Bibliography.—The physical features and economic resources of Idaho are discussed in J. L. Onderdonk’sIdaho: Facts and Statistics(San Francisco, 1885), Israel C. Russell’s “Geology and Water Resources of the Snake River Plains of Idaho,”U.S. Geological Survey, Bulletin 199(Washington, 1902),The State of Idaho(a pamphlet issued by the State Commissioner of Immigration), Waldmor Lindgren’s “Gold and Silver Veins of Silver City, De Lamar and other Mining Districts of Idaho,”U.S. Geological Survey, 20th Annual Report(Washington, 1900), and “The Mining Districts of the Idaho Basin and the Boisé Ridge, Idaho,”U.S. Geological Survey, 18th Annual Report(Washington, 1898). These reports should be supplemented by the information contained elsewhere in the publications of the Geological Survey (see the Indexes of the survey) and in various volumes of the United States Census. W. B. Hepburn’sIdaho Laws and Decisions, Annotated and Digested(Boisé, 1900), and H. H. Bancroft’sWashington, Idaho, and Montana(San Francisco, 1890) are the principal authorities for administration and history. The reports of the state’s various executive officers should be consulted also.
Bibliography.—The physical features and economic resources of Idaho are discussed in J. L. Onderdonk’sIdaho: Facts and Statistics(San Francisco, 1885), Israel C. Russell’s “Geology and Water Resources of the Snake River Plains of Idaho,”U.S. Geological Survey, Bulletin 199(Washington, 1902),The State of Idaho(a pamphlet issued by the State Commissioner of Immigration), Waldmor Lindgren’s “Gold and Silver Veins of Silver City, De Lamar and other Mining Districts of Idaho,”U.S. Geological Survey, 20th Annual Report(Washington, 1900), and “The Mining Districts of the Idaho Basin and the Boisé Ridge, Idaho,”U.S. Geological Survey, 18th Annual Report(Washington, 1898). These reports should be supplemented by the information contained elsewhere in the publications of the Geological Survey (see the Indexes of the survey) and in various volumes of the United States Census. W. B. Hepburn’sIdaho Laws and Decisions, Annotated and Digested(Boisé, 1900), and H. H. Bancroft’sWashington, Idaho, and Montana(San Francisco, 1890) are the principal authorities for administration and history. The reports of the state’s various executive officers should be consulted also.
1Of these 80,000 acres are reached directly—72,000 N., and 8000 S. of the Snake river; and from 50,000 to 70,000 acres more are above the level of the canals and will have water pumped to them by the 11,000-30,000 h.p. developed.2This disqualification and much other legislation were due to the large Mormon population in Idaho. In 1884-1885 all county and precinct officers were required to take a test oath abjuring bigamy, polygamy, or celestial marriage; and under this law in 1888 three members of the territorial legislature were deprived of their seats as ineligible. An act of 1889, when the Mormons constituted over 20% of the population, forbade in the case of any who had since the 1st of January 1888 practised, taught, aided or encouraged polygamy or bigamy, their registration or voting until two years after they had taken a test oath renouncing such practices, and until they had satisfied the District Court that in the two years preceding they had been guilty of no such practices. The Constitutional Convention which met at Boisé in July-August 1889 was strongly anti-Mormon, and the Constitution it framed was approved by a popular vote of 12,398 out of 14,184. The United States Supreme Court decided the anti-Mormon legislation case of Davis v. Beason in favour of the Idaho legislature. In 1893 the disqualification was made no longer retroactive, the two-year clause was omitted, and the test oath covered only present renunciation of polygamy.3Governor Shoup resigned in December to take his seat in the U.S. Senate.
1Of these 80,000 acres are reached directly—72,000 N., and 8000 S. of the Snake river; and from 50,000 to 70,000 acres more are above the level of the canals and will have water pumped to them by the 11,000-30,000 h.p. developed.
2This disqualification and much other legislation were due to the large Mormon population in Idaho. In 1884-1885 all county and precinct officers were required to take a test oath abjuring bigamy, polygamy, or celestial marriage; and under this law in 1888 three members of the territorial legislature were deprived of their seats as ineligible. An act of 1889, when the Mormons constituted over 20% of the population, forbade in the case of any who had since the 1st of January 1888 practised, taught, aided or encouraged polygamy or bigamy, their registration or voting until two years after they had taken a test oath renouncing such practices, and until they had satisfied the District Court that in the two years preceding they had been guilty of no such practices. The Constitutional Convention which met at Boisé in July-August 1889 was strongly anti-Mormon, and the Constitution it framed was approved by a popular vote of 12,398 out of 14,184. The United States Supreme Court decided the anti-Mormon legislation case of Davis v. Beason in favour of the Idaho legislature. In 1893 the disqualification was made no longer retroactive, the two-year clause was omitted, and the test oath covered only present renunciation of polygamy.
