Criticism of Idealism
Idealism. By A. C. Ewing. (Methuen. 21s.) Tun word Idealism is usually thought to denote spiritual conception of the universe. As popularly used, it would be taken to imply the view that the friendly, the conscious and the akin underlies and conditions the hostile, the brutal and the alien ; that, in other words, the universe is at bottom and in spite of appearances to the contrary more like a thought or a person than like a chaotic collection of non-sentient atoms.
It is not with Idealism so conceived that Dr. Ewing's book is concerned, but with the kind of Idealism that has bulked most largely in the history of philosophy, which he defines as " the view that there can be no physical objects existing apart from some experience," the definition being qualified with the provisos that " we regard thinking as a part of experience and do not imply by ` experience' passivity," and " we include under experience not only human experience, but the so-called ` Absolute Experience ' or the experience of a God such as Berkeley postulates." This view in various forms dominated philosophy for over 200 years. With the twentieth century came the Realist reaction originating in Cambridge, which insists, as Dr. Ewing insists, that knowing " must be regarded as rather of the nature of finding than of making," and that there is no reason in the nature of things why what is found should be regarded as dependent upon the finder's mind or, indeed, on any mind for its existence.
It is as a representative of this Realist reaction that Dr. Ewing sets out to criticize and to evaluate the various doctrines that in various forms have been sponsored by the Idealist philosophers of the past. Dr. Ewing's treatment admirably sums up the critical work of the last thirty years. It is acute, comprehensive and well informed, and I personally do not see how anybody who has read it carefully can any longer maintain the traditional Idealist account of the universe. But unlike many modern critics, Dr. Ewing is throughout fair and sympathetic to the views which he criticizes. In fact, he goes out of his way to rebuke the arrogance of some modem philosophers, who write about Idealism as if they thought it was too fatuous to be worthy of serious consideration. These great thinkers of the past, he points out, even if they may have been wrong, were at any rate not fools, and it is quite possible that they were not, after all, wrong. There is, indeed, one point of very great im- portance upon which he takes sides with the Idealists against the agnostic tendencies of modern philosophy. Many modern philosophers have abandoned the view that the speculative reason can provide us with information about the universe. Metaphysical systems may, they aver, tell us a good deal about the nature of the metaphysician, but they do not tell us anything about the nature of things. Consequently these philosophers have substituted for the exploration of the nature of the universe the humbler task of undertaking the clarifica- tion of thought.
Dr. Ewing demurs. The Idealists believed that we could draw conclusions from the nature of our knowing as to the nature of the real world. It has not, Dr. Ewing holds, been established that this belief is necessarily false. The Idealists admittedly may have been confused, and their writings certainly lacked the precision of modern thought, but " there is no reason why a philosopher might not have the clarity and precision of the logical analysts " (i.e., the philosophical agnostics just referred to) " without their Philosophy."
Dr. Ewing is, on the whole, a sturdy champion of common sense. Many philosophical theories, such as, for example, that matter is an illusion, that wholes are more than the sum of their parts, or that physical objects do not exist, seem to common sense too absurd to be worth considering. Now philosophers are continually discussing how much weight ought to be given to the common-sense characterization of a particular view as absurd, a characterization to which, it must be remembered, they would themselves subscribe except on the comparatively rare occasions on which they happen to be engaged in philosophizing. Dr. -Broad has gone so far as to stigmatize as " silly " any view which nobody would dream of holding outside a philosophical lecture-room. On this issue Dr. Ewing makes what appears to me to be a very sensible comment : " If (he says) those who have studied philosophy see reason to accept a given view, why should they reject it just because those who have not studied the subject think it wrong P This would only be a reasonable course if the study of philosophy instead of improving impaired one's capacity for snaking right philosophical judgements. And if so, why study it, since we could be better philosophers without doing so f " I agree. Yet when a test case arises, we find that Dr. Ewing almost invariably embraces the common-sense view, and . proceeds to defend himself on the ground that this is the view that everybody really holds. Take, for example, the vexed case of the existence of physical objects. Most philosophers have denied this for reasons to which all Idealists and most Realists would subscribe. There is, for example, the question of size. The cheese-mite's leg is so small that with the unaided eye we cannot see it. Can we infer, therefore, asks Berkeley, that the cheese-mite is unable to see its own leg ? Clearly we cannot. The inference is obvious. Size is not a property inherent in an object, but is relative to the observer. Similarly with other qualities. Hence the denial by ninny philosophers of independent reality to physical objects, since the qualities which at first sight they appear to possess do not upon examination turn out to belong to them in their own right. Dr. Ewing, having produced a number of rather dubious arguments in favour of physical objects, proceeds to clinch the issue by the confession : " Even if I could see no answer to the arguments used, it would still seem to me more likely that there should be some undetected mistake in these arguments than that there should be no independent physical objects." In other words, if the conclusion of the argument appears irreconcilably hostile to the common-sense world, what we must do is to distrust the argument.
At the end of his book Dr. Ewing has printed a list of the conclusions at which he has arrived. These conclusions embody a moderate Realism. They are guarded, tentative and provisional, but they are eminently . sensible. In fact, I do not know of any set of conclusions which represents more faithfully the trend of moderate, modern opinion on the main issues of philosophical discussion during the last two hundred years. The style of the book is good, albeit rather wordy, and it can be safely recommended to non- philosophers who want to know what are the typical things that philosophers discuss and why they discuss them.
C. E. M. JOAD.
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