowledge, feeling and action that the mind comes into possession of itself ; it is in becoming permeated and transformed by the mind's ideas that the world develops for us the fullness of its reality as object.

Thus defined, idealism is opposed to ordinary common-sense dualism, which regards knowledge or experience as the result of the more or less accidental relation between two separate and independent entities—the mind and its ideas on one side, the thing with its attributes on the other—that serve to limit and condition each other from without. It is equally opposed to the doctrine which represents the subject itself and its states and judgments as the single immediate datum of consciousness, and all else, whether objects in an external world or persons other than the individual subject whose states are known to itself, as having a merely problematic existence resting upon analogy or other pro cess of indirect inference. This theory is sometimes known as idealism. But it falls short of idealism as above defined in that it recognizes only one side of the antithesis of subject and object, and so falls short of the doctrine which takes its stand on the complete correlativity of the two, factors in experience. It is for this reason that it is sometimes known as subjective or incom plete idealism. Finally the theory defined is opposed to all forms of realism, whether in the older form which sought to reduce mind to a function of matter, or in any of the newer forms which seek for the ultimate essence of both mind and matter in some unknown force or energy which, while in itself it is neither, yet contains the potentiality of both. It is true that in some modern developments of idealism the ultimate reality is conceived of in an impersonal way, but it is usually added that this ultimate or abso lute being is not something lower but higher than self-conscious personality, including it as a more fully developed form may be said to include a more elementary.

Origin and Development of Idealism.

In its self-conscious form idealism is a modern doctrine. In it the self or subject may be said to have come to its rights. This was possible in any complete sense only after the introspective movement represented by the middle ages had done its work, and the thought of the individual mind and will as possessed of relative independence had worked itself out into some degree of clearness. In this re spect Descartes' dictum—cogito ergo sum—may be said to have struck the keynote of modern philosophy, and all subsequent speculation to have been merely a prolonged commentary upon it. While in its completer form it is thus a doctrine distinctive of modern times, idealism has its roots far back in the history of thought. One of the chief proofs that has been urged of the truth of its point of view is the persistency with which it has always asserted itself at a certain stage in philosophical reflec tion and as the solution of certain recurrent speculative difficulties. All thought starts from the ordinary dualism or pluralism which conceives of the world as consisting of the juxtaposition of mu tually independent things and persons. The first movement is in the direction of dispelling this appearance of independence. They are seen to be united under the relation of cause and effect, as attributes of an underlying substance, or again as temporal mani festations of some single entity or energy which constitutes the eternal essence of the things that come before our knowledge. But in the pantheism that thus takes the place of the old dualism there seems no permanent place left for the individual. Mind and will in their individual manifestations fade into the general background without significance except as a link in a necessary chain. Deliverance from the pantheistic conception of the uni verse was sought in the recognition of the central place occupied by thought and purpose in the actual world, and as a consequence of this, of the illegitimacy of the abstraction whereby material energy is taken for the ultimate reality.

Ancient Idealism : Socrates and Plato.

The first illustra tion of this movement on a large scale was given in the Socratic reaction against the pantheistic conclusions of early Greek philo sophy (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 principle "man is the measure." This was inter preted by its author, Protagoras, 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 philo sophy 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. (I) 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 concepts, 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. Good ness 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 Soc rates 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 appre hend, 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, 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 gar ment of mythology in which Plato clothed his idealism, beautiful as it is in itself and full of suggestion, covered an essential weak ness. 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 repre sents 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 his philosophy. 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 mani festly 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 ad vance 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 it life. It is this that gives the Aristotelian doctrine in its more abstract statements an air of uncertainty. Yet besides the particular con tribution 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 re mote from each other as sense and thought, the particular and the universal, matter and mind, these oppositions cannot in their na ture be absolute. These truths, however, were hidden from Aris totle'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 ideal istic 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 accepted 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.

Cartesianism.

