the kind of object which it discovers or seeks, "the absolute, eternal, and immutable," or "the things themselves," which, like the absolute square and the absolute diameter of mathematics, "can only be seen with the eye of the mind." And this insistence on the objectivity and permanence of truth is united with the speculative interest in completeness of truth. The knowledge of the philosopher will be not only unerring in point of certainty, but also unlimited in point of sufficiency and generality. Thus Plato represents also that philosophical tendency which has come latterly to be termed 'absolutism.'1

So far, in this summary of Plato, no provision has been made for the moral element. Plato's 'absolute' is defined as the good, and in the order of the sciences, ethics is elevated even above mathematics. "The excellence or beauty or truth of every structure, animate or inanimate, and of every action of man, is relative to the use for which nature or the artist has intended them." 2 In other words, for Plato the teleological categories are fundamental. And this motive doubtless tended to contradict his rationalism, and to create a certain affinity between him and those very sophists who were his dearest foes. The fact remains, however, that so far as method was concerned, ancient idealism was opposed, not to physical or mathematical science, but to the laxity of common sense. This is proved by Plato's high esteem for mathematics as a means of intellectual discipline, through which the philosopher might be emancipated from personal bias and the evanescent chaos of immediate experience, and brought to apprehend definite conceptions and fixed principles.

§3. This rationalistic motive-critical, scientific, and speculative, which dominated constructive philosophy among the ancients, found a more complete expression many 1 Cf. below, Chapter VIII, especially pp. 167, 169–172.

Plato's Republic, Jowett's translation, 479, 486, 490, 510, 601.

This was largely due to the fact that the physical and mathematical sciences themselves were not wholly free from teleology. The mechanical ideal of science was not yet developed. Cf. above, p. 31.

ology by

centuries later in Spinoza. But in Spinoza it is so far freed from all connexion with teleology as to provoke Rationalism a wholly different alignment of forces. In Purged of Tele- the famous Appendix to Part I of the Ethics, Spinoza it is argued that an explanation of nature in terms of final causes is necessarily anthropomorphic. Man is virtually attempting to account for the absolute origin of things in terms of that value which they have for him. He assigns as reasons for the being of things those reasons which would have moved him to create them. And where he can find no such reason he simply imputes one to God's inscrutable wisdom. "Such a doctrine," says Spinoza, "might well have sufficed to conceal the truth from the human race for all eternity, if mathematics had not furnished another standard of verity in considering solely the essence and properties of figures without regard to their final causes." It will be observed that Spinoza prizes mathematics, not only for its exactness, but also for its dispassionateness, for that very character that led Plato to subordinate it to ethics. The philosopher of Spinoza is not the guardian of the State, representing the good of the whole rather than the good of any part, or even the lover of the absolute good, but the witness of those inexorable necessities which make no allowance for human ideals.

1

Thus in the rationalism of Spinoza the teleological principle, derived through Plato and Aristotle from the humanism of the Socratic age, and reinforced by the Scriptural account of the creation and of God's dealings with man, is replaced by the principle of mechanism. Science has now become identified in men's minds with the quantitative laws of motion. The Copernican revolution had further emphasized the meaning of the mechanical theory, and brought out its essentially de-anthropomorphic character, by removing the Earth from the centre of the stellar system, and reducing man's historical career to a peripheral

1 Elwes's translation, Vol. II, p. 77. The Ethics was first published in

and incidental feature of the cosmos. Man was now of small account in that world which he had once been led to believe was contrived for his especial comfort and salvation. If the religious attitude was to be maintained with such a philosophical background, only two possibilities seemed to remain. Either, as in the case of Spinoza himself, the religious consciousness must be reduced to the reason's approval of truth; or religion as a whole must be conceived with Hobbes as a secular institution, used to pacify disorderly men, and sharing the pettiness which under the mechanical philosophy attaches to all human affairs. But religion of the former type must be as rare as the spirit of renunciation and the capacity for intellectual mysticism; while religion of the latter type is a mere convention imposed by cynical enlightenment upon servile ignorance. Hence, not without reason, Spinoza and Hobbes were singled out and anathematized as the great prophets of irreligion.

