to the Platonic Idealism. Plato extended the Socratic discovery
to the whole of reality and while seeking to see the pre-Socratics
with the eyes of Socrates sought “to see Socrates with the
Plato
eyes of the pre-Socratics.” Not only were the virtues
to be explained by their relation to a common or
universal good which only intelligence could apprehend, but
there was nothing in all the furniture of heaven or earth which
in like manner did not receive reality from the share it had in
such an intelligible idea or essence. But these ideas are themselves
intelligible only in relation to one another and to the
whole. Accordingly Plato conceived of them as forming a system
and finding their reality in the degree in which they embody
the one all-embracing idea and conceived of not under the form of
an efficient but of a final cause, an inner principle of action or
tendency in things to realize the fullness of their own nature
which in the last resort was identical with the nature of the whole.
This Plato expressed in the myth of the Sun, but the garment
of mythology in which Plato clothed his idealism, beautiful as
it is in itself and full of suggestion, covered an essential weakness.
The more Plato dwelt upon his world of ideas, the more they
seemed to recede from the world of reality, standing over against
it as principles of condemnation instead of revealing themselves
in it. In this way the Good was made to appear as an end
imposed upon things from without by a creative intelligence
instead of as an inner principle of adaptation.
On one side of his thought Aristotle represents a reaction against idealism and a return to the position of common-sense dualism, but on another, and this the deeper side, he represents the attempt to restore the theory in a more satisfactory form. His account of the process of knowledge Aristotle. in his logical treatises exhibits the idealistic bent in its clearest form. This is as far removed as possible either from dualism or from empiricism. The universal is the real; it is that which gives coherence and individuality to the particulars of sense which apart from it are like the routed or disbanded units of an army. Still more manifestly in his Ethics and Politics Aristotle makes it clear that it is the common or universal will that gives substance and reality to the individual. In spite of these and other anticipations of a fuller idealism, the idea remains as a form imposed from without on a reality otherwise conceived of as independent of it. As we advance from the logic to the metaphysics and from that to his ontology, it becomes clear that the concepts are only “categories” or predicates of a reality lying outside of them, and there is an ultimate division between the world as the object or matter of thought and the thinking or moving principle which gives its life. It is this that gives the Aristotelian doctrine in its more abstract statements an air of uncertainty. Yet besides the particular contribution that Aristotle made to idealistic philosophy in his logical and ethical interpretations, he advanced the case in two directions, (a) He made it clear that no explanation of the world could be satisfactory that was not based on the notion of continuity in the sense of an order of existence in which the reality of the lower was to be sought for in the extent to which it gave expression to the potentialities of its own nature—which were also the potentialities of the whole of which it was a part. (b) From this it followed that difficult as we might find it to explain the relation of terms so remote from each other as sense and thought, the particular and the universal, matter and mind, these oppositions cannot in their nature be absolute. These truths, however, were hidden from Aristotle’s successors, who for the most part lost the thread which Socrates had put into their hand. When the authority of Aristotle was again invoked, it was its dualistic and formal, not its idealistic and metaphysical, side that was in harmony with the spirit of the age. Apart from one or two of the greatest minds, notably Dante, what appealed to the thinkers of the middle ages was not the idea of reality as a progressive self-revelation of an inner principle working through nature and human life, but the formal principles of classification which it seemed to offer for a material of thought and action given from another source.
Modern like ancient idealism came into being as a correction of the view that threatened to resolve the world of matter and mind alike into the changing manifestations of some single non-spiritual force or substance. While, however, ancient philosophy may be said to have Modern Idealism. been unilinear, modern philosophy had a twofold origin, and till the time of Kant may be said to have pursued two independent courses.
All philosophy is the search for reality and rational certainty as opposed to mere formalism on the one hand, to authority and dogmatism on the other. In this sense modern philosophy had a common root in revolt against medievalism. In England this revolt sought for the certainty and clearness that reason requires In the assurance of an outer world given to immediate sense experience; on the continent of Europe, in the assurance of an inner world given immediately in thought. Though starting from apparently opposite poles and following widely different courses the two movements led more or less directly to the same results. It is easy to understand how English empiricism issued at once in the trenchant naturalism of Hobbes. It is less comprehensible how the Cartesian philosophy from the starting-point of thought allied itself with a similar point of view. This can be understood only by a study of the details of Descartes’ philosophy (see Cartesianism). Suffice it to say that in spite of its spiritualistic starting-point its general result was to give a stimulus to the prevailing scientific tendency as represented by Galileo, Kepler and Harvey to the principle of mechanical explanations of the phenomena of the universe. True it was precisely against this that Descartes’ immediate successors struggled. But the time-spirit was too strong for them. Determinism had other forms besides that of a crude materialism, and the direction that Malebranche succeeded in giving to speculation led only to the more complete denial of freedom and individuality in the all-devouring pantheism of Spinoza.
The foundations of idealism in the modern sense were laid by the thinkers who sought breathing room for mind and will in a deeper analysis of the relations of the subject to the world that it knows. From the outset English philosophy had a leaning to the psychological point of Berkeley. view, and Locke was only carrying on the tradition of his predecessors and particularly of Hobbes in definitely accepting it as the basis of his Essay. It was, however, Berkeley who first sought to utilize the conclusions that were implicit in Locke’s starting-point to disprove “the systems of impious and profane persons which exclude all freedom, intelligence, and design from the formation of things, and instead thereof make a self-existent, stupid, unthinking substance the root and origin of all beings.” Berkeley’s statement of the view that all knowledge is relative to the subject—that no object can be known except under the form which our powers of sense-perception, our memory and imagination, our notions and inference, give it—is still the most striking and convincing that we possess. To have established this position was a great step in speculation. Henceforth ordinary dogmatic dualism was excluded from philosophy; any attempt to revive it, whether with Dr Johnson by an appeal to common prejudice, or, in the more reflective Johnsonianism of the 18th-century Scottish philosophers, must be an anachronism. Equally impossible was it thenceforth to assert the mediate or immediate certainty of material substance as the cause either of events in nature or of sensations in ourselves. But with these advances came the danger of falling into error from which common-sense dualism and naturalistic monism were free. From the point of view which Berkeley had inherited from Locke it seemed to follow that not only material substance, but the whole conception of a world of objects, is at most an inference from subjective modifications which are the only immediately certain objects of knowledge. The implications of such a view were first clearly apparent when Hume showed that on the basis of it there seemed to be nothing that we could confidently affirm except the order of our own impressions and ideas. This being so, not only were physics and mathematics impossible as sciences of necessary