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 mediaevalism. In England this revolt sought for the certainty and clearness that reason requires in the assurance of an outer world given to imme diate sense experience ; on the continent of Europe, in the assur ance 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 sensa tionism 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. Suffice it to say that in spite of its spirit ualistic starting-point its general result was to give a stimulus to the prevailing scientific tendency as represented by Galileo, Kep ler 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 to Spinoza's pantheism.

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. Berkeley's statement of the view that all knowledge is relative to the subject—that no ob ject 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 that we possess. To have established this position was a great step in speculation. Henceforth ordinary dogmatic dualism was excluded frem philo sophy; any attempt to revive it, whether with Dr. Johnson by an appeal to common prejudice, or in the more reflective Johnson ianism of the i 8th-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 cer tain 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 neces sary objective truth, but our apparent consciousness of a per manent self and object alike must be delusive.

Kant and Leibniz.—It was these paradoxes that Kant sought to rebut by a more thoroughgoing criticism of the basis of knowl edge the substance of which is summed up in his celebrated Refutation of Idealism, 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 con sciousness of any series of impressions and ideas is itself impos sible except in relation to some external permanent and universally accepted world of objects.

But Kant's refutation of subjective idealism and his vindica tion of the place of the object can be fully understood only when we take into account the other defect in the teaching of his prede cessors that he sought in his Critique to correct. In continental philosophy the reaction against mechanical and pantheistic ex planations of the universe found even more definite utterance than in English psychological empiricism in the metaphysical sys tem of Leibniz, 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 Leibniz also anticipated Kant in seeking to ccrrect the empirical point of view of the English phil osophers. True, sense-given material is necessary in order that we may have thought. "But by what means," he asks, "can expe rience 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. I). But Leibniz'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 suffi cient reason underlying respectively analytic and synthetic, deduc tive and inductive thought, he may be said to have undermined in another way the idealism he strove to establish. It was in seek ing to close up the fissure in his system represented by this dual ism that his successors succeeded only in adding weakness to weak ness 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 con nection of our experiences of the external world does not show it self irreducible to that of formal identity, it must remain unin telligible. As empiricism had foundered on the difficulty of show ing how our thoughts could be an object of sense experience, so Leibnizian 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. The extremity to which philosophy had been brought by em piricism on the one hand and formalism on the other was Kant's opportunity. Leibniz'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 thought not merely in the manipulation of the material of experience but in the ac tual constitution of the object that is known. On the other hand he insisted on the objective reference of this activity with out which it was impossible to get beyond the circle of our own thoughts. The parts of the Critique of Pure Reason, more par ticularly 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 re turn—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 trace able 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 assump tions and abstractions. His philosophy was more like Michael angelo'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 distinc tion 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 es sence 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 funda mental is the element of synthesis. Nor is it possible at any point in knowledge to prove the existence of a merely given object in whose determination 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 thus to find is incomplete. The mind cannot rest in the immediate appearance of the object without involving us in contradiction. The sun does not "rise," the dew does not "fall." But this only means that the unity be tween subject and object to which the gift of consciousness com mits 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 com pletely 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 sub stance of reality.

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 trans lated into its most abstract terms as the "identity of being and not-being," the principle that the "real is the rational," the appar ent substitution of "bloodless" categories for the substance of concrete reality gave it an air of paradox in the eyes of meta physicians, 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 oppo site 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 con tradict another. Unity may be made to contradict diversity, per manence change, the particular the universal, individuality related ness. 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 abstrac tions 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 cate gories 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 its 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 has recognized that the unity of the object with itself in volves 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) Idealism in England and America.—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 genera tion 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, Words worth 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 tak ing 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 neces sity of recognizing a universal or ideal element as a constitutive factor in all experience whether cognitive or volitional; as con trasted with the latter for the ultimate unity of subject and ob ject, knowledge and reality, and therefore for the denial of the existence of any thing-in-itself for ever outside the range of ex perience. 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 thorough going and consistent application of the test of experience. The defect of English empiricism from the outset had been the un critical acceptance of the metaphysical dogma of a pure unadul terated sense-experience as the criterion of truth. This assumption idealism examines and rejects in the name of experience itself. Sim ilarly it only carried the doctrine of relativity to its logical con clusion 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 distin guished as (a) that of exploration and tentative exposition in the writings of J. F. Ferrier, J. Hutchison Stirling, Benjamin Jowett, W. T. Harris; (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, E. Caird, B. Bosanquet; (c) of vigorous effort to develop on fresh lines its underlying metaphysics in F. H. Bradley, J. M. E. McTaggart, A. E. Taylor, Josiah Royce and others. Under the in fluence 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.

