declare in this sense that ‘all reality is spirit,’ that is, that reality consists solely of conscious beings and their states of consciousness. But I am afraid that the enemy will not be propitiated even by this sacrifice, and that the denial of the reality of the material world will inevitably lead to the denial of the reality of any world at all.
With such subjectivism the German idealism had no necessary connexion, at least after Fichte had removed the last fragment of it from his philosophy. The result of Kant’s teaching, when it was freed from the contradictory notion of the ‘thing in itself’—that Irish Bull in philosophy, as Heine calls it—was not to cast any, even the slightest, doubt on the reality of the external world, but only to show that a new element must be added to all that we know of it as an external world, namely, its relation to the subject. No doubt, this new element brings important modifications into our previous views of objectivity. For, on the one hand, it absolutely precludes the attempt to explain the spiritual by the material, and, indeed, compels us to conclude that there is no material world which is not also spiritual. And, on the other hand, as the correlation between the self and the not-self is not onesided, it brings with it also the conviction that there is no spiritual world which is not also material, or does not presuppose a material world. Thus the reality of that which is other than the self-conscious intelligence is seen to rest on the same basis with that of the self-conscious intelligence itself, and the one cannot be denied without the other[1].
But at this point a new difficulty has arisen. So soon as it is understood that the assertion that all objects are relative to the subject, involves the counter-assertion that the subject as such is relative to the object, we seem to be involved in an antinomy between two forms of consciousness, which can neither be reconciled nor separated. We seem, in fact, to be forced alternately to make the subject an adjective or property of the object, and the object an adjective or property of the subject; in other words, to set up two opposite theories, materialism and subjective idealism, each of which has its own independent value, and neither of which can be put aside in favour of the other. This balancing or dualistic view is substantially the theory adopted by Clifford and Huxley, and it has been fully worked out by Mr. Spencer. These writers, in short, use the double relativity of consciousness and self-consciousness, or
- ↑ There is, indeed, a sense in which all that is apprehended by the intelligence must have something of the nature of the intelligence in it. On this subject I may refer to what I have said elsewhere (Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, vol. i, p. 193 seq.).
