"Idealism" in its philosophical sense, is the view that mind and spiritual values are fundamental in the world as a whole. Thus, idealism is opposed to naturalism, that is, to the view that mind and spiritual values have emerged from or are reducible to material things and processes. Philosophical idealism is also opposed to realism and is thus the denial of the commonsense realist view that material things exist independently of being perceived. Some philosophers who have held the idealist view in its antinaturalist form have not opposed commonsense realism, and thus it is possible to be a metaphysical idealist and an epistemological realist. More often, however, arguments against commonsense realism have been used in order to establish metaphysical idealism. The description "subjective idealism" is sometimes used for idealism based on antirealist epistemological arguments, and the description "objective idealism" for idealism that is antinaturalist without being antirealist.
In terms of these definitions, philosophical theism is an idealist view, for according to theism God is a perfect, uncreated spirit who has created everything else and is hence more fundamental in the world than any material things he has created. Marxist philosophers have therefore held that there are in principle only two main philosophical systems: idealism, according to which mind or spirit is primary in the universe, and materialism, according to which matter is primary in the universe. If "primary" is taken not to mean "earlier in time" but rather to mean "fundamental" or "basic," then these Marxist definitions agree with those given above. The only objection to them is that many philosophers who accept theism would be unwilling to be labeled idealists, since they would take the view that idealists belittle the material world and regard it as illusory by comparison with mind or even as less real than mind, whereas theists do not belittle matter or regard it as in any way less real than mind. Certainly this is a difference between theism and some forms of idealism, but there is force in the argument that theism and both subjective and objective idealism may be classed together as opposed to materialism. Pantheism may be regarded as a more thoroughly idealist view than theism, since pantheism is the view that nothing exists except God and his modes and attributes, so that the material world must be an aspect or appearance of God. Theism, in contrast, is the view that God has created a world beyond or outside himself so that the material world, although dependent on him, is not an aspect or appearance of him. What unites idealism both with theism and with pantheism is the rejection of materialism and the assertion of a metaphysic that is favorable to religious belief.
History and Origin of the Term
The word idealism came to be used as a philosophical term in the eighteenth century. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, in his Réponse aux réflexions de Bayle (written 1702; published in Philosophischen Schriften, edited by C. I. Gerhardt, 7 vols. Berlin, 1875–1890), criticized "those who like Epicurus and [Thomas] Hobbes, believe that the soul is material" and held that in his own system "whatever of good there is in the hypotheses of Epicurus and of Plato, of the greatest materialists and the greatest idealists, is combined here" (Vol. IV, pp. 559–560). In this passage Leibniz clearly means by "idealists" philosophers who uphold an antimaterialist metaphysic like that of Plato and himself. When, later in the century, George Berkeley's views came to be discussed, the word idealism was applied, however, to the view that nothing could be known to exist or did exist except the ideas in the mind of the percipient. (Berkeley called his own view "immaterialism," not "idealism.") Thus, Christian Wolff (1679–1754), a follower of Leibniz, included idealists, along with materialists and skeptics, among "three bad sects" that he reprobated, and Denis Diderot (1713–1784) wrote in 1749: "We call idealists those philosophers who, knowing only their own existence and that of the sensations that follow one another within them, do not grant anything else" (Lettre sur les aveugles, London, 1749). The term egoists was also applied to holders of this view, as can be seen from the article titled "Égoistes" in the Encyclopédie, edited by Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and Diderot, which started publication in 1750. Today the word solipsists is applied to what were then called "egoists" or "idealists." In the Critique of Pure Reason (Riga, 1781) Immanuel Kant referred to his own view as "transcendental idealism," and in his Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (Riga, 1783) he called it "critical idealism." Thus, by this time the word idealism was beginning to lose the pejorative meaning that had linked it with extreme subjectivism.
The word idealism is derived from the Greek word ἰδέα, which simply means something seen, or the look of something. Plato used the word as a technical term of his philosophy to mean a universal (such as whiteness) in contrast to a particular (such as something white) or to mean an ideal limit or standard (such as absolute Beauty) in contrast to the things that approximate or conform to it (such as the more or less beautiful things). According to Plato an Idea, or Form, is apprehended by the intellect, does not exist in time, and cannot come into existence or cease to exist as temporal things do and is hence more real than they are. In medieval philosophy Ideas or Forms were regarded as the patterns in accordance with which God conceived of things and created them, and hence they were thought of as existing in the mind of God. René Descartes used the word idea for thoughts existing in the human mind, sometimes retaining, however, the intellectual and objective character of ideas as understood in the Platonic tradition. But he also used the word idea for the effects in embodied minds of external objects acting on the sense organs, and hence the word came to stand for changing sense perceptions as well as for unchanging objects of the intellect. Descartes also used the word idea for a shape or form stamped upon a soft material, as when he said in Section XII of his Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628) that "shapes or ideas" are formed in the brain by things outside the body acting upon it. John Locke, in An Essay concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690), used the word idea for perceptions of "sensible qualities" conveyed into the mind by the senses and for "the perception of the operations of our own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got" (Bk. II, Ch. I, Sec. 4). The mind, he held, "stirs not one jot beyond those ideas which sense or reflection have offered for its contemplation" (ibid., Sec. 24). Berkeley adopted Locke's terminology and held that by our senses "we have the knowledge only of our sensations, ideas, or those things that are immediately perceived by sense" (Principles of Human Knowledge, Dublin, 1710, Sec. XVIII). Thus, Berkeley here repeats a view already held by Locke.