3Governor Shoup resigned in December to take his seat in the U.S. Senate.
IDAR,orEdar, a native state of India, forming part of the Mahi Kantha agency, within the Gujarat division of Bombay. It has an area of 1669 sq. m., and a population (1901) of 168,557, showing a decrease of 44% in the decade as the result of famine. Estimated gross revenue, £29,000; tribute to the gaekwar of Baroda, £2000. In 1901 the raja and his posthumous son both died, and the succession devolved upon Sir Pertab Singh (q.v.) of Jodhpur. The line of railway from Ahmedabad through Parantij runs mainly through this state. Much of the territory is held by kinsmen of the raja on feudal tenure. The products are grain, oil-seeds and sugar-cane. The town of Idar is 64 m. N.E. of Ahmedabad. Pop. (1901) 7085. It was formerly the capital, but Ahmednagar (pop. 3200) is the present capital.
IDAS,in Greek legend, son of Aphareus of the royal house of Messene, brother of Lynceus. He is only mentioned in a single passage in Homer (Iliad, ix. 556 sqq.), where he is called the strongest of men on earth. He carried off Marpessa, daughter of Evenus, as his wife and dared to bend his bow against Apollo, who was also her suitor. Zeus intervened, and left the choice to Marpessa, who declared in favour of Idas, fearing that the god might desert her when she grew old (Apollodorus i. 7). The Apharetidae are best known for their fight with the Dioscuri.A quarrel had arisen about the division of a herd of cattle which the four had stolen. Idas claimed the whole of the booty as the victor in a contest of eating, and drove the cattle off to Messene. The Dioscuri overtook him and lay in wait in a hollow oak. But Lynceus, whose keenness of sight was proverbial, saw Castor through the trunk and warned his brother, who thereupon slew the mortal Castor; finally, Pollux slew Lynceus, and Idas was struck by lightning (Apollodorus iii. 11; Pindar,Nem., x. 60; Pausanias iv. 3. 1). According to others, the Dioscuri had carried off the daughters of Leucippus, who had been betrothed to the Apharetidae (Ovid,Fasti, v. 699; Theocritus xxii. 137). The scene of the combat is placed near the grave of Aphareus at Messene, at Aphidna in Attica, or in Laconia; and there are other variations of detail in the accounts (see also Hyginus,Fab.80). Idas and Lynceus were originally gods of light, probably the sun and moon, the herd of cattle (for the possession of which they strove with the Dioscuri) representing the heavenly bodies. The annihilation of the Apharetidae in the legend indicates the subordinate position held by the Messenians after the loss of their independence and subjugation by Sparta, the Dioscuri being distinctly Spartan, as the Apharetidae were Messenian heroes. The grave of Idas and Lynceus was shown at Sparta, according to Pausanias (iii. 13. 1), whose own opinion, however, is that they were buried in Messenia. On the chest of Cypselus, Marpessa is represented as following Idas from the temple of Apollo (by whom, according to some, she had been carried off), and there was a painting by Polygnotus of the rape of the Leucippidae in the temple of the Dioscuri at Athens.
In the articleGreek Art, fig. 66 (Pl. iv.) represents Idas and the Dioscuri driving off cattle.
In the articleGreek Art, fig. 66 (Pl. iv.) represents Idas and the Dioscuri driving off cattle.
