Idealism

The word idealism has been so drawled through perfunctory and irresponsible discourse that one must speak by the card if he would not be undone by the reckless equivocation. Fortunately the most fashionable authority in the premises has left a categorical definition of the term that will bear criticism as well as will any statement of an insoluble problem.

In the year 1840 the editor of Hegel’s works issued a small volume specially composed or selected by Karl Rosencranz, presenting Hegel’s original outline of his course of lectures in the gymnasium at Nürnberg in 1808–11. We quote from his exposition of the “Phenomenology of Spirit,” as delivered in the second year of the course:

“Our ordinary knowing has before itself only the object which it knows; it does not at first make an object of the knowing itself. But the whole which is extant in the act of knowing includes the object and the ego that knows, and the relation between them, namely consciousness.

“In philosophy, the determinations of the knowing include not only the determinations of objective things (as such) but also a determination of the knowing to which they belong—this likewise in common with things. In other words (always there are other words), they include both objective and subjective determinations; or rather (sic) definite species of relation of the object and the subject to each other.

“Since things and their determinations are both in the same knowing, it is quite possible, on the one hand, to view the same (the original) things as in and for themselves outside of consciousness, given to the latter as foreign and already existing material for it; on the other hand, however, the view is possible that consciousness itself posits this world, and produces or modifies the determinations of the same, through its mediating relations and self-activity, either wholly or in part. The first mode of view is called Realism, the second Idealism.

“The subject, more definitely apprehended, is Spirit (the mind). It is phenomenal when essentially relating to an existing object; it is so far consciousness. The science of consciousness is therefore called the phenomenology of Spirit.

“But the mind, according to its self-activity within itself and in relation to itself independent of all relation to others, is considered in the science of mind proper, or psychology.”

This private outline for a course of public lectures is a kind of soliloquy, in which the lecturer forecasts clearly for his own guidance the substance to be amplified in his future discourse. Its rugged and categorical sentences call down literature from its vague and æsthetic atmosphere to scientific analysis of experience, and the precise meaning we intend in the language that we use. We find that we have been making objective topics of particulars which are internal and spiritual, or else are so blended of matter and mixed as to fail of right identification.

Experience more and more aggravated the antagonism between sense and reliable understanding, as to whether reality was external or internal, or partly each. Things of many kinds, which should be real and identical of themselves, not only change constantly in time but become different through their environment and the subjective conditions of their observers. The summer haze doubles the size of the sun, and a moral haze magnifies the two mites of the widow. “Things are not what they seem”; we are at a loss in locating reality, whether mental, material or moral.

A tree falls in the woods, and there is a roar—i.e. if any creature hears it, but not otherwise. The discrepancy here, between the popular and the ideal notions, comes from neglect of the distinction between sound, as in our experience, and vibration of the air, which becomes sound only as affecting auditory nerves; and this prompts the awkward assertion of the idealist, that there is no sound unheard. But when he says there can be no pain unfelt, the former assertion seems less anomalous. So when we say a lemon is sour, we are only locating externally our own sensation; the lemon will not be sour if left alone. We find that we have given to experience an externality which must be identically lived, to be at all—not but that there may be external ingredients involved with the experience.

So in the case of certain relatives. We say of a certain body, it is hot, or it is cold; but it is neither hot nor cold by itself, but only by a standard. The same body may seem hot or cold according to the patient’s temperature. A cold-blooded fish may be warm in water that would chill an animal to death. There is no absolute thermometer on which cold is a degree.

Now while this proposition of Hegel, that “Consciousness may posit this world,” is altogether too rank when taken for the world’s rational explanation—for consciousness, to be explanatory, should be wise and designing and efficient, and every sane man knows that he does not designingly and voluntarily posit his world—and further, there is no popular or even esoteric understanding of a universal consciousness to which the positing could be rationally attributed (and the rationale of all consciousness is still left as an unknown root), still, I say, the categorical sentence, “Consciousness posits this world,” is capable of a striking defence, and one quite satisfactory to a faith that will admit primarily the miracle of it all, or hold with the good Bishop Berkeley, that all consciousness and all ideas are due to the instant inspiration of God. For I must hold that so far as “this world” can be resolved to color, form, size and tangibility—and I will include all difference whatsoever—it is determined through (if not by) consciousness. But this declaration shall evade, so far as radical explanation is concerned, any power or fertility or cause behind consciousness, and (for the moment) any account of the objective and historical order of experience in whose presence alone consciousness is found to determine for spirits the things of this world.