Thus, the word idea was used variously to mean a Form in the Platonic sense, a Form as apprehended in the mind of God or by the human mind, a shape impressed on soft, yielding material, and, apparently by analogy with this last sense, a modification produced in a mind by the influence on it of external things that affect the sense organs. Neither a Platonic Form nor a shape is a mental entity. "Operations of the mind" clearly are, and so would be the effects in minds of material objects that produce "impressions" in them. Ideas in this last sense would seem to be like mental images, but mental images produced not by imagining but by the operation of external objects. This variation in meanings can be seen in Berkeley's A New Theory of Vision (Dublin, 1709), where he writes (Sec. XLI): "a man born blind being made to see, would, at first, have no idea of distance by sight; the sun and stars, the remotest objects as well as the hearer, would all seem to be in his eye, or rather in his mind. The objects intromitted by sight, would seem to him (as in truth they are) no other than a new set of thoughts or sensations, each whereof is as near to him as the perceptions of pain or pleasure, or the most inward passions of his soul." It will be noticed that in his passage Berkeley comes close to assimilating "in his eye," a physical condition, to "in his mind," meant presumably to be a mental condition. Again, he puts "sensations" in apposition with "thoughts," although sensations and thoughts would seem to be as different as pains and concepts. There is also the suggestion that what is near to us is "in the mind," so that if colors and shapes are not, as they seem to be, at a distance from us, they must be in our minds. The passage is an important one for indicating the conflicts and confusions involved in the word idea and carried over into some of the arguments for idealism.
Immaterialism
Berkeley gave the name "immaterialism" to the central thesis of his philosophy, the thesis that there is no such thing as material substance. Immaterialism has been prominent in idealist theories just because to prove that there is no material substance would be the most effective and spectacular way of disproving materialism. If there is no material substance, then matter cannot be the basis of what is or all that there is. Immaterialism has been supported by two main lines of argument. Along one line it has been argued that it is impossible that matter could be independently real. The arguments to this effect may be called the metaphysical arguments for immaterialism. Along the other line it has been argued that the colors, shapes, and sounds that are naturally taken to belong to independently existing material objects are in fact sensible qualities that cannot exist apart from being perceived.
The arguments to establish this may be called the epistemological arguments for immaterialism. Although he did not call himself an immaterialist, Leibniz, on the evidence of the passage we have quoted, would have regarded himself as an idealist, and his arguments were metaphysical rather than epistemological. Berkeley, of course, is best known for his epistemological arguments, even though his argument that the very notion of something existing totally unperceived is self-contradictory may be classed as metaphysical. Arthur Collier, in his Clavis Universalis (London, 1713), used both epistemological and metaphysical arguments; the subtitle of his book, "a Demonstration of the Non-existence or Impossibility of an External World," allowed for both types of approach.
leibniz
Leibniz's metaphysical idealism consisted of two main theses: (1) that matter is necessarily composite and hence cannot be substantially or independently real, and (2) that simple (that is, noncomposite) substances must be perceiving and appetitive beings even though they are not necessarily conscious or self-conscious. He gave the name "monad" to these independently real and essentially active substances, and he argued that space and time cannot be real containers in which substances exist but must be the order in which monads are related to one another. Thus, he held that space and time are not absolute existences but relations of coexistence and succession among created monads. He did not conclude from this, however, that space and time and material objects are mere illusions or delusions; delusions and dreams, he held, are by their very nature inconsistent and unpredictable, whereas the material world in space and time is regular and in part predictable. Leibniz was not quite explicit on the matter, but he seems to have believed that space and time were a sort of mental construction or ens rationis and that material things are regular appearances rather than real substances. Sometimes, however, he used the expression phenomena bene fundata for space and time.
However this may be, Leibniz argued for an idealist system in which there is a series of realms of being with God as the supreme, uncreated spiritual substance. In the realm of created substances all the members are active and immaterial and some are self-conscious substances created in God's image. In the realm of appearances the elements are "well-founded" in the substantial realities, and in consequence they show a rational order even though, like the rainbow, they disappear when closely examined. Finally, there are isolated realms of mere illusion and delusion that, however, have their place in the total scheme of things. Leibniz believed that this metaphysical system could be proved by reason. He held, too, that sense experience is not an independent source of knowledge but is reason in a state of obscurity and indistinctness. Thus, he held that "we use the external senses as … a blind man does a stick" and that the world is revealed as it is by means of reason, not by means of the senses (Letter to Queen Charlotte of Prussia, 1702). Thus, he denied not only the substantial reality of matter but also the efficacy and even the possibility of mere sense experience. This is a theme that many later idealists have developed. It runs counter, however, to the empiricist immaterialism of Berkeley.
berkeley
Berkeley is the best-known exponent of immaterialism on epistemological grounds. His basic argument is that what we immediately perceive are sensations or ideas, that sensations or ideas are necessarily objects of perception (their esse, as he put it, is percipi, their essence is to be perceived), and that what we call physical things, such as trees and rocks and tables, are orderly groups or collections of sensations or ideas and are hence mind-dependent like the sensations or ideas that compose them. This argument proceeds on the assumption that sense experience is basic and reliable. Matter is rejected on the ground that the senses inform us of ideas but not of material substances to which these ideas belong. The very notion of a material substance distinct from sensible qualities or ideas is, according to Berkeley, unimaginable and inconceivable.