3

Spinoza and Hobbes do not, it is true, adequately represent the rationalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was on the whole characteristic of these centuries to believe that religion, even Christian orthodoxy, could be established by strictly rational means. But Spinoza and Hobbes represent the rationalistic spirit of this age in its freest and purest expression, and their philosophies typify its logical trend. To keep one's eye single to things as they are, to yield one's mind only to facts and necessities, seemed to lead in the end to the belittlement of man and the disallowance of his spiritual claims.

The Idealistic

§4. We are now prepared to understand the service which modern idealism offered to religious belief. True religion required to be defended, not, as in the Revolution days of Socrates and Plato, against the prejudices and blindness of unthinking men, but against the claim of science to have alienated the world from man. Faith and 2 Cf. his Leviathan (1651), Ch. XII.

1 Cf. above, pp. 13-15.

3 Cf. above, pp. 32-34.

revelation had been left unsupported in their demand that the world should be subordinated to spirit. That nature which religion had conceived to be the handiwork of God, or the stage-setting of the moral drama, or at most merely the principle of negation in the spiritual life, threatened to swallow up both man and God. A new philosophy must redeem nature from mechanism and restore its spiritual centre. It must not be supposed that this was the conscious aim of the idealists and their forerunners, or that the tendency was not in large part due to purely theoretical motives. But it is this that accounts for the great human importance of idealism, for its stimulating power and widely diffused influence. And it is in this sense that idealism is revolutionary. Kant, for example, compared his theory of knowledge with the Copernican revolution in astronomy. He proposed to assume that "the objects must conform to our mode of cognition" rather than that "our knowledge must conform to the objects," just as Copernicus, "not being able to get on in the explanation of the movements of the heavenly bodies, as long as he assumed that all the stars turned round the spectator, tried, whether he could not succeed better, by assuming the spectator to be turning round, and the stars to be at rest." 1

But Kant did not point out the fact, nor has its importance ever been sufficiently recognized, that the idealistic revolution was virtually a counter-revolution, through which the spectator again became the centre of the system. Nor did this counter-revolution either begin or end with Kant. It is a movement of epochal proportions, supported by a wide diversity of thinkers, and dominating philosophy from the time of Berkeley down to the present day. Its central motive is the restoration of the supremacy of spirit. Its distinguishing characteristic as a philosophy of religion is its subordination of nature to God by means of a preliminary reduction of nature to knowledge. Science is to be

1 Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Max Müller's translation, second edition, p. 693.

allowed a free hand in nature; and having annexed nature, its title is to be transferred to mind. That very mechanical cosmos which had served to belittle man, is now made to glorify him through being conceived as the fruit of intelligence. God, the discarded hypothesis of science, is enthroned again as the master-knower of whom science itself is only the imperfect instrument.

Thus, while the burden of idealism is a religious interpretation of nature, its cardinal principle is a theory of knowledge. For the purposes of technical philosophy it consists in a single proposition, to the effect that knowledge is an originating or creative process. Idealism's claims can be substantiated only provided it is true that to know is to generate the reality known. It must be proved that the being and nature of things are conditioned by their being known. In what follows, the attempt will be made, amidst the confusing motives which attend the history of idealism, to keep this cardinal principle constantly in view, and to sift and test the evidence with which it has been supported. And first, let us consider the manner in which Descartes and Locke, the forerunners of idealism, prepared the ground for Berkeley, its founder.

The Beginnings of Modern

Dualistic Ver

§ 5. The strategy of idealism depends on the adoption of a certain initial standpoint. The world must be viewed under the form of knowledge. Although the precise significance of the fact cannot yet be Idealism. The made clear, it is a fact that everything that sion of Knowl- can be mentioned, such as the sun, gold, or edge Napoleon I, can be classed as an element of knowledge, or idea. This generalization does, it is true, require a qualification, the importance of which will shortly appear. Elements of knowledge, or ideas, imply a knower, which is not itself an idea, but which confers the character of idea on what it possesses. With this amendment, we may say that it is possible to regard the

1 The dialectical importance of this starting-point will appear later. Cf. below, pp. 127-128.

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