Beginning with color, I say categorically that color is determined by the eye; I do not mean caused or produced in an explanatory sense, but only that it is phenomenally according to the eye, and awaits its presence.

In voicing my experience I have to assume a rôle of authority here, because my personal vision, although not singular, is rather extraordinary, exemplifying a binocular paralogism, in which quite frequently each of my eyes sees for itself, making for me two objects out of one; and either of these objects is the reality, as confirmed by its tangibility, although they differ in color. When I look at a lighted lamp, say seven or eight feet away, I see two lamps, a foot apart, one giving a white or clear light, the other appearing yellow. An ordinary iron stove has for my left eye, singly, the color common for both eyes when in normal focus, but to the right eye singly it appears bronze. Nickel ornaments are to my right eye of a beautiful brass. Surely my eyes determine these colors, even as stained glass colors the landscape; but the wonder is that the lens of the eye, unlike the glass with its one color, discriminates a myriad of tints and shades.

But it is not the mere color of an object that concerns me most. When I see two frames of one picture on my wall, and can hold my focus on either of them, I advance and place my hand upon it as the real frame, and am ready to stake [body] and soul that I touch the real.

This conception of the phenomenality or ideality of objects becomes yet more impressive when we consider their size. Here we have the whole city claimed and owned and mapped to the fraction of an inch, and recorded in the courts, according to standard measures that are guarded with locks and seals. An inch is an inch and a pound is a pound by law. If the earth should lose part of its gravity unaware, all justice would be frustrated. The merchant who had contracted to deliver a pound would instantly become an idealist; your pound is not such in itself, but is related to and determined by an external intention; it is to be adjusted to the scheme of things, like Shylock’s bond.

The literal truth of a size in and of itself would set the whole world crazy. Here is a pea—the whole race of men are of one opinion as to its size, as established in a universal environment; its alteration would derange the procession of events. But the truth is that this magnitude of the pea is but an arbitrary selection from its myriads of sizes, in this case determined by the common visual lens. This the true size! or the real size! Place it in the microscope and instantly it shows the size of a cannon ball. Is this a trick, an illusion? So far from it, we have lived the illusion hitherto. The glass has not merely exaggerated or distorted the features visible to the naked eye; the ball has grown, not like a bladder at the expense of its walls, but as the womb grows, essentially; new features and perhaps living creatures appear upon it. If any credit is to be allowed for beauty and ingenuity and use, the experience demonstrates the mechanical lens as an improvement on the natural eye, yielding, if not an ultimate size, at least a higher grade of appreciation or the assumed reality of size, as somewhat in and of itself. At any rate the fact is manifest that size is phenomenal, and determined by physical organism. Consciousness does “posit” it.

This is a simple truth, comparatively stale, to be sure, amid the growing wonders of science, but if the reflective mind will philosophize and make the most of it the inferences are overwhelming. The moment we admit that size is according to the lens of vision, “things in themselves” become conjectural.

The ideation of form is rather handicapped than staminated by the intrusion of tangibility, until both are subjectivized. Plato, being pressed for a definition of color, ventured the opinion that color is “an effluence of form commensurate with sight, and sensible”; we should say, rather, an effluence of surface; and that we rather think than see form, which is a kind of eclectic construction. Of course sense and understanding are inseparable, but when we propose analysis we are well advised to keep them separate. Even a worm or a clam is not so exclusively sensuous as not to show some understanding when its ground is jarred; but it seems a fair distinction to say that while a realist knows what he sees, the idealist sees what he knows—or that sense is amenable to identity, while difference is due to thought. Perhaps one cannot see what he does not know, but he surely may know what he does not see—for instance, familiar things when his eyes are closed, or in the darkness of the night. He knows (or at least assumes that he knows) by memory and conception, while he has no corroborating perception, and may be deceived.

We shall find, upon due reflection, that we have been very inconsiderate in our notions of form. For instance, we have a general notion of a table, obviously due to the average height of our viewpoint, and the ordinary position and use of the article. But we may assume that there are creatures on the floor, and on the ceiling of the room, to which the table presents a very different formation; those overhead may have never seen the legs, and those below may have never seen the various objects which the table is made to support. Theoretically the table has numberless viewpoints, from either of which it has a different form—constantly different, as well as also successively different by natural change.

