Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/240

226 G. H. HOWISON : That the book has great worth of matter, and will have much weight in the doctrinal controversy that is now upon us, follows of course from the known training and culture of its writers. In many regards, those who are in earnest about a polemic against the current anti-personal philosophies, monisms of one sort or another, may unquestionably rejoice in its courageous, outspoken, and resourceful assault upon Naturalism and Absolutism alike. And if one were to decide upon the philosophical meaning of a movement solely by the general aim of it, in disregard of its method, there would be little or nothing in the programme set forth by the Oxford Eight to which any idealist could demur. " The reality of human freedom, the limitations of the evolutionary hypothesis, the validity of the moral valuation, and the justification of that working enthusiasm for ideals which Naturalism . . . must deride as a generous illusion " this unquestionably sums up well the cause for which every idealist works ; nor could anything much better express the object with which my own volume was prepared. But one doesn't become an idealist simply by attachment to ideals, or by opposition to those aspects of Naturalism which assail the credit of ideals ; otherwise many an empiricist, many a positivist even, might be called an idealist, and such a persistent railer at Idealism and all its ways as Prof. James might still rank as an idealist of idealists. Idealism is constituted by the metaphysical value it sets upon ideals, not by the aesthetic or the ethical, and rather by its method of putting them on the throne of things than by the mere intent to have them there. It is always distinct from Mysticism (which at the core is Emotionalism), and still more from Voluntarism. Its method is, at bottom, to vindicate the human ideals by showing them to be not merely ideals but realities, and to effect this by exhibiting conscious being as the only absolute reality ; this, again, it aims to accomplish by setting the reality of conscious being in the only transsubjective aspect thereof, namely, in intelligence. So the fact comes about that Idealism gets its essential character from its discovery that intelligent certainty depends on such an interpretation of reality as makes the knowledge of reality by the spontaneous light of intelligence conceivable ; in short, that Ideal- ism is necessarily nationalism, or implies an apriorist Theory of Knowledge. No sort of Experientialism, so far as it is consistent, can rightly be called Idealism. Voluntarism, emotive Mysticism, it readily may be, but then it is simply Subjectivism ; and if it be taken in cognitive terms, it cannot get beyond Sensationism, unable as it is to provide for any changeless and universal ideas with which to organise experiences into objects that are inalterably the same for all subjects and therefore abidingly real. Not even such a theory as Berkeley's (to which one of the eight essayists appears to hold, with some added helps from Kant) can be con- sistently called Idealism ; for though it teaches that there is an immutable principle at the basis of our experiences, namely the