arrangement or other, they stand in relation. Difficult as this system may be to understand, and violently as it wrenches the popular common sense, it is yet the system into which the great majority of philosophers in all ages and countries hitherto are seen, more or less distinctly, to have been carried by their speculations. While the Natural Realists among philosophers have been very few, and even these have been Realists in a sense unintelligible to the popular mind, quite a host of philosophers have been Constructive Idealists. These might be farther subdivided according to particular variations in the form of their Idealism. Thus, there have been many Constructive Idealists who have regarded the objects rising to the mind in external perception, and taken to be representative of real unknown objects, as something more than modifications of the mind itself—as having their origin without. Among these have been reckoned Malebranche, Berkeley, Clarke, Sir Isaac Newton, Tucker, and possibly Locke. But there have been other Constructive Idealists, who have supposed the objects. rising in the mind in external perception to be only modifications of the mind itself, but yet, by some arrangement, vicarious of real unknown objects, and intimating their existence. Among such have been reckoned Descartes, Leibnitz, Condillac, Kant, and most Platonists. The general name "Idealists," it will be seen, properly enough includes both the classes as distinct from the Natural Realists, inasmuch as both classes hold that what the mind is directly cognisant of in external perception is only ideas. But, inasmuch as these ideas are held by both classes, though under divers hypotheses, to refer to

E

real existences beyond themselves, and distinct from the perceiving mind, the thinkers in question may also properly enough be called Realists or Dualists, though not "Natural" Realists or Dualists. They occupy a midway place between the Natural Realists and the philosophers next to be mentioned.

(5.) There is the system of Pure Idealism, which abolishes Matter as a distinct or independent existence in any sense, and resolves it completely into Mind. Though this system is named in the scheme, for the sake of symmetry, and as the exact antithesis to Materialism, it is difficult to cite representatives that could be certainly discriminated from the merely Constructive Idealists just mentioned on the one hand, and from the school of philosophers next following on the other. Fichte is, perhaps, the purest example.

(6.) There is the system of Absolute Identity. According to this system, Mind and Matter are phænomenal modifications of one common Substance. The whole Cosmos, both of Matter and of Mind, is referred to a one Absolute Entity, of which it is to be conceived as but the function, activity, manifestation, or forthrushing. This system, it will be noted, is at the opposite extreme from Nihilism. It is the system of Spinoza, and also, though with a difference, of Schelling.

In this classification of Philosophical Systems from one point of view, I have followed, with some little liberty of rearrangement and change of expression, the best recent authority on the subject.* Objections may be taken to

*Sir William Hamilton's Discussions (Articles "Philosophy of Perception" and "Idealism"); also his Lectures on Metaphysics

the classification even in respect of what it was intended for; nor, whatever may be its worth as respects the past, do I think that it provides, as it stands, a sufficient means of recognising and naming the various working cosmological conceptions now extant among philosophers, and of which it might be desirable to take account.* But it goes

so far. It brings out, at all events, what I wished to bring out to wit, that we can have by no means an adequate collective view of the philosophers of our time, so long as we trust to a mere preliminary division of

(i. 293–297); but particularly his Dissertations on Reid (748—749 and 816-819). In these portions of Sir William's writings, his classification of Philosophical Systems from the point of view of the Doctrine of External Perception is turned over and over again in all sorts of ways, and with all sorts of side-lights. I have taken his authority for the facts, but have modified and rearranged the classification to suit it to my purpose in the text.

*For example, a very prevalent form of cosmological conception among thinkers of the present day is one which, if I am not mistaken, it would be difficult to assign to any one of the six systems enumerated. It is a compound of Materialism with Constructive Idealism. A very large number of thinkers, if I am not mistaken, always think of Mind as bred out of Matter, and yet, when they study this Mind as perceiving and taking cognisance of that World of Matter out of which it has been bred, do not allow that it grasps the reality at all, but only that it substitutes for the reality a hypothetical construction of its own affections. Sentiency, they think, is the child of Matter, but has never beheld, nor can behold, the real face of its mother. Are there not also millions of forms and degrees of sentiency, from the lowest of living creatures up to man, each apprehending the world according to a different measure of capacity? Is the dog's world-i.e. the construction of his own affections to which the dog attributes an external reality—the same, even so far as it goes, as his master's!

them, however accurate, into Empiricists and Transcendentalists. Behold what crossings and matchings, both of Empiricism and Transcendentalism, incalculable beforehand, in even the cosmological classification so suggested to us! Empiricists among the Idealists, side by side with Transcendentalists! On the other hand, Transcendentalists in almost all the six classes, and even in those where we should expect only Empiricists ! What if there should be such a thing even as a Transcendental Materialist, or a Materialistic Transcendentalist? I am not concerned here with what ought to be possible or impossible in cosmological conception consistently with either of the two psychological theories. My statement is that a philosopher may have a working cosmological conception which could not be reconciled with his avowed psychological theory if he would think that theory consistently out, or respecting which, at all events, his opponents give him this assurance. In short, as there have been strange crossings and matchings of the psychological theories with the prevailing cosmological conceptions in the past, so there may be in the future. And what if we were still farther to complicate the intertexture by introducing, even at this point, the theological element? There have been Atheistic as well as Theistic Idealists; there have been Theistic as well as Atheistic Empiricists; there are in the world some whom `rough popular speech does not hesitate to describe as Transcendental Atheists; and, as there have been examples of what might be called Theistic Materialism in the past, what if something still describable by that name should

exist somewhere at present, throwing stones both at Atheism and Pantheism?

III. THE ONTOLOGICAL DIFFERENCE.

Mind or Consciousness, whatever it may be, is that organism in the midst of all things through which all our knowledge of all things must come. Philosophers, therefore, may make a study of that; and they have done so under the name of Psychology. Round this organism, howsoever related to it, is the vast and varied Cosmos, or phænomenal and historical Universe, which the organism reports to us as hung in Space and voyaging through Time. Philosophers may make a study of that; and such a study would be Cosmology. But, beyond this whole phænomenal Universe or Cosmos which has the Mind of Man in its midst, it has been the passion of Philosophy to assert or speculate a transcendent Universe, or Empyrean of Things in Themselves, of Essential Causes, of Absolute or Noumenal, as distinct from Phænomenal, Existence. What enspheres the Cosmos, what supports it, of what Absolute Reality underneath and beyond itself is it significant, of what Absolute Meaning is it the expression, the allegory, the poem? May not the entire Phænomenal Cosmos, hung in Space and voyaging through Time, be but an illusion-and this whether we consider it to be, within itself, a play of Matter alone, or of Spirit alone, or of both Matter and Spirit? If we feel that it is not, on what warrant do we so feel? In what tissues of facts and events, material or moral, in this