Berkeley made the surprising claim that this view is in full accordance with common sense. According to common sense, he argued, trees and rocks and tables are immediately perceived and have the characteristics they are immediately perceived to have. But according to those who believe in material substance, what is immediately perceived are the ideas produced in the mind by material substances of which we can only have mediate or indirect knowledge. Furthermore, these indirectly perceived material substances do not have the characteristics of color, hardness, etc., which common sense says they have. Hence, Berkeley thought that material substances, even if they were conceivable, would be problematic existents, so that the theory in which they figured would give rise to skepticism about the existence of familiar things like trees and rocks and tables. Immaterialism, in contrast, with its claim that such things, being ideas, are immediately perceived, does not lead to skepticism about them.
In its reliance on sense experience, then, and in its acceptance of the view that trees and rocks and tables are immediately perceived and are as they seem to be, Berkeley's immaterialism is very different from that of Leibniz. On the other hand, there is an important point of similarity between their views that is often overlooked. Leibniz held that substances, or monads, that is, the basically real things that make up the world, must be active, perceiving beings. Berkeley held this too, for he argued that sensible qualities or ideas are dependent and passive existences that depend on independent and active beings. These independent and active beings, according to Berkeley, are selves. The difference between Berkeley and Leibniz is that Berkeley held that only selves are active, whereas Leibniz held that activity is possible at a lower level than that of selves. However, this view that what is real is active is an element in a number of idealist theories.
Berkeley also supported immaterialism with the argument that it is not possible even to conceive of anything existing apart from being thought of, for it must be thought of in the very act of being conceived. This argument was not used by Leibniz, but it has played an important part in the arguments of many idealists since Berkeley.
collier
Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis, which appeared posthumously in 1713, was possibly written before Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), in which Berkeley's immaterialist philosophy was first published. Collier used epistemological arguments to prove immaterialism, but, unlike Berkeley, he made no attempt to reconcile immaterialism with common sense. On the contrary, he said that in denying the existence of the material world he meant that bodies are as delusory as the visions of lunatics. Collier also produced metaphysical arguments for immaterialism, maintaining, for example, that matter can be proved to be both infinite in extent and not infinite in extent, infinitely divisible and not infinitely divisible, and since nothing can in fact have contradictory characteristics, matter cannot exist.
Knowledge of immaterialism was spread in Germany by the publication of a book that contained German translations of Berkeley's Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (London, 1713) and Collier's Clavis Universalis and whose title was Sammlung der vornehmsten Schriftsteller die die Wirklichkeit ihren eigenen Körper und der ganzen Körperwelt leugnen (Rostock, 1756). The translator and editor, Johann C. Eschenbach, set out to refute as well as to translate the two books.
Transcendental Idealism
Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, described his own view as formal, critical, or transcendental idealism. Nevertheless, a famous passage of that book (B 274) is headed "Refutation of Idealism." Kant called the types of idealism he claimed to be refuting problematic idealism and dogmatic idealism, respectively. By problematic idealism he meant the view, which he attributed to Descartes, that the existence of objects in space outside us is doubtful. By dogmatic idealism he meant the view, which he attributed to Berkeley, that "space and all the things to which it belongs as an inseparable condition" is "something impossible in itself and hence looks upon things in space as mere imaginations" (B 274). Kant's interpretation of Descartes is not quite adequate, but his interpretation of Berkeley is so completely at fault that it seems possible that he had made use of Eschenbach's book and confused Collier's arguments with those of Berkeley.
In any case, Kant's transcendental idealism is very different from the types of idealism we have so far considered. Kant held that it is not possible to gain knowledge of the world by rational thought alone, and thus he rejected all attempts such as those of Leibniz and Wolff to do so. Nonetheless, he also held that mere sense experience does not give knowledge of the world either, since in the absence of interpretation, sense experience is "blind." Thus, Kant argued that unless our perceptions were organized within what he called the pure a priori intuitions of space and time in terms of rational principles such as the requirement that our perceptions refer to things in causal relation with one another, knowledge of an objective world would be impossible. Without the a priori intuitions of space and time and the categories of the understanding, there would be a manifold of fluctuating sensations but no knowledge of the natural world. When Kant refuted the two types of idealism mentioned above, he argued that no one could become aware of himself unless there were enduring material substances with which he could contrast his own fleeting experiences. We should not be aware of selves unless we were also aware of material things. This line of argument disposes of the view that we could be certain of our own existence but doubtful about the material world and also of the view that material things are "mere imaginations." Unless there were material things in space, we should not know of our own existence or of our own imaginations.