Now as no one of these viewpoints can claim an authenticity superior to that of any other, the table has no integrity of form, taken as an observed thing in, or of, or by itself; all of its forms are solipsisms, each peculiar to a different intelligence. The thing in itself therefore fades into a mere position in the objective order of nature, identical only as a reliable potentiality in whose presence one of the table-forms becomes actual in the presence of a homogeneous spirit.

For the idealist, identity is blind; the “truth” of reality is distinction, which can be only in intelligence. It is very old philosophy, that “one” is made by limiting—made; the distinction is vital. There is no dead limit-ed; there is only the unlimited and the limiting. Draw with chalk a circle on a piece of cloth; the circle is limiting, or limit; but if you ask for the limited, the only answer is that it is essentially the unlimited, the cloth, which is the same without as within the circle. For idealism, distinction is alive, vital. The difference of two things is not a property of either, but is rather the property of that which relates them, or holds them in distinction. Here are two stones, distinguished as the big one and the little one; are they such in and of themselves? Surely, no; for I can change either as such by increasing or diminishing the other. Or in the case of number: here are six counters—are they six in themselves? Each is now a sixth of the number; if I surreptitiously remove one, I do not intrinsically affect the others, yet each of them will become a fifth; and if a thing is indifferently a sixth or a fifth, or is the same whether it is number six or number five, it can hardly claim number in itself. Number is a property of some one who can count.

So form is not a dead objective thing in itself, that may persist without thinking; it is not of stuff, but of mental relation. Here is a “puzzle picture, showing an Arab and a camel; find another Arab.” Around the two obvious figures the artist seems to have indulged in scribbling, mere trash to transient observation, but which, nevertheless, is all that is to be merely seen. If you find the Arab in question you will have constructed his form by selection and unification, after which the form has become visible. We draw a triangle on a blackboard, and habitually assume that we see it by the eye, regardless of its idea, or the genius of its construction. But can a horse see a triangle? Take its base line: why shall he connect that with the two converging sides above? Why not rather affect the parallel with the edge of the board below? How shall he care where those lines go or end, while there is no form in his mind? He can no more see a triangle than he could see a picture of the Crucifixion. He has not the thought-forms through which the rhapsodies of sense become things.

The idealist will contend that only the idea, or the class, can be real and consistent, while the particular or participant is contradictory and confused; that the general cannot be asserted of the particular thing, but at best of thought or spirit only.

Idealism seems to have originated with the Greeks over the question whether the class or universal was merely an aggregation of particulars, each a separate value individually, or a unit from which their value came by participation. There are various beautiful things, but whence the common adjective that determines the class, beautiful? Is it an entity that can be thought as by itself? Taking the largest generality, we assume an entity of the many; but when we ask for the reality, instead of the name—when we ask “Many what?” we discover that the many are a mere rhapsody and confusion, of which the whole stock and substance is unity—it is nothing but ones, and is itself nothing, if not resolved to one. It was a question between Socrates and Parmenides, whether everything had or helped to constitute a class, or took stock in an idea. Socrates favored a certain objectivity in beauty and truth and justice, as general ideas that could have participating specimens, but at such examples as filth or nastiness he demurred; they seemed wholly subjective postulates or opinions. There is nothing against the real contents of filth, or even nastiness; it is only matter out of place; a basket of garbage may be of royal cuisine, only broken and disordered—every bit of it a dainty morsel by itself. The nastiness is in our appreciation of its incongruity with conventional fitness. But, then, could there be ideas wholly subjective?—and so forth.

We yield too readily to the claim and appearance of motion—perhaps too readily to the “science” that denies it. A wheel rolling on the rails at sixty miles an hour certainly presents as sure a demonstration of motion as the nature of things may afford—the wheel going bodily on the line of its route, and at the same time revolving on its axis. But questions arise: If the wheel moves, it must all move, or else go to pieces? It must. And the track is still? It is. But if the wheel moves, while in contact with the motionless track, the wheel would grind the track; but now a changing particle of the wheel at the bottom serves as a pivot for the motion of the other particles. Strip off the rim of a wheel and roll it on its spoke: we see at once that each spoke holds its position on the track until the next spoke comes down. If the wheel were lifted from the track and then revolved, this motionless part would fly to the centre and the other parts would go up and down and right and left around it; set the wheel upon the track again, and then the forward moving centre assumes also the backward motion of the bottom, the top doubles its speed, and the bottom is as still as the track.

