John Henry Muirhead

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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, memory 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 reflection 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 mutually independent things and persons. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As the object exists through the constructive activity 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 opposite 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 the fullness of its reality as object. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.” ”