IDDESLEIGH, STAFFORD HENRY NORTHCOTE,1st Earl of(1818-1887), British statesman, was born in London, on the 27th of October 1818. His ancestors had long been settled in Devonshire, their pedigree, according to Burke, being traceable to the beginning of the 12th century. After a successful career at Balliol College, Oxford, he became in 1843 private secretary to Mr Gladstone at the board of trade. He was afterwards legal secretary to the board; and after acting as one of the secretaries to the Great Exhibition of 1851, co-operated with Sir Charles Trevelyan in framing the report which revolutionized the conditions of appointment to the Civil Service. He succeeded his grandfather, Sir Stafford Henry Northcote, as 8th baronet in 1851. He entered Parliament in 1855 as Conservative M.P. for Dudley, and was elected for Stamford in 1858, a seat which he exchanged in 1866 for North Devon. Steadily supporting his party, he became president of the board of trade in 1866, secretary of state for India in 1867, and chancellor of the exchequer in 1874. In the interval between these last two appointments he had been one of the commissioners for the settlement of the “Alabama” difficulty with the United States, and on Mr Disraeli’s elevation to the House of Lords in 1876 he became leader of the Conservative party in the Commons. As a finance minister he was largely dominated by the lines of policy laid down by Mr Gladstone; but he distinguished himself by his dealings with the Debt, especially his introduction of the New Sinking Fund (1876), by which he fixed the annual charge for the Debt in such a way as to provide for a regular series of payments off the capital. His temper as leader was, however, too gentle to satisfy the more ardent spirits among his own followers, and party cabals (in which Lord Randolph Churchill—who had made a dead set at the “old gang,” and especially Sir Stafford Northcote—took a leading part) led to Sir Stafford’s transfer to the Lords in 1885, when Lord Salisbury became prime minister. Taking the titles of earl of Iddesleigh and Viscount St Cyres, he was included in the cabinet as first lord of the treasury. In Lord Salisbury’s 1886 ministry he became secretary of state for foreign affairs, but the arrangement was not a comfortable one, and his resignation had just been decided upon when on the 12th of January 1887 he died very suddenly at Lord Salisbury’s official residence in Downing Street. Lord Iddesleigh was elected lord rector of Edinburgh University in 1883, in which capacity he addressed the students on the subject of “Desultory Reading.” He had little leisure for letters, but amongst his works wereTwenty Years of Financial Policy(1862), a valuable study of Gladstonian finance, andLectures and Essays(1887). HisLifeby Andrew Lang appeared in 1890. Lord Iddesleigh married in 1843 Cecilia Frances Farrer (d. 1910) (sister of Thomas, 1st Lord Farrer), by whom he had seven sons and three daughters.
He was succeeded as 2nd earl by his eldest son,Walter Stafford Northcote(1845- ), who for some years was his father’s private secretary. He was chairman of the Inland Revenue Board from 1877 to 1892; and is also known as a novelist. His eldest sonStafford Henry Northcote, Viscount St Cyres (1869- ), was educated at Eton and Merton College Oxford. After taking a 1st class in History, he was elected a senior student of Christ Church, where he resided for a while as tutor and lecturer. His interest in the development of religious thought led him to devote himself specially to the history of the Roman Catholic Church in the 17th century, the first-fruits of which was hisFrançois de Fénelon(London, 1901); eight years later he published hisPascal(ib.1909).
The second son of the 1st earl of Iddesleigh,Stafford Henry Northcote, 1st Baron Northcote (b. 1846), was educated at Eton and at Merton College, Oxford. He became a clerk in the foreign office in 1868, acted as private secretary to Lord Salisbury, and was attached to the embassy at Constantinople from 1876 to 1877. From 1877 to 1880 he was secretary to the chancellor of the exchequer, was financial secretary to the war office from 1885 to 1886, surveyor-general of ordnance, 1886 to 1887, and charity commissioner, 1891 to 1892. In 1887 he was created a baronet. In 1880 he was elected M.P. for Exeter as a Conservative, and retained the seat until 1899, when he was appointed governor of Bombay (1899-1903), being created a peer in 1900. Lord Northcote was appointed governor-general of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1903, and held this post till 1908. He married in 1873 Alice, adopted daughter of the 1st Lord Mount Stephen.
