“ The advent of personal idealism is a welcome protest against the confusion of God and man in one mind, and against the confusion of one man’s mind with another’s. The school undoubtedly tends towards realism. I am conscious only of myself as a person, and of my bodily signs. I know the existence of other human persons and minds only through their giving similar bodily signs. If the personal idealist consistently denies other bodies, then the bodily signs become, according to him, only part of his experience, which can prove only the existence of himself. ”

“ Nature is not my nature, nor your nature, but one. From this fact of unity of Nature and of everything in Nature, combined with the two previous positions accepted, not from Nature, but from Kant, Green proceeded to argue, altogether beyond Kant, that Nature, being one, and also requiring unifying intelligence, requires one intelligence, an eternal intelligence, a single spiritual principle, prior to, and the condition of, our individual knowledge. ”

“ Having thus confused contradiction and difference, independence and solitariness, experience and inference, Bradley is able to deduce finally that reality is not different substances, experienced and inferred, as Aristotle thought it, but is one absolute super-personal experience, to which the so-called plurality of things, including all bodies, all souls, and even a personal God, is appearance—an appearance, as ordinarily understood, self-contradictory, but, as appearing to one spiritual reality, somehow reconciled. ”

“ Consequently, Kant’s explanation of the unity of a thing is that there is always one thing in itself causing in us many phenomena, which as understood by us are objectively valid for all our consciousnesses. What Kant never said and what his whole philosophy prevented his saying, was that a single thing is a single thought of a single consciousness; either of men, as in Fichte’s philosophy, or of God and man, as in Hegel’s. ”

“ Lastly, though the personal idealists are right in rejecting the hypothesis of one mind, they are too hasty in supposing that the hypothesis is useless for idealistic purposes. No idealism can explain how we all know one sun, except by supposing that we all have one mind. The difficulty of personal idealism, on the other hand, is to reconcile the unity of the thing with the plurality of thinkers. ”

“ It is difficult to see exactly where he begins to differ from Hegel; but at any rate he believes in different self-conscious persons; he does not accept the dialectical method, but believes in beginning from the personal experience of one’s own self-consciousness; and, though he is not very clear on the subject, he would have to admit that a thing, such as the sun, is a different object in each person’s consciousness. He is not a systematic thinker, but is too much affected by the eclectic notion of reconciling all philosophies. ”

“ Nevertheless, as he believes all the time that everything knowable throughout the whole world of evolution is phenomena in the sense of subjective affections of consciousness, and as he applies Hume’s distinction of impressions and ideas as a distinction of vivid and faint states of consciousness to the distinction of ego and non-ego, spirit and matter, inner and outer phenomena, his philosophy of the world as knowable remains within the limits of phenomenalism. ”

“ When we combine his view of Nature under the first head that whatever is inferred in the natural sciences is ideas, with his view of knowledge under the second head that knowledge is experience, and experience, individual or universal, is of duality of subject and object in the unity of experience, it follows that all we could know from the data would be one experience of the race, one subject consisting of individual subjects, and in Nature single objects in the unity of this universal experience ”

“ The unity of the sun can only be explained either idealistically by supposing it to be one object of one mind, or realistically by supposing it to be one thing distinct from the many minds which think about it. The former alternative is false, the latter true. Personal idealism, therefore, must end in personal realism. ”

“ It will be remembered that Fechner regarded every composite body as the appearance of a spirit; so that when, for example, molecular motion of air is said to cause a sensation of sound in me, it is really a spirit appearing as air which causes the sensation in my spirit. This noumenalism would not do for Lewes, who says that air is a group of qualities, and qualities are feelings, and motion is a mode of feeling. What, then, could he make of the external stimulus? He was obliged by his phenomenalism to say that it is only one feeling causing another in me. ”

“ There is no contradiction (as Aristotle said) between a man being determined by many attributes, as rational, six-foot-high, white, and a father, and yet being one whole substance distinct from any other, including his own son; nor is there any contradiction between his body being in bed at 8.15 and at breakfast at 8.45 within the same hour. Bradley’s supposed contradictions are really mere differences. So far he reminds one of Herbart, who founded his “realistic” metaphysics on similar misunderstandings ”

“ He had definitely confined universal experience to the one experience of the race. But perhaps Caird’s phrase “a perfect intelligence” has beguiled him into thinking that the one subject of universal experience is not mere mankind, but God Himself. Under the third head, however, his guide is Lotze. The argument may be shortly put as follows: As the Nature which is the object of mechanics and all natural sciences is not natural substances, but phenomena and ideas; as mass is not substance, and force is not cause; as activity is not in the physical but in the psychical world ”

