Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/327

THE NEW REALISM AND THE OLD IDEALISM. 313 a fundamental one, and destroys the subjective position ; but I think it is true that Green does not really succeed, much more than Berkeley does, in making its fundamental character apparent. It is clear that the world for Green is an intellectual construction, not a perceptual datum as at first it appears to be for Berkeley ; but it still appears to be a construction that is completely carried on within some individual mind, or, at any rate, within some quasi-individual mind. 1 The more recent system of Mr. Bradley has in some re- spects a much more objective aspect. His repudiation of the ballet of bloodless categories is familiar to every one ; and his criticism of the Self goes far to destroy subjectivity. Yet, on the other hand, he is on some fundamental points far more decidedly subjective than Green, or perhaps than any other prominent representative of idealism. Certainly by his constant appeal to ' experience,' as at once the starting-point and the goal in the search for reality, he gives to his philosophy a subjective turn from which he is never quite able to free it. The world for Mr. Bradley is a straightened out experience, but still it is an experience, and nothing more ; and, indeed, the most purely subjective aspect of experience mere feeling seems in the end to be for Mr. Bradley its most important and significant aspect. 2 Similar remarks apply, though with some qualifications, to the type of idealism set forth in Prof. Taylor's Elements of Metaphysics. Now, it is against all such tendencies in philosophy that the new Realism lodges its protest. The world that we know, it urges, is not something in the mind, but something that the mind apprehends. We know the world before we know the mind and what is in it ; or at least we become gradually aware of these two aspects of reality through what is intrinsically the same process. Now, this conten- tion can hardly be said to be a novelty in modern philosophy. The main point in it is that which was urged by Kant in his ' Refutation of Idealism,' and which is constantly urged of our own consider in various relations ; or does the nature consist only in relations, which again imply the action of a mind that is eternal present to that which is in succession, but not in succession itself ? ' 1 By calling his mind ' eternal ' or ' timeless,' he no doubt makes it cease to be a mind in any ordinary sense. But still he seems to imply that we are somehow to figure it to ourselves as being a mind i.e. a consciousness. 2 Some interesting comments by Prof. Henry Jones on this aspect of Mr. Bradley's philosophy will be found in the Hibbert Journal for April, 1906.