IDEALISM AND THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
By Dr. EDWARD CAIRD
Delivered May 14, 1903.
Since the publication of Kant’s great work, almost all discussion of the theory of knowledge has turned upon the relation of the object to the subject or of the content of our experience to the formal character of our thinking. In some sense, therefore, we may call all modern theories of knowledge idealistic, and most of them have been so called by their authors. But this does not carry us very far: for the word idealism has been used with so many shades of meaning that it is loaded with misleading associations. It has even, it may be feared, led to the confusion with each other of philosophies which have almost nothing in common. It becomes, therefore, a matter of some importance to disentangle the various senses in which the term has been employed, and the attempt to do so may perhaps furnish the best starting-point for a consideration of the real issues involved in the question.
Now with Plato, who first brought the word into philosophical use, an idea meant something that was primarily and emphatically objective. The idea of a thing was, as he constantly puts it, the thing itself. ‘The good itself,’ ‘the beautiful itself,’ ‘the one itself,’ are the permanent objective realities to which all our conceptions of goodness, beauty and unity point, as distinguished from their phenomenal appearance; and the thought that they are present to our minds, or accessible to our consciousness, though never absent, is secondary and derivative. But with Locke an idea is primarily a state of mind, and Berkeley’s doctrine that the esse of things is their percipi has so deeply affected our philosophical language that in common usage the name idealism is most often applied to the theory which regards the modifications of our consciousness as the objects, or at least as the primary and immediate objects, of knowledge, and which treats the existence of the external world only as an
