Page:The Distinction between Mind and Its Objects.djvu/61

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MIND AND ITS OBJECTS
55

was the continual collision between its statements, and passages which crowded into my mind in which Green, Wallace, and Mr. Bradley—to mention no more than these—seemed most sharply and in their whole aim and method to dissociate themselves from what I understand by Epistemology.[1] According to my understanding and conviction, the whole movement from Hegel downwards, and most explicitly Green's contribution to the movement in England, was a revolution against psychological idealism and epistemology, having much in common with what the realists are now more emphatically attempting. My view of the situation was expressed in 1885, when I said that the plan of the great masters has been handed over to be carried out piecemeal by the journeymen; and I still believe this view to be sound. If I could transfer, for example, into this Appendix a couple of pages from Wallace's "Introductory Essays" to Hegel's "Philosophy of Mind,"[2] I really

  1. See previous page. I repeat that I understand by Epistemology in the sense which I repudiate a theory of knowledge which is not simply a portion of a general theory of Reality. I do not, for instance, consider my own work in Logic to be Epistemological, and have never used the term or acquiesced in its use. I was careful to exclude the idea. Vol. i, pp. 2 and 3.
  2. Pp. ciii-iv. Professor Alexander's point about the meaning of calling an object an idea, for instance, is here stated precisely as he states it. I do not think that in modern Metaphysic or Logic it has ever been in doubt. See, e.g., my "Essentials of Logic," p. 12, or Bradley on "what is sometimes called Idealism," "Appearance," p. 249.