Kant's transcendental idealism, therefore, is his view that space and time and the categories are conditions of the possibility of experience rather than features of things as they are in themselves. Whether things-in-themselves are in space and time and whether they form a causally interacting system we do not know, but unless we were so constituted as to place everything in spatiotemporal contexts and to synthesize our sensations according to the categories of the understanding, we should not have knowledge of an objective world. Kant did not think that this synthesizing was carried out by the empirical selves we are aware of in ourselves and others. He thought, rather, that a transcendental self had to be postulated as doing this, but of this transcendental self nothing could be known, since it was a condition of knowledge and not an object of knowledge. The natural world, or the world of appearances, as he calls it, somehow depends on a transcendental self of which we can know nothing except that it is. Whereas at the empirical level selves and material things are equally real, the knowledge we have at this level presupposes the synthesizing activities of a transcendental self of which we can know nothing.
Kant was regarded in his own day as a destroyer not only because he maintained that there was no basis for the rationalist, metaphysical constructions of Leibniz and Wolff but also because he held that no single one of the traditionally accepted arguments for the existence of God was valid and that it is impossible to prove the immateriality and immortality of the soul. Idealists such as Leibniz and Berkeley and Collier had considered that they had framed philosophical arguments that favored religious belief. Berkeley, for example, emphasized that his conclusions made atheism and skepticism untenable. He also claimed to have provided a new and cogent argument for the existence of God. According to Kant, however, sense experience cannot lead us beyond the natural world, and the categories of the understanding can be validly applied only where there are sense experiences and if applied beyond them can lead only to insoluble antinomies. For example, if the category of cause is used to transcend sense experience, then equally valid proofs can be made to show that there must be a first cause and that there cannot be a first cause. In the appendix to the Prolegomena Kant says that "idealism proper always has a mystical tendency" but that his form of idealism was not intended for such purposes but only as a solution of certain problems of philosophy. All this seems to place Kant outside the main idealist tradition and to indicate that he was developing a positivistic view. Nevertheless, at the end of the eighteenth century a group of philosophers who are known as Absolute idealists claimed to have been inspired by him. What, then, are the features of Kant's idealism that gave rise to views so different from his?
One is that Kant called specific attention to the elements of activity and spontaneity in knowledge. His view that knowledge of nature would be impossible apart from the activity of the understanding in synthesizing sensations in accordance with the categories led some of his successors to regard knowledge as analogous to construction or making. Another feature of Kant's philosophy that pointed in the direction of Absolute idealism was the thesis that synthesizing in terms of the categories presupposed a unitary transcendental self. It is true that Kant himself said that as a presupposition of experience the transcendental self could not be an object of knowledge, but some of his successors claimed to be rather more familiar with it.
Some of Kant's views on morality and on freedom of the will also gave scope for development in an idealist direction. Kant held that the free will problem is insoluble by metaphysical argumentation, for it can be proved both that there must be a freedom of spontaneity and that there is no freedom and everything takes place according to laws of nature. But in his ethical writings that followed the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant argued that our knowledge of and respect for the moral law presupposed freedom of the will. He emphasized that this was not a metaphysical or speculative proof; his point was that metaphysics could not disprove freedom of the will, so that we are justified in accepting what morality presupposes. He argued, furthermore, that the existence of God and the immortality of the soul might also be accepted as practical concomitants of morality, as long as the fundamental impossibility of their being theoretically proved was recognized. Again, Kant introduced into his account of knowledge a faculty of reason (Vernunft ), which, remaining dissatisfied with the understanding's confinement to the ordering of sense experiences, constantly strove for completeness and totality. Kant thought that the reason might in practice advance our knowledge by seeking for a completeness that is not in fact to be found—Kant used the expression focus imaginarius in this connection. Some of his successors transformed this suggestion into the claim that reason reveals a real, not an imaginary or merely methodological, totality.
Absolute Idealism
fichte
The development from Kant's idealism to Absolute idealism can be most readily seen in the writings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Like Kant, Fichte believed that strict determinism is incompatible with morality and that our knowledge of the moral law presupposes the freedom of the will. Therefore, the philosopher is faced with choosing between two systems of thought, the deterministic system that Fichte called "dogmatism," of which Benedict de Spinoza is the chief representative, and "critical idealism." Fichte recognized that the philosophy a man chooses depends on the sort of man he is, but he also thought that reasons could be given for preferring the idealist course. A reason on which Fichte placed great weight is that thought and intelligence cannot be accounted for within a system of causes and effects, for, in comprehending causal determination, they necessarily go beyond it. If, therefore, there is to be a fundamental account of things, it must start from the intellect. Fichte was here developing a suggestion by Kant in the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals that the operations of the intellect transcend the phenomenal series of causes and effects. Thus, according to Fichte a free, intelligent ego (Ich ) must be the starting point of philosophy, and everything else must somehow be "deduced" from this ego. Fichte, therefore, endeavored to go beyond Kant by showing that space and time and the categories are not just facts that must be accepted as they are but necessary conditions of intelligence. Even the material world is not merely matter of fact but is presented as a series of obstacles that must be overcome in the performance of our duties.
schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) began his philosophical career as a supporter of Fichte—as the titles of two of his early works show: Vom Ich als Prinzip der Philosophie (Tübingen, 1795) and "Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kritizismus" (in Philosophische Journal, 1796). Schelling's first account of his distinctive views was titled System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Tübingen, 1800), but he later described his view as "absolute idealism," explaining that things are always conditioned by other things, whereas mind is undetermined and absolute. Fichte's idealism has sometimes been called a "moral idealism," since its basis is a system of active moral beings. Schelling's has sometimes been called an "aesthetic idealism," since Schelling argued that it is the artist who makes men aware of the Absolute. Although, like Fichte, he believed that free activity is basic in the world, he placed less emphasis on the distinction between individuals and came nearer to pantheism.
hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) is too individual a philosopher to be readily classifiable, but he was undoubtedly the most comprehensive and the most influential of the Absolute idealists. In his Encyclopedia (Sec. 95) he writes of "the ideality of the finite," which he says is "the main principle of philosophy," and says that "every genuine philosophy is on that account idealism." Like much that Hegel wrote, this is somewhat cryptic, but it appears to mean that what is finite is not real and that the true philosophy, idealism, recognizes this. The matter is more fully discussed in the Science of Logic (Bk. 1, Sec. 1, Ch. 2), where Hegel says that philosophical idealism is the view that "the finite is not genuinely real." Here he also contrasts his form of idealism with subjective idealism and says that in denying the reality of the finite, idealist philosophy is at one with religion, "for religion no more admits finitude to be a genuine reality, than it admits finitude to be ultimate, absolute, or as basic (ein Nicht-Gesetztes ), uncreated, eternal."
We need not linger over Hegel's rejection of subjective idealism, except to refer to what he says about Berkeley's immaterialism in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Hegel there argues that Berkeley says very little when he says that things are ideas, for this only amounts to recommending a change of nomenclature and calling things ideas, and this throws no new light on the status of things and ideas. Hegel's arguments are metaphysical rather than epistemological. He thought that Fichte was right when he tried to deduce or give reasons for the categories, and Hegel's Science of Logic may be regarded as his view of how the deduction should be carried out. Insofar as such a compact work can be summarized, its argument is that we say very little about the world when we say that it is, rather more when we say that it is measurable, or that it is a series of interacting things, more again when we think of it in terms of chemical combinations, still more when we apply the categories of life, more again when we apply the categories of theoretical reason, and most of all when we come to the categories of will and the pursuit of the good. What remains of the older metaphysical arguments is his view that the incomplete and inadequate categories lead to contradictions. These contradictions, Hegel held, are resolved as the higher categories are reached, in particular the category of the Absolute idea.
Hegel also tried to show that rudimentary mind operates in the natural world. But what most concerned him was the working of mind in human society. He set out a series of stages of human achievement proceeding from the family organization to "civil society" (what today we call the market economy), from civil society to the state, and then, at the highest levels, to art, religion, and philosophy. The idealist character of this construction may be seen from the fact that when Marx wished to set out a materialist view of society he took the economy as basic, the state as dependent on it, and regarded art, religion, and philosophy as ideologies that had no real influence.
Hegel's philosophy was elaborated after his death by a series of able successors and criticized from many points of view. It came to be known in England about the middle of the century, and Benjamin Jowett translated some passages (which he never published) for the use of his students. Absolute idealism was made known to a larger British public by James Hutchinson Stirling's The Secret of Hegel (2 vols., London, 1865), (Fichte's moral idealism had earlier influenced Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge had been influenced by his reading of Schelling, although he had not accepted all of Schelling's views. William Wordsworth's definition of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquillity" seems to be a translation of a phrase of Schelling's that Coleridge noticed and copied into his notebook).
Neo-Hegelianism
About the time when German Absolute idealism was becoming known in England through the writings of Coleridge and Carlyle, it was also becoming known in the United States through a group of writers (mostly Unitarians) who came to be called the transcendentalists. Later, in the 1860s, idealist philosophy received more detailed and professional attention on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1867 at St. Louis, William Torrey Harris founded the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, in the first issue of which he referred disparagingly to the prevailing "brittle individualism" that he considered should be replaced by a philosophy in which the state was properly comprehended as a support for freedom. In the same period Thomas Hill Green was teaching philosophy at Oxford with the support of Jowett. The nature of Green's influence may be seen from a letter sent to Green in 1872 asking him to speak to an essay society whose members felt the need for "earnest effort to bring speculation into relation with modern life instead of making it an intellectual luxury, and to deal with various branches of science, physical, social, political, metaphysical, theological, aesthetic, as part of a whole instead of in abstract separation," and sought for "co-operation instead of the present suspicious isolation." This letter was signed by, among others, F. H. Bradley, who had recently become a fellow of Merton College (Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience. T. H. Green and His Age, London, 1964, pp. 159–160). Both Harris and his circle and Green and his were critical of social individualism as well as of positivism and materialism. They aimed to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which they thought was based on an inadequate pluralistic metaphysics.