But stillness, and centre, and bottom are all general ideas, which refuse sensible expression. Is there a bottom or a centre of a wheel, as a material thing? Or are these conceptions in the mind only? Surely the latter. The perimeter of the wheel is a curve, and no section of it can be so short but it will curve up from the track and present the anomaly of being both top and bottom; and no portion of the wheel can be so small as to be wholly a centre, but if sensible it will be so large as to have an ideal centre of its own.

Now in declaring the subjectivity or ideality of form we found the integrity of the idea threatened with frustration by the tangibility of its ground; we can sensuously touch the material that owns and presents the form, and so prove its objectivity as awaiting consciousness, rather than determined by it; let vision be never so illusive, touch seems a sure test of substance; let the night be ever so dark, touch proves the objective reality of things whose inherent form awaits only the kindly light to reveal them.

Well, sensation, that involves pain and pleasure, should seem the surest criterion of reality. But somehow, as at the discharge of a gun the report comes later than the fact, the scientists will insist that the nerves carry sensation only 180 feet per second, so that a material man might be dead before he knew it, as they tell of a star still visible that perished thousands of years ago.

But that touch is less phenomenal than vision, that its objects show a substantiality not relative to or determined by subjective organization, is an untenable hypothesis. The attestations of substance by tangibility and impenetrability are variously contradictory. We have but to notice the different penetrative forces of electricity and light. Light goes through glass, and stops at iron, while electricity goes through iron and stops at glass. If our visual faculties were electrical, glass would be phenomenal, and iron would be no object; while if our vision had the penetrative quality of light, iron would be an object, while pure glass would be invisible. We see only what we cannot see through.

We gather from these reflections the potential significance of Hegel’s definition of idealism, as the doctrine that “consciousness posits this world,” with the careful reservation, “wholly or in part.” Only the “absolute” idealists, of the Fichtean order, go so far as to say that there is nothing in the visible and tangible world but what is placed there either by or through consciousness. According to Kant there is something at least mentionable as a thing by itself, but how qualified he neither knew nor ostensibly cared to know. His vocation was science, not explanation, and science as a fact for criticism, regardless of its unknown root. But the more moderate idealists—such as appreciate the reflections above noticed—are for their own part very willing to avoid the responsibility of consciously making this wondrous world, or even their own share of it, and insist that there must be somewhat independent of our parasite consciousness—some objective and historical order, in the presence of which, and according to which, consciousness has or makes or determines these phenomenal revelations. Either this or else the whole fact is a divine miracle.

The static and dynamic viewpoints are likely to remain in contrast, if not in opposition, as long as men shall countenance the possibility of a particular and of a universal intelligence, or the masque of humanity shall continue. That we live in the newness of time, that creation is continuous, that things are born and grow old, and that life in its process is vitalized and realized by sensations of immediate and temporal and even sacred experience—all new, and with the prestige of a divine accomplishment of historical purpose and intrinsic worth—it were stultification to deny; the denial would be a flippant assertion that we are but such stuff as dreams are made on and that we do not really know, or feel, or exist. (Yet to deny the supremacy of reason and Sufficient Intelligence, in which all things must always be and be known and felt, is to declare a condition in which existence itself would be so precarious and confused as to be hardly worth while, and one requiring a suspense of judgment at its very best.)

The dilemma is the same, or analogous, between idealism and realism. If we agree with Parmenides, that “one thing are being and thinking”; or with Protagoras, that “man” (as intelligence) “is the measure of all things”; or with Hegel and the earlier Fichte that the absolute totality is the self-relation of “thought”; or with Kant, that our external world is projected from (or at least determined through) our personal organization, and that our objects are not things in themselves; or finally, with more modern critics, that there are no things in themselves—common sense and sane metaphysics alike require some account of the region where things at least seem to be, and some sort of objective and historical order of reality in the positions before which, and some way determined by which, the individual spirits are so uniformly given the same phenomena in the same place and time. It is certainly remarkable, if spirits project their own phenomena, that in any given presence or position they all project the same apparitions, in the same stages of growth and decay. There should be either a unity of inspiration from behind the different spirits or else there is presumably an objective integrity before them.