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 in volve 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 move ment 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 two decades of the loth century.

New Dualism.

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 com mon sense. Nor is the impression which its enunciation in Kant made, likely to have been lightened in this country by the con nection 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 187o 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 connection 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 dens 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 beyond 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 con cern? To meet these difficulties and give back to us the assur ance 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. (I) 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 con ceptions by which we seek to establish relations between them upon the other. The relation of these impressions (and for the matter of that 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." (Mind, N. S. xii. p. 433.) (2) Things may be, and may be known to be simply different. They may ex clude one another, exist so to speak in a condition of armed neu trality 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 dif ference, different from conceptual difference," or expressing the same thing in other words "there are relations not grounded in the nature of the related terms." (Proc. Arist. Soc., 1901, p. i io.) In this double-barrelled criticism it is important to distinguish what is really relevant. Modern idealism differs from the arrested idealism of Berkeley precisely in the point on which dualism in sists. 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 reality 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 possibil ity of giving any fact which claims to be true its place in a co herent system of mutually related truths. To this dualism opposes the doctrine that truth and falsehood are a matter of mere imme diate 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." (Mind, N. S. xiii. p. 523.) Pragmatism.—More widespread and of more serious import is the attack to which idealism has been subjected from the side of the subject and subjective interests which has found expres sion in Pragmatism and kindred movements. Here also it is im portant 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 prag matism. 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 (with a permanent, resistant structure) one of it as only so far cosmic as to be capable of being infinitely moulded to human desire.

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 which 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 environ ment 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 nat ural 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 associa tions which give it content and stability. And just as mind does not lose but gains 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 com mon reality which, while it includes both is more than either.

Seeing nothing but irreconcilable contradiction between the con ceptions of the world as immutable law and a self-determining subject the new idealism 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 tenden cies of multitudes they give no clue to the movement of indi viduals. 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, 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.

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 affirmed that no solution is likely to find acceptance which involves the rejection of unity and intelligible order as the primary principle of our world. The assertion of this principle by Kant was 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 logic 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 does not require the annihilation of all differences but the apprehension of them as in organic relation to one another and to the whole to which they belong. The revival as in the above argument of the idea that the function of thought is the elimination of difference, and that rational connection 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. Apart from the narrowness which would limit human interest to "prac tice," as pragmatism fain would do, there is paradox in a theory which, at a moment when the best inspiration in poetry, sociology and physical science comes from the idea of the unity of the world, gives in its adhesion to an irrational pluralism on the ground of its preponderating practical value.

On the other hand, idealism would be false to itself if it inter preted 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. Perhaps the depth and extent of the dissatisfaction are suf ficient evidence that most recent developments are not free from ambiguity on this vital issue. But what is thus suggested is not a rash departure from the general point of view of idealism, 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.

BIBLIOGRAPHY. See articles Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Bibliography. See articles Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Neo-Hegelianism; T. H. Green, Works (1900) and Prolegomena to Ethics (1884) ; W. Wallace, Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel (1894) ; F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality (1893), Ethical Studies (1928) ; B. Bosanquet, Gifford Lectures (1911—I2) ; J. M. E. McTaggart, Studies in Hegelian Dialectic (1896) , Cosmology (1901) ; J. Royce, Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885) , The World and the Individual (19oo—o1) ; G. P. Adams, Idealism and the Modern Age (New Haven, 1919) ; E. Le Pragmatisme americain et anglais (1923) . (J. H. Mu.)