Green's form of idealism was rather closer to that of Kant than to that of Hegel. It was built around two main themes, that the natural world cannot be self-contained and ultimate, and that there is no merely given experience. The first theme is an extension of Kant's theory of the transcendental ego, which Green held implied that nature presupposes "a principle which is not natural," a "spiritual principle" (Prolegomena to Ethics, Oxford, 1883, Sec. 54). The second theme, on the other hand, goes well beyond Kant, who believed that there was a "manifold of sense" which the understanding synthesized. Green's view that there is no merely given sense experience, and that all experience implies some sort of intelligent organization, was a central theme of subsequent idealist argument. It has a certain kinship with Leibniz's theory that ideas of sense are confused ideas of reason.
Green died in 1882, and the leading English idealist philosophers after that were F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet. In Scotland, where idealism very soon prevailed in the universities, Edward Caird's A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Kant (Glasgow, 1877) and Andrew Seth's (later Pringle-Pattison's) Hegelianism and Personality (London and Edinburgh, 1887) were notable contributions. But from the 1880s to the 1920s Bradley and Bosanquet dominated the philosophical scene in Great Britain. Bradley attempted to discredit the commonsense view of the world by bringing to bear a multitude of arguments to show that it involved self-contradictions, and he argued that these contradictions could be eliminated only if the world is shown to be a single, harmonious experience. The central theme of Bosanquet's idealism was that every finite existence necessarily transcends itself and points toward other existences and finally to the whole. Thus, he advocated a system very close to that in which Hegel had argued for the ideality of the finite. Bradley and Bosanquet influenced one another a great deal. For example, Bradley's Ethical Studies (London and Edinburgh, 1876) influenced Bosanquet's account of society, and Bosanquet's Knowledge and Reality (London, 1885) led Bradley to modify very considerably the views he had set out in his Principles of Logic (London, 1883).
In the United States the most impressive contribution to the philosophy of idealism is Josiah Royce's The World and the Individual (first series, New York, 1900; second series, New York, 1902). Royce was extremely learned in the literature of idealism, both German and British, and The World and the Individual was written in the light of his study of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel and of his reading of Bradley's Appearance and Reality (London, 1893). Furthermore, Royce was acquainted with the empiricism and pragmatism of C. S. Peirce and William James and with Peirce's work in formal logic. Like Pringle-Pattison, Royce considered that Bradley went too far in regarding the individual mind as "fused" or "transformed" in the Absolute. The mystic who regards finite experience as mere illusion, Royce held, is an improvement on the realist who uncritically accepts it just as it is, but nevertheless the very point of idealism would be lost if the individual self is deprived of all cosmic significance. Royce believed he could show that the "world … is a realm of individuals, self-possessed, morally free, and sufficiently independent of one another to make their freedom of action possible and finally significant" (The World and the Individual, first series, p. 395). Like Fichte, Royce endeavored to support this view by an analysis of the moral, rational will.
By the beginning of the twentieth century idealism had become a powerful force in the universities of the English-speaking world. Empiricism and realism were held to have been finally discredited, along with the utilitarianism and individualism that had so often accompanied them. Philosophical truth was thought to be a unity, so that similar principles animated idealist works on aesthetics, ethics, religion, and politics. Such leading British statesmen as Arthur J. Balfour and Richard B. Haldane and the South African prime minister Jan C. Smuts wrote books defending the idealist point of view. When the new provincial universities were being founded in Great Britain at that time, Haldane used his influence to foster the study of philosophy in them, as a central, unifying subject.
At the same time, however, points of view opposed to idealism were being vigorously developed. An example is G. E. Moore's "The Refutation of Idealism," which appeared in Mind (n.s. 12 [1903]: 433–453). Another example is The New Realism, a collection of articles by American philosophers critical of idealism that was published in New York in 1912. Bertrand Russell urged that idealists were ignorant of new developments in logic and that this rendered their theories untenable. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London, 1922) was symptomatic of a new, pluralist, antispeculative approach to philosophical problems. Moore's "The Conception of Reality" (PAS, 1913–1914) attempted to show that one of Bradley's theses was nothing but a consequence of his not realizing that the proposition "Unicorns are thought of" is of quite a different logical form from the proposition "Lions are hunted." In the 1920s the very possibility of speculative metaphysics was denied on the basis of the allegedly empiricist principle of verifiability. Furthermore, the idealist theses about the "unreality" of finite individuals and the "reality" of society or the state were held to be evil as well as meaningless.
But during this period when the idealist movement was under increasing attack, three important treatises appeared in which comprehensive idealist theories were developed. John M. E. McTaggart's The Nature of Existence (Cambridge, U.K., 2 vols., 1921–1927) defended a pluralistic idealism by means of metaphysical arguments designed to show that space, time, and matter cannot possibly be real. Michael Oakeshott's Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge, U.K., 1933), unlike McTaggart's work, seems to have been completely unaffected by the realist and empiricist arguments so widely accepted at that time. Brand Blanshard's The Nature of Thought (2 vols., London, 1939), on the other hand, maintains a constant and detailed criticism of behaviorist and empiricist arguments. It is noteworthy that in none of these elegantly written idealist works is there any attempt to defend a theistic position. Indeed, The Nature of Existence concludes its discussion of God by saying that "there can be no being who is a God, or who is anything so resembling a God that the name would not be very deceptive" (Sec. 500).