For example, take the discovery of our planet Neptune. At least two astronomers had realized that in the objective consistency of the solar system there was required in a certain position the gravitation proper to a certain bulk of matter. The practical fact of the “thing” (Neptune) had never appeared in human knowledge, and was realized only after science and mechanism had caught up with a reality which historically preceded them.

These contrasting viewpoints of idealism and realism are as such quite as defensive severally as are those of the static and dynamic, and it is but fair to materialism, in the face of the idealist contention that consciousness posits the apparent world, to consider occasionally what a wonderful world it is, and what a staggering proposition to the average consciousness its production or even its comprehension must be. We have no use for the truism that each man’s world is “all the world to him.” We are not solipsists; we have to believe in other people, and in history, in “alien energy,” and a venerable establishment at which, as ephemeral visitors, we may take our glimpse, question its conditions, its origin, purpose and permanence, and inconsequently pass on.

It is under the spur of these or like considerations that solid people like Mr. Spencer revolt at “the insanities of idealism.” Yet Spencer himself, when philosophising, will not forego these anomalies. In his “Psychology” he says: “What we are conscious of as properties of matter, even down to its weight and resistance, are but subjective affections produced by objective agencies which are unknown and unknowable.” No idealist can say more; and if any property of matter is not such a subjective affection, but a reality apart from subjective spirit, the sensible world may exist as truly without experience as within it.

But the sense anomaly will persist. Here is a great painting which has for the moment but an uncultured observer. Now I am free and prompt to say that color, form, size, tangibility (and even all difference whatsoever if you please) are determinations of conscious spirit, and that apart from such determinations there are no “things,” any more than there are color and beauty and perspective in the night on the hind side of the earth; something must come there—light as well as vision—to afford intelligent experience; still the ground of possible experience may be objectively determined. The culture of the boor is the measure of the picture only for him. The picture has objective potentiality for a larger culture; and so the idealist, with his one dogmatic and unquestionable claim, may well inquire, if reality evolves “things” only according to his subjective categories, the material limiting, if not the formal constructing element of experience may be on the objective side so far as he is concerned. A critic might say to the average perfunctory idealist, even as he might to the boor before the picture, “you see all there is in it for you, and ignore what a fundamental explanation requires of its position—in which event you are a solipsist and a bigot, up in the tree of life indeed, but sawing off the limb that supports you.”

Idealism and realism, in their literature, have shown a very unnecessary and even contemptuous antagonism. The idealist, obsessed with his right claim that objects are not yet “things” in themselves, seems to the realist to be clearing his perspective of everything save, perhaps, of subjective dream—at any rate that he makes the visible world “in itself” unreal; whereas the true idealist should mean no such fact; he opposes not realism but materialism. Fully admitting the external reality, he philosophises the making of the reality, claiming that experience is not wholly due to mere crude stuff, but partly as involving soul in the world, and possibly God; that experience of phenomena is a composition of matter and form, and that the matter becomes “things” (out of the formless dark) only in the presence of divine light and organic vision. But idealism has been mainly (and perhaps helplessly) at fault, in not scientifically explaining what the noumenal ground, the matter-side of the exhibition, is, before the show, and in itself—what it is that impregnates the position in the objective historical order, and makes it potential of the same “things” to all organized spirits alike in the presence of the same position. Kant’s idealism is not opposed to the reality of things but only to their utter materiality:

“The ideality of space and time (and of their contents) leaves the truthfulness of our experience (as well as the ground or cause of it) quite untouched, because we are equally sure of it, whether these forms are inherent in things by themselves, or by necessity in our institutions of them only.”

It is just here that “absolute” idealism puts in its claim, that the noumenal side of reality is totally implicated in the divine subjectivity, and that matter or the negative shall have no essential credit in itself, but only as critically posed in the shape of a non-ego in the ego regarded as self-related spirit. The exploitation of this idea into a system, involving the working world, became the life vocation of Fichte, and continued until its possibilities and as well his own powers were hopelessly exhausted, and ended in his renunciation of the whole problem, in his “Vocation of Man.”

“I know that if I am not merely to play another perplexing game with this system, but intend really and practically to adopt it, I must refuse obedience to the voice within me. . . . I will not do so. I will freely accept the vocation which this impulse assigns to me. I will restrict myself to the position of natural thought, in which this impulse (faith) places me, and cast from me all those over-refined and subtle inquiries which alone could make me doubtful of its truth.”

(This determination changed his claim of knowledge as self-relation, or knowledge of knowledge, to simple faith in Kant’s canon of pure reason, “I think.”)

