everything that I had seen. And similarly, the general circumstance that in observing I am compelled to supply the very element whose real ubiquity or necessity I am attempting to discover, must itself be discounted or corrected, if I am to draw a true conclusion. In so far as the idealistic conclusion depends on that circumstance itself, it is fallacious.

The Cardinal

Principle and the Berkeleyan

Proofs in Contemporary

§ 10. A study of the later development of idealism will disclose the fact that it relies mainly, if not entirely, on the Berkeleyan proofs - 'definition by initial predication,' and 'argument from the egocentric predicament.' Despite the fact that present day idealism prefers to attribute its Idealism authorship to Kant, some idealists expressly credit Berkeley himself with having established the cardinal principle. "The truth is," says one writer, "that Berkeley gave the coup de grace to all forms of materialism, when he proved, or led the way to the proof, that matter (so-called physical reality) is a compound of qualities, and that every quality turns out to be an elemental form of consciousness, a way of being conscious."1

But it is more usual to find Berkeley's proofs restated, with slight variations to match the shade of the particular idealism which the author represents. For the cardinal principle lends itself to various interpretations. In its general form this principle asserts the priority of the cognitive consciousness; and it is therefore capable of as many diverse formulations as there are diverse conceptions of cognition. Thus there may be perceptual, rational, or volitional idealists, according as knowledge is held to consist essentially in perception, reason, or volition. And Berkeley's proofs are capable of corresponding formulations. With some of these diversities we shall deal in the chapter that follows. Meanwhile it will throw further

1 M. W. Calkins: The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, p. 400; cf. pp. 118-132.

⚫ Cf. especially, pp. 158-162.

light on the meaning of Berkeley's proofs, and illustrate their wider significance, if we have set before us a single contemporary instance of each.

The use of 'definition by initial predication' appears, for example, in the common habit among idealists of adopting what is called the standpoint of experience. This standpoint being once adopted, and the meaning of experience formulated, idealism needs no further proof. Thus Professor Baillie writes: "We must start, in other words, from the whole of experience as such. . . . Now we take experience as a whole when we look upon the subject-mind, in which alone experience exists, as the centre to which all forms of experience refer and round which they gather. . . . Experience always implies a relation between two distinct elements: the one is that for which something is, and the other the something which is presented. These are the so-called subject and object." But nowhere does this author show why we should start with experience in this sense, or why having so started we should regard that particular aspect of things as essential and definitive.

When idealists do raise these last questions, they employ, as a rule, the argument from the 'ego-centric predicament.' We cannot avoid the standpoint of experience, if we are to have anything before us at all; or eliminate the relation to a thinking consciousness, if we are to think. "Find any piece of existence," says Mr. Bradley, “take up anything that anyone could possibly call a fact, . . . and then judge if it does not consist in sentient experience. When the experiment is made strictly, I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced. Anything, in no sense felt or perceived, becomes to me quite unmeaning. And as I cannot try to think of it without realizing either that I am not thinking at all, or that I am thinking of it against my will as being experienced, I am driven to the conclusion that for me experience is the same as reality. 1 J. B. Baillie: Idealistic Construction of Experience, pp. 105, 108.

You cannot find fact unless in unity with sentience."1 But all this proves no more than that finding is finding; no amount of reiteration or verbal alteration can ever make it prove what the idealist wants it to prove - namely, that being is finding, that in order to be or to be what they are, things must be found.

It is doubtless true that idealism has had a long and eventful history since Berkeley; and there are many who would maintain that idealism did not begin its history until after Berkeley. But to any one who refuses to permit the issue to be confused, it must be apparent that the theory with which Berkeley startled the world in 1710 is essentially the same as that which flourished in the nineteenth century in the form given it by Fichte and Hegel. It is essentially the same, in that the agreement is far more important than the difference. The two theories agree in asserting that the cognitive consciousness is the universal condition of being, or that to be is to be either knower or known; they differ in what they conceive to be the fundamental properties of consciousness and the nature of truth. But it is the principle in which they agree from which both theories derive their philosophy of religion, and to which both have owed their popular influence. And this principle obtains both its simplest statement and its original arguments in the writings of Berkeley.

1 F. H. Bradley: Appearance and Reality, pp. 145, 146.

CHAPTER VII

OBJECTIVE OR TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM

General Meaning of Post

ism

§ 1. THE militant and profoundly influential idealism of contemporary thought traces its descent from Kant, and only indirectly, if at all, from Berkeley. The phrase 'objective idealism,' in the sense in Kantian Ideal- which it is at present in vogue in Englishspeaking countries, is intended to suggest that Kantianism cures Berkeleyan idealism of a malignant 'subjectivism,' with which it is infected, and to which it must otherwise succumb. For to reduce external reality to the several percepts of the human mind, as Berkeley did, is virtually to reduce it to that transiency, relativity, and privacy of mere opinion, from which knowledge must perpetually seek to escape.

According to objective idealism, Berkeley's error lay, not in his reduction of external reality to mind; but in his failure to recognize that the mind here in question is not the human mind of psychology, but a universal mind, or a subject of knowledge in general, endowed with the principles of logic. The central conception of objective idealism, in other words, is the conception of a super-personal, or impersonal, logical consciousness. This consciousness conditions being; and its enactments are binding on the individual thinker, as his 'objective' reality. 1 Thus objective idealism does not propose to reject the cardinal principle of Berkeleyan idealism, but rather to correct and improve upon it. It is only when viewed in this light that its inner dialectic can be understood. In the account

1 As is well known, Berkeley himself anticipated this theory in his conception of the divine mind. But that which to Berkeley was an afterthought, never satisfactorily reconciled with his first principles, becomes in objective idealism the central motive.

which follows, I shall consequently seek to discover not only whether objective idealism does actually succeed in avoiding the pitfall of 'subjectivism,' but also whether it -in any way strengthens the case for idealism by reinforcing Berkeley's original proofs, or by adding new proofs of its

own.

Kant's contribution to objective idealism consisted in his discovery of certain 'categories,' or forms of thought, which he held to be the universal prerequisites of knowledge. He employed the term 'transcendental' to indicate the peculiar status of these categories, and the metaphysics of his followers thus derives the name 'transcendental idealism,' or 'transcendentalism.' As a rehabilitation of rationalism, this view was opposed to the whole empirical movement which had emanated from Locke and which dominated the thought of the eighteenth century. But it was opposed more particularly to the fatal consequences of empiricism as exhibited in the hopeless predicament of Hume. This writer was at the beginning, as he has remained ever since, the awful warning to all who would stray from the path of Kantian rectitude. We must, therefore, begin our review of Kantianism with a brief account of this unbeliever who perished for lack of the gospel.

§ 2. Hume's sceptical predicament was the sequel to his criticism of Berkeley. He showed that although Berkeley The Sceptical had successfully vanquished the older dualCrisis in Hume ism between ideas and material substance, he had at the same time given fresh emphasis to another dualism, that between ideas and spiritual substance. "Besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise Something which knows or perceives them; and exercises divers opera

1 I do not mean, of course, to imply that Kant himself is a metaphysician, or even that all of his followers are metaphysicians. It is possible to be a Kantian, and yet not be an idealist in the sense intended in the present chapter. Cf. below, pp. 144-148.