Idealist Social Theory
Most nineteenth-century and twentieth-century idealist philosophers were agreed that utilitarians and individualists had a false view of what constitutes an individual person. They believed that since individuals are constituted by their relations to one another, the idea that society is an association of independently existing individuals is absurd. They thought, too, that it follows from this that freedom is something more positive than just being left alone by the government. Insofar as government is concerned with the common aims of individuals, it is not merely a constraint on them but a manifestation of their most rational purposes. Some idealist writers, therefore, saw no serious harm in Rousseau's claim that men can be forced to be free. T. H. Green was thus able to support temperance legislation on the ground that it enabled those protected by it to fulfill their abiding aims rather than their passing whims.
Even so, Green had no doubts about the ultimate reality of individual persons, whereas Bosanquet, in his Philosophical Theory of the State (London, 1899) argued that the state is the real individual and that individual persons are unreal by comparison with it. But Bosanquet did not think that this justified socialist control. On the contrary, he believed that if society is organic and individual, then its elements can cooperate apart from a centralized organ of control, the need for which presupposes that harmony has to be imposed upon something that is naturally unharmonious.
McTaggart was the one leading idealist who denied the relevance of metaphysics to social and political action. He was a Hegelian scholar who was in general agreement with Hegel's views, but he thought that Hegel was wrong in supposing that metaphysics could show that the state is more than a means to the good of the individuals who compose it. McTaggart concluded that "philosophy can give us very little, if any guidance in action.… Why should a Hegelian citizen be surprised that his belief as to the organic nature of the Absolute does not help him in deciding how to vote? Would a Hegelian engineer be reasonable in expecting that his belief that all matter is spirit should help him in planning a bridge?" (Studies in Hegelian Cosmology, Cambridge, U.K., 1901, p. 196).
Some Comments on Idealism
act and object
Moore, Russell, and other realist philosophers at the beginning of the twentieth century objected to idealism that its exponents failed to distinguish between the act of perception and the object of the act. It was rightly argued that the words idea and sensation were used vaguely and thus encouraged the confusion. According to the realist argument, colors and shapes are objects of the mind, whereas pains and feelings are states of mind, and what the idealists do is to say of the former that they are essentially mental, when this is true only of the latter. It may be questioned, however, whether the idealists were thus confused. Certainly Berkeley was not, since in the first of the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous he himself made this objection only to reject it on the ground that the only acts of mind are acts of will, and in perceiving we are passive and do not exert acts of will.
In any case it is not easy to be sure that we can recognize or identify acts of perception. William James, for example, said he could distinguish no such thing (Essays in Radical Empiricism, New York, 1912), and Russell later took this view as well (The Analysis of Mind, London, 1921). Furthermore, even if the distinction is acceptable, what the object of perception is still remains to be determined. It is hard to maintain that what is immediately perceived is a physical object, since this seems to be inconsistent with the physiology of perception. If the immediate object is a sense datum, as Moore and Russell argued, then this suggests a representative theory of perception. But representative theories of perception are liable to the objection that they make our knowledge of physical objects problematical. If, on the other hand, sense data are not intended to play their part in a representative theory of perception but are meant to be all that can be perceived, then commonsense realism has been abandoned and Berkeley is vindicated. Apart from this, the very notion of a sense datum is dubious, since it is impossible to specify what a sense datum is without reference to physical objects. The distinction between act and object does not, therefore, lead to any effective arguments against idealism.
existence apart from mind
We have seen that Berkeley supported his immaterialist theory with the argument that nothing could exist apart from mind, since if we try to think of something existing unthought of we have to think of it, so that there is a contradiction in the very notion of thinking of something unthought of. Berkeley was by no means the only idealist who used this argument. It seems to have been accepted by Bradley, for example, when he wrote in Chapter 14 of Appearance and Reality :
We perceive, on reflection, that to be real, or even barely to exist, must be to fall within sentience …. Find any piece of existence, take up anything that any one could possibly call a fact, or could in any sense assert to have being, and then judge if it does not consist in sentient experience. Try to discover any sense in which you can still continue to speak of it, when all perception and feeling have been removed; or point out any fragment of its matter, any aspect of its being, which is not derived from and is not still relative to this source. When the experiment is made strictly, I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.
This general line of argument came under attack in The New Realism, where the objection to it was that it falsely concludes that whatever is must be experienced from the evident tautology that whatever is experienced is experienced. From the fact that nothing can be experienced without being experienced it does not follow that everything must be experienced. Another way of stating this objection is to distinguish (a ) it is impossible to-think-of-something-existing-unthought-of and (b ) it is impossible to think of something-existing-unthought-of. Berkeley and Bradley are accused of denying the possibility of (b ) because of the obvious impossibility of (a ) (G. Dawes Hicks, Berkeley, London, 1932).
idealist metaphysics
Idealism involves the existence of some ultimate spiritual reality beyond what appears to common sense and ordinary sense experience. If it could be proved, therefore, that it does not make sense to speak of something that transcends sense experience, then idealism, like all other metaphysical systems, would be meaningless, as is claimed by logical positivism. Logical positivism, however, has been subjected to serious criticism and is by no means the chief alternative to idealism. It is linguistic philosophy, the philosophy that seeks to solve or to dissolve philosophical problems by showing that they arise out of linguistic misunderstandings, that today is the strongest opponent of idealism.
