I.
To truth the intellect is related, as is the eye to light, and the ear to sound. If the eye were destroyed, the sun would not cease to shine. His light would still come upon hill and plain to feed the flowers and to disclose their beauty, but without the organ of vision no creature in the universe would be able to see the things which his light reveals. The ear does not create sound. Let it be forever sealed, and the Niagaras would still continue to fall and the thunders to shake the heavens, but they would not be heard. The intellect does not create truth, but it is the only faculty with which man is endowed by which he is able to discover it.
It was the error of the idealists that they made the order, laws, and relations of things as so many principles projected out of the observer’s own mind into the universe about him. What he seemed to see in things, were but modifications of his own mental states. The only order things had was in the observer’s own mind. It was regarded not only as the pivot upon which the universe turned, but also as the creative principle from which the universe took form. Apparently this was a great gain to mind, but it was at the expense of any real world for the mind to contemplate. It seemed to win a victory for the intelligence absolute and entire, but it was by shutting it up to its own shadowy abstractions, and abandoning it in a shoreless and bottomless void to its own vain musings. The personal pronoun I was extended perpendicularly and horizontally, till topways and sideways the whole of space and time was filled with it. No solid earth, no burning sun, no rolling orbs were left. A great, illimitable, irresponsible ego became the sole occupant of all that is.
This extreme idealism is in direct contrast to the realism of the early thinkers. They taught that things depended on man neither for their existence nor their intelligibility. That each thing carried the real intelligible essence as an ultimate fact in itself. Thought in man was but the reflection of this intelligible essence in the thing, as the light in the mirror is but the reflection of the light of the lamp.
Of the two systems, extreme idealism is preferable to extreme realism. All mind and no matter, is better than all matter and no mind. Thought with no place to stand, is better than a place to stand and no thought. The eye with nothing to see, is better than something to see and no eye.
The solution which realism gave of the problem of existence, left no place for mind, the solution which idealism gave of it left no place for matter. But both the external world, upon which realism was founded, and the intelligence, upon which idealism was founded, are expressions of mind. The one as intelligible content, the other as combining active capacity and the intelligibility of the content, exactly corresponds to the active grasp of the capacity.