IDEA(Gr.ἰδέα, connected withἰδεῖν, to see; cf. Lat.speciesfromspecere, to look at), a term used both popularly and in philosophical terminology with the general sense of “mental picture.” To have noideahow a thing happened is to be without a mental picture of an occurrence. In this general sense it is synonymous with concept (q.v.) in its popular usage. In philosophy the term “idea” is common to all languages and periods, but there is scarcely any term which has been used with so many different shades of meaning. Plato used it in the sphere of metaphysics for the eternally existing reality, the archetype, of which the objects of sense are more or less imperfect copies. Chairs may be of different forms, sizes, colours and so forth, but “laid up in the mind of God” there is the one permanentideaor type, of which the many physical chairs are derived with various degrees of imperfection. From this doctrine it follows that theseideasare the sole reality (see furtherIdealism); in opposition to it are the empirical thinkers of all time who find reality in particular physical objects (seeHylozoism,Empiricism, &c.). In striking contrast to Plato’s use is that of John Locke, who defines “idea” as “whatever is the object of understanding when a man thinks” (Essay on the Human Understanding(I.), vi. 8). Here the term is applied not to the mental process, but to anything whether physical or intellectual which is the object of it. Hume differs from Locke by limiting “idea” to the more or less vague mental reconstructions of perceptions, the perceptual process being described as an “impression.” Wundt widens the term to include “conscious representation of some object or process of the external world.” In so doing he includes not only ideas of memory and imagination, but also perceptual processes, whereas other psychologists confine the term to the first two groups. G. F. Stout and J. M. Baldwin, in theDictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, i. 498, define “idea” as “the reproduction with a more or less adequate image, of an object not actually present to the senses.” They point out that an ideaand a perception are by various authorities contrasted in various ways. “Difference in degree of intensity,” “comparative absence of bodily movement on the part of the subject,” “comparative dependence on mental activity,” are suggested by psychologists as characteristic of an idea as compared with a perception.
It should be observed that an idea, in the narrower and generally accepted sense of a mental reproduction, is frequently composite. That is, as in the example given above of the idea of chair, a great many objects, differing materially in detail, all call a single idea. When a man, for example, has obtained an idea of chairs in general by comparison with which he can say “This is a chair, that is a stool,” he has what is known as an “abstract idea” distinct from the reproduction in his mind of any particular chair (seeAbstraction). Furthermore a complex idea may not have any corresponding physical object, though its particular constituent elements may severally be the reproductions of actual perceptions. Thus the idea of a centaur is a complex mental picture composed of the ideas of man and horse, that of a mermaid of a woman and a fish.
SeePsychology.
SeePsychology.
IDEALISM(from Gr.ἰδέα, archetype or model, through Fr.idéalisme), 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.in “ideals”). 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 (1) what in general it is and how it is differentiated from other theories of knowledge and reality, (2) how it has risen in the history of philosophy, (3) what position it occupies at present in the world of speculation.
1.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. But this is only one side of the truth. It is equally true that a subject apart from an object is unintelligible. 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.
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 state and judgments as the single immediate datum of consciousness, and all else, whether the objects of an external world or person other than the individual subject whose states are known to itself, as having a merely problematic existence resting upon analogy or other process 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 incomplete 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 absolute 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.
2.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 respect 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 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. 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, determining and determined, which turns out to mean that they are merely passing manifestations of some single entity or energy which constitutes the real unknown essence of the things that come before our knowledge. In the pantheism that thus takes the place of the old dualism there seems no place left for the individual. Mind and will in their individual manifestations fade into the general background of appearance without significance except as a link in a fated chain. Deliverance from the pantheistic conception of the universe comes through 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.
The first illustration of this movement on a large scale was given in the Socratic reaction against the pantheistic conclusions of early Greek philosophy (seeIonian School). The whole movement of which Socrates was a part may beAncient idealism: Socrates.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 directlyto 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 thePlatoeyes 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.
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 aAristotle.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 hisEthicsandPolitics Aristotlemakes 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 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 someModern Idealism.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 (seeCartesianism). 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.
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 EnglishBerkeley.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 hisEssay. 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 allfreedom, 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 necessaryobjective truth, but our apparent consciousness of a permanent self and object alike must be delusive.
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 RefutationKant.of Idealism,1wherein 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.
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 hisLeibnitz.Critiqueto 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 (seeWolff) 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.
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 demonstrationKant.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 theCritique 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?
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 theHegel.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.
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 termsStumbling blocks in Hegel’s statements.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 andhistory. 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,2J. Hutchison Stirling,3Benjamin Jowett,4W. 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,6E. Caird,7B. Bosanquet;8(c) of vigorous effort to develop on fresh lines its underlying metaphysics in F. H. Bradley,9J. M. E. McTaggart,10A. E. Taylor,11Josiah Royce12and 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.
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,2J. Hutchison Stirling,3Benjamin Jowett,4W. 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,6E. Caird,7B. Bosanquet;8(c) of vigorous effort to develop on fresh lines its underlying metaphysics in F. H. Bradley,9J. M. E. McTaggart,10A. E. Taylor,11Josiah Royce12and 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.
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 theNew Dualism and Pragmatism.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 adeus 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,”14or 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.”15The 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 appliesmutatis mutandisto 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—thatinwhich and thatbywhich 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 twoof 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’sHegelianism and Personality(1887) and W. James’sWill 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,” ofneedsto 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.