Neo-Hegelianism

For reasons equally compelling, however, he must insist that the finite is real somehow. "Anything that in any sense 'is' qualifies the absolute reality and so is real." The solution of the antinomy lies in the relativity of everything finite. No exception to this law offers itself. "There is no mere appearance or utter chance or absolute error, but all is relative." The absolute or infinite ex perience, therefore, which logically must be, can in fact be ; and so we are entitled to say that it is. The absolute is vindicated and the finite defended through the admission of degrees in truth and reality.

Bradley's essay made history both within the school and with out. All three features of the finite stressed by him, the defects which condemn it, the "relativity" which suggests salvation for it and the absolute in which it is saved, have bitten into contem porary thought. For example, both his line of attack upon the finite and his line of defence have brought mathematics and physics into the idealistic argument. Apropos of his line of defence, we find the "relativity" of recent mathematical theory regarded by Viscount Haldane as a particular case of the general principle of relativity involved in the idealistic construction of experience. Apropos of his attack, we find Royce reducing all Bradley's charges against the finite to one, namely that it involves an in finite regress; and, thinking the very possibility of idealism to be at stake, he evolves a mathematical counter-argument. Besides bringing up mathematical argument in defence of idealism Brad ley's dialectical attack on the finite has also provoked mathe matical resistance. This has come from Russell and the realists. Curiously enough it takes exactly the same form, a defence of the finite against the charge of involving an infinite regress of a self-contradictory kind. Still deeper has been the bite of the Bradleian Absolute. Intended by him as the saviour of the finite, it has everywhere been taken as annihilating it. It has in con sequence drawn upon itself almost the whole resistance of a gener ation, to that conception of a quiescent absolute, to which the Western mind seems constitutionally averse. Thus it generated Pragmatism in England, and played a great part in differentiating such Neo-Hegelianism as has appeared in America from the Eng lish type.

The earliest Neo-Hegelian influences which reached America found, as in England, an idealism already there, one derived largely from the same Scottish sources. There were such teachers as Noah Porter of Yale and Thomas McCosh, of Princeton. A channel through which the Neo-Hegelian interest in America found important expression was the Journal of Philosophical Studies, edited by W. T. Harris (1835-1909) of St. Louis (Mo.).

The note of American idealism is its solicitude for personality and the individual. This is conspicuous in Howison and still more

where the influence of Lotze was stronger, as in Bowne. The feature of Royce's central work, The World and the Individual 0900 is its combination of a doctrine of the absolute with a doctrine of the unique individual. The substance of reality is experience, and every finite idea of which it is composed has an "internal meaning" embodying a purpose which, in the absolute, is fulfilled. The absolute is needed in order that all ideas may reach fulfilment, both those within the experience of individuals and those beyond.

Royce's absolutism can hardly be said to have survived as a school. Yet it would be untrue to say that in America the idealism which recognizes an absolute has merely disappeared, leaving its empty room to be divided between a pragmatism which emphasizes human values and a realism which thirsts for facts. There are signs of a younger idealistic thought ambitious to vindicate the absolute realistically by touching it, so to speak, at the very nadir of fact, through the perception that all knowledge of ob jects is necessarily also a revelation of subject, and therefore a traffic with mind. On some such assumption seems to rest the work of W. E. Hocking (The Meaning of God in Human Experi ence, 1912), and it is possibly in a note such as this, not without its echoes on both sides of the Atlantic that the eventual issue of the Neo-Hegelian incident in the history of philosophy is to be discerned.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Sir

Henry Jones, Idealism as a practical creed (1909) ; James Seth, English Philosophers and Schools of Philosophy (1912) ; R. B. Perry, The Philosophy of the Recent Past; Macran, Hegel's Doctrine of Formal Logic (1912) ; H. A. Reyburn, Hegel's Theory of Ethics (1921). (J. W. S.) The philosophical movement called Neo-Kantianism commenced in Germany in the 186o's. Beginning with certain epistemological enquiries, it extended gradually over the whole field of philosophy. The individual thinkers who belong to this movement differ from each other in their interpretation of the Kantian doctrine as well as in the results which they reach from the Kantian premises. But, notwithstanding differences of detail, there is a certain methodical principle common to all of them. They all see in philosophy not merely a personal convic tion, an individual view of the world, but they enquire into the possibility of philosophy as a science with the intention of formu lating its conditions. They take their cue from the most general statement of the Kantian problem in the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason and in the Prolegomena. But in returning to the fundamental aim of Kant, to lead philosophy "into the safe road of a science," Neo-Kantianism finds itself confronted with a new task inasmuch as it must face a different state of science itself.