MR. GRAHAM ON IDEALISM.*
THE recent revival of interest in Bishop Berkeley is a fact of no little significance. His Idealism met the fate usually accorded to
great thoughts on their first appearance. It was first ridiculed and then refuted, and the work of refutation has been going on now for a century. Of late there have been symptoms that the process of refutation, though carried on for so long and repeated so often, has not been effective. When the wave of German philo- sophical thought began to break on British shores, and the old problems of Knowing and Being were presented in new lights, it was soon seen that the new systems had an old element in them. The philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, suggested Berkeley. There was an affinity between the imported and the home-grown ideas which had been so long contemned, that stirred the doubt whether we might not have been unjust to one of our own thinkers. The genial and accomplished Ferrier, in expounding a new scheme, evidently due to German influences, though he was reluctant to own it, was forward in acknowledging his debt to Berkeley. In reaction from the dogmatism of the " Common-Sense " school, he was inclined, indeed, to exalt the good Bishop beyond his due. The impulse thus manifested in Ferrier grew powerfully in Scotland. At last it has given us Professor Fraser's splendid edition of Berkeley, and with and in it an attempt to prove that the whole of modern philosophy, both the English systems opposed to him and the greater systems of the Germans, from Kant downwards, have their source in the founder of subjective idealism. If the Scotch school was the means of preventing men from seeing the services and the true historical position of Berkeley for half
a century, as Mr. Graham says, he must admit that it has made ample amends at last. For it is mainly due to the two Scotchmen,
Professors Ferrier and Fraser, that the thoughts of the Bishop are now again the living influence they have become, and that such large claims can be made for them, without exciting surprise, as Mr. Graham puts forward in his essay on Idealism.
These claims are larger than can be soberly justified. In making them Mr. Graham is evidently under the influence of patriotic as well as philosophical motives. He is concerned that Ireland should seem to stand aloof from the great stream of modern intellectual development. If she does, she may be reduced to the isolation of countries like Turkey and Portugal. There is not much danger of this, so long as Trinity College, Dublin, proves the excellent foster-mother of philosophy she has lately been, and can boast of such acute philosophical critics as Mr. Mahaffy and Mr. Graham himself. But Mr. Graham is anxious to show that Ireland has been productive in the past as well as that she is critical in the present. He sees in Berkeley Ireland's typical philosopher, as Locke is that of England, and Hume of Scot- land. And as Locke and Hume were both powerful contributors to the historical movement in philosophy which determined the direction of the thought of Kant, so also he tries to show was Berkeley. Indeed he will be satisfied with nothing less than making him the author of "the great conception in which lay, as in a germ, the whole future of Philosophy." The leaders of the German Transcendental School have taken up and carried on to completion the work suggested by Berkeley. Hegel gives the last result of philosophy, in which Idealism is carried to its extreme limit, and though in many respects the absolute idealism of Hegel is incompatible with the absolute spiri- tualism of Berkeley, there is not merely "historical succes-
• Idealism: as Essay, Metaphysical and Critical. By William Graham, ALA., of Trinity College, Dublin. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. 1872.
sion," there is "actual logical affiliation" between the two idealists. On the theological side, Berkeley's principles lead to the conclusion that all things may be directly referred to God.
External perceptions which constitute the universe are produced in us by a spirit, and so also surely may internal feelings. And so with Hegel,—the individual is merged in the Absolute. Berkeley, of course, did not hold any such view, and Hegel has been ably defended against the charge of sinking the individual in the universal, though that is perhaps the natural result of his system, a result to which it was very soon brought by men like Feuerbach and Strauss.
But this point of analogy is more of a philosophical curiosity than anything else. What must be proved in order to establish even historical succession between Berkeley and Hege], to say nothing of logical affiliation, is that Berkeley's principle of subjec- tive idealism, or the resolution of the external into sensation, eads naturally and necessarily to the reduction of all life and history, and the whole scheme of nature, to Thought, explicable and alone explicable by the necessary processes of thought moving continu- ously in obedience to its own laws in self-development into its own categories. It must be seen that the latter is an infinitely more difficult and extensive work than the former. In presence of Hegel's gigantic attempt to construct the universe on the lines of the thought of the Creator, to show how if there was creation at all, it must have been round and upon the " diamond- net " of reason, the effort of Berkeley to reduce perception to sensation is surely a very small affair. We cordially grant Berkeley's originality, we strongly sympathise with Mr. Graham's defence of him against his critics ; he has demonstrated that Hamilton and Mansel are full of inconsistencies and self-contra- dictions, and we gladly recognise the vigour, freshness, and force of his polemical assaults on Berkeley's enemies. Nevertheless, when all is said, Berkeley's entire achievement —supposing him successful, which we cannot admit—was to demonstrate that man's known world, what constitutes the circle and sphere of his universe, is perceived within, and not with- out his mind ; that matter without mind is therefore in- conceivable, or as Ferrier called it, "nonsensical," and that our only world must be spiritual. But when this has been done, philosophical idealism has only obtained its starting-point. It must carry its principle (if this is to be its principle) through all the fields of experience, and show how it accounts for them. This is what Hegel did. As Mr. Graham says, "he makes the most gigantic attempt to verify his principle by carrying it through all Philosophy and through all History," so as to show that everywhere nothing is but Thought, and that Thought is adequate to account for everything. Here lay the great difficulty, and for this were required enormous labour and intellectual power. The great German idealists—Fichte, Schelling, Hegel—give us systematic philosophies of art, history, nature, ethics, and religion. Berkeley did none of all this. We cannot even think Mr. Graham has proved the historical connection he desiderates between the earlier and later idealism. Kant directly affiliates himself to Hume, and from Kant the course of idealism onward to Hegel was a necessary development, if thorough work was to be made with it. To us it seems that Berkeley's idealism was more of an episode in the history of philosophy than an indispensable chapter in the great volume. It was what Mr. Graham calls the Scotch school, a "parenthesis," though we do not say "an irrelevant paren- thesis."
But if we do not think Mr. Graham succeds in his main object, and if we find occasion sometimes to differ from his conclusions regarding philosophy and its principles, as well as its historical course, we very thankfully acknowledge the high ethical purpose, the great critical acumen, the fine philosophical appreciation, and the noble enthusiasm that pervade his book. He has vindicated the place and claims of philosophy with eloquence and power. He has made his own much of what is best in the German idealists, though his one-sided devotion to Hegel blinds him, we fancy, to the merits of some others. He has shown the necessary connec- tion of the results to which our greatest naturalists are leading us with the problems of metaphysic. It is a noble work to trace in every individual phenomenon, and in the sum of all phenomena, the purpose, the reason, the thought which is in them. The task undertaken by German Idealism was to exhibit thought realising itself in experience. But Idealism needs to be supple- mented by Empiricism. Only through the co-operation of the
two shall we ever attain satisfactory results. Therefore it is that, as Schelling said, the real promoters of philosophy in France and England are the great naturalists of the two countries.
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