Yet malgré this renunciation by Fichte, absolute idealism is the only goal and full accomplishment of dialectic philosophy. The soul cannot pose as a mere spectator of any object, however real. It must draw the object up into itself, where no mere copy or representation of it before the Highest shall, under the name of “truth,” pretend to absolute science; only identity with the object can be trusted. Truth, to the absolute, is a false pretence. Its very name stamps it as paper, not gold which cannot be substituted, however conventionally represented. The question is about knowledge, not about correct or passable likenesses; and truth is only asserted of likeness, not of identity with the object. Truth can pertain only to representation, which can never be equivalent to the genuine original. It is a word too much, unless the object as subject is self-related.

I do not observe that our materialists, who are halted by the spiritualists’ claim that no matter can be refined to mind (since substance cannot serve as relation), have made full use of these phenomena of light and color, which were to Plato the prime wonders of the world. For how indeed can we think of light, at whose presence all the form and beauty of the world appear, as less than half of what we call intelligence? Without it “subjective” vision were impossible; we cannot imagine color. Nor are compound colors chemical. A blue ferruginous sand and a yellow silicous sand combined will make a green, although all the particles retain their integrity, and can be separated by a magnet. And the common light, which plays such an intellectual part in the phenomena of beauty, is a chemical element; it is as rankly material as any acid, as well appears in its action upon collodion in the making of a photograph, and in its mechanical effects upon vegetation. The distinction shall be very fine between such substance and relation, in a mechanical green.

All our conceptions of light are crude and immature. How inconsiderate and puerile is our notion of a star: a bright point, sending a ray to us. But is it not at the same time sending a ray to every point of the universe? Not a singular gleam, but a limitless globe of light—an atmosphere, yet to be distinguished among a myriad of such, and occupying the same space. Our star is but one of its infinite manyness. And we read that it may be only the ghost of a star at last.

If the apparition of the star be really a ghost, there is a globe of light (assuming it to have had a beginning) in which a dark sphere is swiftly expanding a ring of light which still contains it.

Frankly speaking, it is not in our present vocation to explain, even if we easily could, the confusion in which our concession to the plausibility of Idealism may seem to have involved our discussion. The purpose has been rather to philosophically show wherein philosophy has failed. And just here particularly should appear its shortcoming, as having not clearly distinguished between realism and “materialism”—a notion beyond the possibility of thought.

Kant took pains to acknowledge and give warning that an idealist proper does not deny the reality of what he depreciates as mere phenomena (to whose basic stuff he was presently indifferent), but insists upon the intellectual and relational element in its composition. Said Kant: “It must not be supposed that an idealist is one who denies the existence of external objects of the senses; all he does is to deny that the existence is known by immediate perception, and to infer that we can never become perfectly certain of their reality by any experience whatever.”

Kant himself was stoically indifferent to the unsettling consequences of his doctrine. If it made knowledge solipsism—if the things of this world are only as they are in spiritual appreciation that may be commingled of conception, memory, dream and illusion—he would but fall back upon his sure method, and warn the acolyte of the ineluctable necessity of empirical experience, and of the fact that only the accompanying assurance of perceptive sense could make a whole of knowledge.

When the materialist says then, “these things are real, whether observed or not, and are no less real in the dark on the hind side of the earth,” the idealist may well inquire for his meaning, not only as to the “things” but as to reality itself. For consider the things as to their sizes: the materialist will not long persist in the integrity of these sizes, but if he does not hold the things to their apparent sizes they will vanish; they have none of his “matter” if they have no determined size; all that he can claim of matter without color, form, tangibility, and above all, difference—all of which we have found determined by organs—falls into the curiosity of what causes the mental experience, and matter, as dead, negative stuff, gives little promise of explanation.

