[4] Bacon, Novum Organum, i. 10.
[5] See notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 400.
[6] See Chapter XII.
[7] Cf. Ethica, iv. 37, Schol. I. contrasting rerum externarum communis constitutio with ipsa hominis natura, in se sola considerata.
[8] See the Discours préliminaire to the Theodicee.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE NEW IDEALISM.
This new idealism which conjures by the name of Reason is a different thing from the pseudo-idealism of Jacobi, as it is from the 'rationalism,' so-called, of the mere intellectualist. Its ideal is not a desperate refuge from the hard and bitter reality, only to be reached by the plunge of faith,—which seems rather the leap of despair: not a mere other-world,—always other, longed for, presaged, beheld in dreamy vision, but unperceived by the clear light of intelligence: clutched at, but elusive of every effort. It is not won by turning the back on reality and flying on the wings of morning faith to the better land and the presence of the divine: but by persistence in unfolding, expanding, adjusting, re-combining, and fortifying those partial glimpses of the unseen which occur in every vision of the seen. It is true the ideal is, in a way, always an other world: but not a mere other world; it is another, and yet not another, but the same, seen, if you like to say, transfigured, idealised. But idealisation, if so applied, means not an addition here and a subtraction there made in reality, from some source outside—from some indeterminable Whence (Whence indeed should such additions come?). It does not mean a correction of faults and failures in the real, at the will of an artist who is dissatisfied with his subject-model and would mend it out of other faces and forms stored up in memory or sketch-book. This idealism does not in that sense idealise (so as to falsify). It means complete reality; absolute, systematic, unconditioned reality: nowhere fragmentary, nowhere referring outside, but completing itself in all its members. It means—to quote the Hegelian term—seeing all things in the Idea—their notion (or ideality), i. e. their unifying 'grip,' reflecting itself in their objectivity, and their reality completing itself in art, religion, and philosophy to that ideal which to the non-artistic, non-religious, non-philosophic mood is only dimly suggested and partially supposed. Still less is it an idealism which, as popularly understood, turns reality and historic fact into mere ideas.