Moore's insistence on the act-object distinction was not, as we have seen, a successful mode of attack on idealism. But when he criticized Bradley for misunderstanding the logic of propositions in which something is said to be real, he was starting a sort of philosophizing that has proved most inhospitable to idealist theories. Moore saw that when Bradley said that time is unreal he had no wish to deny such things as that people are sometimes late for their trains. Yet if there were no temporal facts, there would be no trains and no people to catch or to lose them. Moore felt that something had gone wrong with Bradley's argument, and he tried to locate the fault. He thought that Bradley believed that even though time is unreal, if it can be thought of then it must have some sort of existence. Moore thought he could show that this belief is groundless and arises from a misunderstanding of what is being said when something is said to be real. But Moore also came to believe that we know for certain such things as that there are trains and people and that in consequence we are justified in denying out of hand those philosophical views that would require trains and people and space and time and matter to be mere appearances or not to be real at all. It was through his attempts to understand the prevailing idealist metaphysics that Moore came to adopt his philosophy of common sense. This philosophy and the linguistic philosophy that grew out of it regard our prephilosophical beliefs and concepts as in a certain sense unassailable. If this view is correct, then idealism is based on misunderstandings. If it is not correct, then the idealist criticisms of our prephilosophical beliefs have to be taken seriously.
idealism and the nature of thought
The idealist movement is important in the history of philosophy quite apart from the success or failure of idealist metaphysics. Idealists have insisted from Kant onward that thinking is an activity. This view of thinking was Kant's particular contribution to philosophy and is opposed to the Cartesian theory of knowledge. According to Descartes knowledge consists in the intuition of clear and distinct natures. What keeps us from obtaining knowledge, Descartes held, is the existence of prejudices that keep us from getting face to face with the ultimate clarities; once the prejudices are removed, the world shows itself as it really is. On this view the human mind is like a mirror that reflects what is there when it has been wiped clean. According to Kant, however, the mind approaches the world with concepts and presuppositions of its own. It does not reflect the world but tries to understand and interpret it. The activity of synthesizing is an activity of interpreting, and this can be done only by means of concepts that we already possess. According to Descartes we must wipe the mirror clean to be ready for undistorted visions; inquiry ends in revelation. According to Kant we gain knowledge as we improve and test our theories. Apart from natural science, nature is nothing but what men have to contend with in their daily concerns. This view was metaphysically elaborated by Kant's idealist successors, but they did not lose sight of an important implication of it that Kant had seen, the implication that the pursuit of knowledge was a spontaneous activity. They argued that knowledge and freedom go together and that therefore determinism and reductive materialism cannot be true. This would appear to be the essence of the idealist argument.
See also Absolute, The; Coherence Theory of Truth; Dialectical Materialism; Hegelianism; Ideas; Neo-Kantianism; New England Transcendentalism; Panpsychism; Personalism; Realism; Relations, Internal and External; Solipsism.
Bibliography
A number of idealist texts are available in The Idealist Tradition: From Berkeley to Blanshard, edited by A. C. Ewing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957).
The meaning of the term idealism is discussed in Norman Kemp Smith, Prolegomena to an Idealist Theory of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1924).
On the history of idealism, see G. Watts Cunningham, The Idealistic Argument in Recent British and American Philosophy (New York: Century, 1933); Nikolai Hartmann, Die Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus, 2 vols., Vol. I: Fichte, Schelling und die Romantik (Berlin and Leipzig, 1923), Vol. II: Hegel (Berlin and Leipzig, 1929), 2nd ed., 1 vol. (Berlin, 1960); J. H. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Philosophy. Studies in the History of Idealism in England and America (London, 1931); and Josiah Royce, Lectures on Modern Idealism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919).
On idealist social theory, see A. J. M. Milne, The Social Philosophy of English Idealism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1962), which, in spite of its title, has a chapter on Royce.
For an analysis and criticism of idealism, see A. C. Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey (London: Methuen, 1934).
other recommended titles
Ayers, Michael. "What Is Realism?" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplement 75 (2001): 91–110.
Bradley, F. H. Appearance and Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930.
Foster, J. The Case for Idealism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.
Franks, Paul. "From Kant to Post-Kantian Idealism: German Idealism." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplement 76 (2002): 229–246.
Kulp, Christopher, ed. Realism/Antirealism and Epistemology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.
Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Revolt against Dualism. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1930.
McDermid, Douglas James. "The World as Representation: Schopenhauer's Arguments for Transcendental Idealism." British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11 (2003): 57–87.
Neill, E. "Evolutionary Theory and British Idealism: The Case of David George Ritchie." History of European Ideas 29 (2003): 313–338.
Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.
Royce, J. The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965.
Sprigge, T. L. S. The Vindication of Absolute Idealism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983.
Van Cleve, James. "Time, Idealism, and the Identity of Indiscernibles." Nous, supplement 16 (2002): 379–393.
H. B. Acton (1967)
Bibliography updated by Benjamin Fiedor (2005)
Encyclopedia of Philosophy Acton, H.