It will be but courtesy on our part to kneel in spirit and confess the fatuity of any presumption of having made explanation easier. Newton may find a pretty pebble on the shore, still lost in wonder as to what the great ocean covers. We rather like the notion, shallow though it be, of primordial forms in the elements of things, which crystallize readily of themselves: it spares a little of anxious intention. And we are comforted by the rupture of aristocratic heredity, when we see that a divine descent through the line of the acorn is not absolutely necessary in the lineage of the oak: since, as we have noticed, both root and branch of the same plant may have grown out of its environment, and represented an illegitimate succession. But after evolution has congratulated itself on its main stay of the survival of fitness, through the push of self-love—seen the mere paws get fingers and indurated nails, finally reinforced by the afterthought of a thumb, to enclose (in order to climb a vine, for instance); after it has seen the blind anxiety of the pushing worm wear through the skin to a focus so sensitive and responsive to the interest within that it has developed a lens and can really see, realized the cordage and leverage of the bones and joints as time and the vital push have accomplished the creature for his position—all this and so much more—then to see the wonder of all wonders, the recreation of the species—to see the mere orgasm of the cock and the hen, drawing from all the streams which out of the wild time delivered this creature, deposit in an egg a white speck in which the whole history is recorded in a potentiality so vital that mere impersonal heat may in twenty-one days render it actual as a bird of paradise—there philosophy, as we regard it, should consent to one very important fact: it is most unlikely that any man (at best any man that we have known or heard of) has in his intelligence any cosmic relation to this world, or as an inheriting son has any unique claim to the estate. Yet that he may have a glimpse of the record we surely know.

