mind, and a still more hidden power superior to both, and from which both are derived, then we have but abandoned the perplexing questions raised by metaphysical Realism to take refuge in the religious position from which it seemed to offer a plausible deliverance.
Does Idealism help us? Idealism is of several forms. That represented by Berkeley need not occupy us here, for Berkeley not only admitted, but expressly asserted, the existence of an all-comprehending Power, and without this his philosophy would have appeared to himself unmeaning and incomprehensible. Nor need we stop to examine that more recent species of Idealism, as I hold it to be, which its illustrious author, Mr. Herbert Spencer, has christened Transfigured Realism. Whatever differences may exist between Spencer and Berkeley—and I believe them to be more apparent than real—they are at one in the cardinal doctrine that sensible phenomena are but the varied manifestations of this ultimate Power. All such Idealism as this is in harmony with religion. But there are two forms which seem to be at variance with it, one of which I will term Moderate, and the other Extreme Idealism.
Moderate Idealism agrees with Berkeley in dismissing to the limbo of extinct metaphysical creatures the substance supposed to lurk beneath the apparent qualities of bodies. It holds that there is no such substance, and that these qualities, and therefore bodies themselves, exist only in consciousness. But it differs from Berkeley in omitting to provide any source whatever, external to ourselves, from which these bodies can be derived. Not only are they in their phenomenal aspect mere states of our own consciousness, but they have no other aspect than the phenomenal one, and are in themselves nothing but phenomena. Rather inconsistently, this school of Idealism does not push its reasoning to its natural results, but concedes to other human beings something more than a merely phenomenal existence. Nothing exists but states of consciousness; but those peculiar states of my consciousness which I term men and women may be shown, by careful reasoning, to possess (in all probability) an existence of their own, even apart from my seeing, hearing, or feeling them. The process by which we reach this conclusion "is exactly parallel to that by which Newton