“ Laurie is a Hegelian, using Kant’s categories, as Hegel did, to argue that they are true not only of thoughts but of things; and for the same reason, that things and thoughts are the same. At first in his psychology he speaks of the “attuition” and the rational perception of an outside object. But in his metaphysics founded thereon he interprets the outside object to mean an object outside you and me, but not self-subsistent; not outside universal reason, but only “Beënt reason.” He quotes with approval Schelling’s phrase, “Nature is visible Intelligence and Intelligence visible Nature.” ”

“ As, however, he does not suppose that we have a direct perception of something resisting the organism, such as Hamilton maintained, it becomes necessary to state exactly what he means by “attuition.” It is, according to him, something more than sensation, but less than perception; it is common to us with lower animals such as dogs; its operation consists in co-ordinating sensations into an aggregate which the subject throws back into space, and thereby has a consciousness of a total object outside itself, e.g. a stone or a stick, a man or a moon. ”

“ When Green said that “Nature is the system of related appearances, and related appearances are impossible apart from the action of an intelligence,” he was speaking as a pure Kantian, who could be answered only by the Aristotelian position that Nature consists of related bodies beyond appearances, and by the realistic supposition that there is a tactical sense of related bodies, of the inter-resisting members of the organism, from which reason infers similar related bodies beyond sense. ”

“ Accordingly, the many things of this world are not self-discrepant, as Bradley says, but are distinct and relative substances, as Aristotle said. The argument, therefore, for one substance in Spinoza’s Ethics, and for one absolute, the Real, which is one substantially, in Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, breaks down, so far as it is designed to prove that there is only one substance, or only one Real. ”

“ But natural realism, as finally interpreted by Hamilton, was too dogmatic, too unsystematic, and too confused with elements derived from Kantian idealism to withstand the brilliant criticism of Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865) , a work which for a time almost persuaded us that Nature as we know it from sensations is nothing but permanent possibilities of sensation, and oneself only a series of states of consciousness. ”

“ What makes his vindication of conscious personality all the more interesting is that he has so much in common with the Hegelians; agreeing as he does with Hegel that self-consciousness is the highest fact, the ultimate category of thought through which alone the universe is intelligible, and an adequate account of the great fact of existence. ”

“ It has been largely borrowed either from previous English or from later German idealism, and what originality it has possessed has been mainly shown in that spirit of eclectic compromise which is so dear to the English mind. The predominant influence, on the whole, has been the phenomenalism of Hume, with its slender store of sensations, ideas and associations, and its conclusion that all we know is sensations without any known thinkers or any other known things. ”

“ Personal Idealism.—The various forms of idealism which have been described naturally led in England, even among idealists themselves, to a reaction against all systems which involve the denial of personality. English moral philosophy cannot long tolerate a metaphysics which by merging all minds in one would destroy personality, personal causation and moral responsibility, as James Martineau well said. ”

“ Green, on the other hand, in deducing his own conclusion that the world is, or is a system of, one eternal intelligence, incautiously put it forward as “what may be called broadly the Kantian view” (Prolegomena, § 36) , and added that he follows Kant “in maintaining that a single active conscious principle, by whatever name it be called, is necessary to constitute such a world, as the condition under which alone phenomena, i.e. appearances to consciousness, can be related to each other in a single universe” (§ 38) . ”

“ He thinks that “attuition” gives us consciousness of an object, but without knowledge, and that knowledge begins with reason. His theory of reason brings him into contact with the German idealists: he accepts from Kant the hypothesis of synthesis and a priori categories, from Fichte the hypothesis that will is necessary to reason, from Schelling and Hegel the hypothesis of universal reason, and of an identity between the cosmic reason and the reason of man, in which he agrees also with Green and Caird. ”

“ Their point is to stretch Hume’s phenomenalism so as to embrace all science, by contending that mechanism is not at the bottom of phenomena, but is only the conceptual shorthand by aid of which men of science can briefly describe phenomena, and that all science is description and not explanation. ”

“ He carries its operation before reason still farther, supposing that “attuition” makes particular inferences about outside objects, and that a man, or a dog, through association “attuites” sequence and invariableness of succession, and, in fact, gets as far in the direction of causation as Hume thought it possible to go at all. Laurie’s view is that a dog who has no higher faculty than “attuition,” can go no farther; but that a man goes farther by reason. ”

“ Again, he thinks that substance is activity; differing from both Leibnitz and Lotze herein, and still more in not allowing the existence of the many beyond experience. Hence his personal or pluralistic idealism is the view that the world is a plurality of many coexisting and interacting centres of experience, while will is the most fundamental form of experience. ”

“ Nevertheless, there is a common tendency in them, and in the university of Oxford, towards the belief that, to use the words of the editor, “We are free moral agents in a sense which cannot apply to what is merely natural.” There is indeed much more activity of thought at Oxford than the world suspects. ”

“ His views, in his chapter on the Laws of Motion, that the physicist forms a conceptional model of the universe by aid of corpuscles, that these corpuscles are only symbols for the component parts of perceptual bodies, and that force is a measure of motion, and not its cause, are the views of Mach. ”