Another thought which may be a part of philosophy hereafter is that time must be regarded as a dynamic principle. These wonders of history and development argue so long a process, give a sense of so much being due to process, that when we reflect that time as such can have no beginning, we seem driven to regard it as in itself fertile, objective and concrete, and to conceive Idealism as a private affair. A cultured appreciation finds the world so utterly beyond finite comprehension that, taken as a subjective effect, it would incur a contempt that is due only to the subject himself. While Idealism, for its ingenuity, will be ever safe from the charge of “insanity,” it is most likely that the faith in objective reality will prevail,11There was a piquant and memorable controversy, lasting more than twenty years, between Thomas Hobbes (author of “The Leviathan,” etc.) and certain of the professors of Oxford University, over the possibility of the quadrature of the circle, which has a metaphysical interest as involving the relative authority of sense and understanding, and so liable to personal predilection and preference. The discussion was at first conducted in Latin, with classic dignity and decorum, but waxing hot in consequence of opposing viewpoints—so hot that Mr. Hobbes, arguing from the sensuous and popular side, did not hesitate at calling his opponents not only fools but liars—he decided that he could more roundly abuse them in their native tongue, and continued the contest in English, whereat the Dons rather wittily, if not very elegantly, protested that he had resorted to Billingsgate because “he had not the right Latin for stinking fish.”(This, by the way, was a rather disingenuous claim of such thorough scholars, for Hobbes’ translations of both Latin and Greek have been generally approved. Pope declared that his versions of Homer and Thucydides were the best ever written. Hobbes’ idiosyncracy, if such it was, is best expressed by Sir James Mackintosh as his inability to discriminate between the intellectual and the emotive faculties of man, as determining metaphysical certainty.)It was this peculiarity, perhaps, that led to Mr. Hobbes’ final comment upon the refinements of his adversaries, that “if he had been as learned as they were he would probably have known no more than they did.“This jibe appears superficially no more than a retort of common sense and experience upon highbrow technicality and finesse; but it is this and much more.It was a characteristic saying of Kant that we may think certain facts while yet we do not know them. This he would call transcendental thinking, wherein words and symbols are assumed as concrete realities. Language is an invention and a growth, which has not yet attained the limits of insight and intuition; but at the same time the mind can disport with mere conceptions which have no corroborating perceptions of sensuous experience—although according to Kant (and Aristotle as well) a whole of thought must have both matter and form—the sensuous experience being taken up into intellectual forms, and so made a whole of knowledge.But while Kant plainly instanced the transcendental extravagance wherein we may verbally think what we do not concretely know (making play upon words as real things), he did not remark upon the converse fact that we may really know what, for lack of the appropriate language, we cannot articulately think. I suspect it was as exploiting one of these unspeakable surds, or as giving it rational interpretation, that Hobbes claimed, if not the technical quadrature of the circle, a pragmatical value “just as good.“Hobbes’ proposition assumes to show the tangent that is equivalent to any given arc, and so to determine the area of a curvilineal figure in quadrilateral form; and in doing this he would encounter an incapacity of mathematics to express an obvious geometrical space. His demonstration is of exceeding length, and of troublesome intricacy to the layman, and although we have its language, the appropriate drawing or diagram seems to be lacking from American libraries. One can only conjecture, therefore, whether or not he made good, or in what sense; but such a claim is obviously an intrenchment upon the “fourth dimension.“Let us first approve, by collating geometry and mathematics, the converse of Kant’s very pregnant assertion that we may think what we do not know, to wit, that we may know what we cannot articulately think, our conceptual and formal mathematics failing of terms that should respond to, or accord with our geometrical perception, in this instance to the side of a double square.The diagonal of any given square is equivalent to the side of a square of twice its area.In the figure the diagonal a, of the square bc, is a side of the double square de, for the triangle f is half of the square bc, and a quarter of the square de, which obviously has twice the area of the square bc.Now, mathematically, the square bc is to the square de (its double) as one is to two; and a side of bc is to the diagonal a (a side of de) as one is to that which, squared, would equal two—that is, to the square-root of two, expressed thus: √2.Or similarly, if the side of the smaller square be taken as 2 (which squared is 4) the side of the double square would be a number which, squared, would equal 8—it would be the square-root of 8; i.e., that which squared would equal 8.But our mathematics afford no such number as, squared, would equal either 2 or 8. We can with decimals approximate ever nearer and nearer to the square roots of these numbers, but the process is in vain, because no digit, squared, produces a cipher. Whether some other than our decimal system might thwart the infinite regressus of these mathematical surds is a question for professors; it is enough for our purpose here to see in the diagram the result of a proportion which we cannot mathematically express. We may, as a modus vivendi, for practical purposes, wrap the problem of the infinite regressus in a symbol (as √2), but the fact remains that the “truth” of the matter is at the bottom of the “bottomless well” of Democritus. Still it is readily obvious that a controversy might arise over the relative sufficiency of percepts and concepts of the same object, since the diagonal of a square, taken as representative of the double square, is as such demonstrable geometrically, but inexpressible or surd mathematically.This fact affords the hint that in other and more important instances sensuous intuition may transcend intelligible expression. Reverting to Mr. Hobbes and his proposition, in the absence of his diagram, I can but conjecture that he used some such geometrical value in defiance of the professors’ mathematics. For he says in his final comment: “I have used a more natural, a more geometrical, and a more perspicuous method in the search of this so difficult a problem than you have done in your Arithmetica Infinitorum.” But I have to think that any angular equivalent of the circle is debarred by an inexorable proportion, which I will formulate in the following theorem: The area of any figure is to its perimeter as the uniformity of its extension. It is the uniformity of dimension diametrically that appreciates either surface or solid. It is uniformity that constitutes what is called, more or less in a hopeless jest, the “fourth dimension.” Perhaps we may sufficiently illustrate this fact without diagrams. Conceive a square, six by six inches, and beside it a parallelogram, seven inches by five. The two figures have an equal perimetrical straight lineage of 24 inches, and four equivalent right angles; yet the area of the square is 36 square inches, while that of the parallelogram is but 35. Some other quality than mere extension must determine the containing capacity of this 24 inches of lineage. Again, measure with a tapeline any circular disc; a dinner plate will serve; then cut from cardboard a square of the same perimeter, and impose it upon the disc. While the corners of the square will extend beyond the circle, the area of its extrusion will obviously fail to compensate the lunes apparent between the circle and the sides of the square; the discrepancy is even greater than that between the square and the parallelogram. In the same way, a sphere of plastic matter, pressed into the form of a cube, would require a more extensive receptacle to contain it.We should learn from these experiments that form is an element of extensity; that excentricity of outline involves a diminution of areal content; and that the circle, in the perfection of its uniformity, has a dimension which any possible angularity must degrade and diminish.Whether the first circle was a concept or a percept—whether some genius thought of a point central in a horizon of points, or a caveman twirled it with a forked stick in the sand—is likely to remain a question. and that the ultimate duplexity will be of time and space as respectively male and female principles.

Having granted all that may be rightly claimed in Hegel’s definition of idealism, we have to notice what it lacks of explanation, in the large discourse of reason.

When the idealist, as a philosopher or observer, finds Consciousness (a name in capitals) “positing this world,” wherein is he the wiser? Intelligence as such can but accept what is given to it, and there remains inscrutable the ingenious and productive power which consciousness can only be said to represent. The worth of things being transferred to consciousness affords no explanation or account of them, either as to their coming or to their order or connection. Even if consciousness were original instead of merely a gift, its criticism but opens the way to fundamental explanation.

However, the discomfiture of its devotees will not make idealism less than the most startling discovery of the human race.