THE NEW REALISM AND THE OLD IDEALISM. 325 the sense that physical science convinces us that there are more things in heaven and earth than we are commonly aware of, not in the sense that any of the familiar objects of our knowledge are other than what we familiarly know them to be. Any advance in knowledge may be said, in the former sense, to convict us of a previous illusion the discovery, for instance, that water, which seems so simple, is composed of oxygen and hydrogen ; or that our earth, which seems so stable, revolves round the sun. But the former has not afflicted us with any fresh fear of drought ; nor has the latter tended to depreciate the value of property. Now, it is just in the same sort of sense that idealism changes our view of the world around us. The idealist does not seek to rob any one of his sun and planets, nor even of his cups and saucers. To say that something is more than what it seems is not to say that it is not what it seems. When Shelley sings to the skylark : Hail to thee, blithe spirit ! Bird thou never wert, he does not really mean to deny that the lark belongs to the class ' Aves '. Or, when Wordsworth blames Peter Bell, because ' a primrose by the river's brim ' was to him only ' a yellow primrose,' he is not accusing him of an error in botany. Even the plainest of plain men are constantly recognising that things are not merely what at first sight they appear. An antiquarian is not as a rule a speculative philosopher ; but cups and saucers are not merely cups and saucers for him. They may be specimens of rare china. ~ the mathematician, again, the rims of the cups and lucers may be circles. For the artist they may have all sorts of excellent qualities which the ordinary person does lot detect in them. For the manufacturer they are the results of a certain process. Even for the tea-drinker they lave a purpose ; while the sociologist is well aware that their presence here at all can only be explained by the radual development of the arts. If all these people have right to deal with cups and saucers, and to show us that there is more in them than we see at first, why should the philosopher alone be warned off, as if he were ' a bull in a
- hina shop ' ? Has not the philosopher as good a right as
Browning to maintain that, not only cups and saucers, but all other things as well, can only be finally made intelligible when they are thought of as parts of a system to which life and intelligence are the key? May we not say with his Eabbi Ben Ezra : 22
