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 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. 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,”[14] or 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.”[15] The 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 applies mutatis mutandis to 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—that in which and that by which 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 two of 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’s Hegelianism and Personality (1887) and W. James’s Will 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,” of needs to 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.
To the older idealism as to the new the essence of mind or spirit is freedom. But the guarantee of freedom is to be sought for not in the denial of law, but in the whole nature of mind and its relation to the structure of experience. Without mind no orderly world: only through the action of the subject and its “ideas” are the confused and incoherent data of sense-perception (themselves shot through with both strands) built up into that system of things we call Nature, and which stands out against the subject as the body stands out against the soul whose functioning may be said to have created it. On the other hand, without the world no mind: only through the action of the environment upon the subject is the idealizing activity in which it finds its being called into existence. Herein lies the paradox which is also the deepest truth of our spiritual life. In interpreting its environment first as a world of things that seem to stand in a relation of exclusion to one another and to itself, then as a natural system governed by rigid mechanical necessity, the mind can yet feel that in its very opposition the world is akin to it, bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. 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. 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. Here, too, subject and object grow together. The power and vitality of the one is the power and vitality of the other, and this is so because they are not two things with separate roots but are both rooted in a common reality which, while it includes, is more than either.
Passing by these contentions as unmeaning or irrelevant and seeing nothing but irreconcilable contradiction between the conceptions of the world as immutable law and a self-determining subject pragmatism (q.v.) seeks other means of vindicating the reality of freedom. It agrees with older forms of libertarianism in taking its stand on the fact of spontaneity as primary and self-evidencing, but it is not content to assert its existence side by side with rigidly determined sequence. It carries the war into the camp of the enemy by seeking to demonstrate that the completely determined action which is set over against freedom as the basis of explanation in the material world is merely a hypothesis which, while it serves sufficiently well the limited purpose for which it is devised, is incapable of verification in the ultimate constituents of physical nature. There seems in fact nothing to prevent us from holding that while natural laws express the average tendencies of multitudes they give no clue to the movement of individuals. Some have gone farther and argued that from the nature of the case no causal explanation of any real change in the world of things is possible. A cause is that which contains the effect (“causa aequat effectum”), but this is precisely what can never be proved with respect to anything that is claimed as a real cause in the concrete world. Everywhere the effect reveals an element which is indiscoverable in the cause with the result that the identity we seek for ever eludes us. Even the resultant of mechanical forces refuses to resolve itself into its constituents. In the “resultant” there is a new direction, and with it a new quality the component forces of which no analysis can discover.[16]
It is not here possible to do more than indicate what appear to be the valid elements in these two conflicting interpretations of the requirements of a true idealism. On behalf of the older it may be confidently affirmed that no solution is likely to find general acceptance which involves the rejection of the conception of unity and intelligible order as the primary principle of our world. 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. Explanation of it does not require the annihilation of all differences but the apprehension of them in organic relation to one another and to the whole to which they belong. It was, as we have seen, this conception of thought as essentially synthetic for which Kant paved the way in his polemic against the formalism of his continental predecessors. The revival as in the above argument of the idea that the function of thought is the elimination of difference, and that rational connexion must fail where absolute identity is indiscoverable merely shows how imperfectly Kant’s lesson has been learned by some of those who prophesy in his name.
Finally, apart from these more academic arguments there is an undoubted paradox in a theory which, at a moment when in whatever direction we look the best inspiration in poetry, sociology and physical science comes from the idea of the unity of the world, gives in its adhesion to pluralism on the ground of its preponderating practical value.
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. Yet the depth and extent of the dissatisfaction are sufficient evidence that the most recent developments are not free from ambiguity on this vital issue.
What is thus suggested is not a rash departure from the general point of view of idealism (by its achievements in every field to which it has been applied, “stat mole sua”) but a cautious inquiry into the possibility of reaching a conception of the world in which a place can be found at once for the idea of unity and determination and of movement and freedom. Any attempt here to anticipate what the course of an idealism inspired by such a spirit of caution and comprehension is likely to be cannot but appear dogmatic.
Yet it may be permitted to make a suggestion. 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. In saying subject we say self, in saying self we say free creator. No conception of the infinite can therefore be true which does not leave room for movement, process, free creation. Oldness, sameness, permanence of principle and direction, these must be, otherwise there is nothing; but newness of embodiment, existence, realization also, otherwise nothing is.