IDOLA THEATRI.* WHEN Alan Breck discussed the character of the

Master of Lovat he was constrained to admit that, whatever his short- comings, he was a "very respectable person on the field of war." Some such praise we think that Mr. Sturt deserves. He con- fesses himself an idealist (of the " personal " persuasion), and he sets out to deal faithfully with the imperfections of other schools of thought which come under the same general category. The root of all evil, he finds, is what he calls the "passive fallacy," the insufficient recognition of "personal striving" and of the will in the philosophical construction of human life, and from this spring the three idola which be deals with in detail,—intellectualism, absolutism, and sub- jectivism. Now we are very ready to admit that idealism is full of faults. Many of its exponents have learned too glibly the lessons of the masters. They have adopted conclusions, which form the end of a rigorous process of thought, as their starting-point, and have turned valuable principles into cliches, which they use in many spheres where they have no applica- tion. There are so many bubbles in current idealism which want pricking that we are grateful to any man who will undertake the work,—especially grateful when the bands are those of a well-wisher, if not a disciple.

Intellectualism is the creed which regards all reality as a form of thought, which does no justice to the independence of things, and which therefore ignores what Mr. Sturt calls their "dynamic character." His criticisms of some of the more obvious difficulties which attach to the statement rather than to the substance of this view show considerable clever- ness. The intellectualist—whom it is not very easy to identify with any philosopher of standing—secures a synthesis by eliminating from his data all disturbing contradictions. But Mr. Sturt in his criticisms seems to us to suffer from the fault

• Idola Theatre: a Criticism of Oxford Thought and Thinkers from the Standpoint qf Personal Idealism. By henry Sturt. London Macmillan and Co. L10e. net.] of over-elaboration, and some of his findings come very near_ those time-honoured crudities of speculation which presume he would disavow. The " an abstraction as indefensible as any of those he attacks, casts its shadow over his pages. In his criticism of intellectualisb logic, again, he entirely misses the point of view of his opponents. He complains that it takes no account of "interest"; but what has the morphology of knowledge to do with interest P One may as well expect a treatise on aesthetics to discuss the psychology of picture-buyers. He complains that it is static rather than dynamic ; but in a real sense a morphology must be static. The same irrelevant criticism appears later in the work in a passage dealing with Mr. Bradley, where he argues that "the main function of inference is to help us to act upon reality. The soldier reasons out a plan of attack, infers that he will capture the fortifications, orders the assault, and verifies his reasoning by success!' But for

the life of us we cannot understand what these ethical and psychological considerations have got to do with the question.

For logic as it is commonly accepted is not a picture of the world as we know it. It is the isolation of the abstract side of the actual,—a barren activity, if you like, but one certainly not open to the kind of charge Mr. Sturt brings against it.

He is happier in his attack upon absolutism, as exemplified in Hegel, and reaching its conclusion in the scepticism of Appearance and Reality. With a great deal of the criticism of Hegel we agree, especially the exposure of the arbitrary local colour which tinged his Absolute, and made him find in the Prussian State the fullest up-to-date realisation of the Eternal. All this has been said before by Renan, by Professor James, by Professor Pringle-Pattison and others, and Mr. Sturt repeats it with vigour and enthusiasm. As against the Buddhist side of Hegelianism his contention is final. But the reading of these chapters has not convinced us that Mr. Sturt has grasped the essential position of Hegelianism in spite of his triumphant exposure of its faults, and we cannot but feel that Mr. Bradley's words in his Ethical Studies are not irrelevant, when he speaks of a "philosophy, which we all have refuted, and, having so cleared our consciences, which some of us at least might take steps to understand." With the last "idol," subjectivism, Mr. Sturt has an easier task. The arguments against solipsism are not difficult to master ; and as to the other form, impersonal subjectivism, we admit its weakness, but find it hard to think of any quarter where it flourishes.

The second half of the volume consists in a detailed. criticism of particular philosophers,—Hegel, T. H. Green, Mr. Bradley, and Professor Bosanquet. We have no space here to indicate the points on which we differ from the critic, which are numerous and important ; but Mr. Sturt is candid, vigorous, occasionally subtle, and always interesting. The cardinal merit of the work is its insistence upon the ordinary consciousness as the starting-point of philosophy,—" personal experience, which I hold always to be the norm of reality." "In England, at any rate," he writes, "a philosopher has no chance of a hearing unless he is on friendly terms with experi- ence; he need not be empirical, but he must not be anti- empirical." He has his felicities, too, of style and thought. It is both acute and just to find the logical result of one kind of absolutism in a coarse utilitarianism, a relapse to the lower categories, and to say that Pater's definitions of art and criticism reduce them to the level of perfumery. And the following comments are well worth remembering :—

"He may assert that all finite persons and things are melted down in the Absolute ; but what he rather means is that all the theoretic difficulties incident to finite existence disappear when the Absolute is postulated."

"As soon as the Hegelian comes to make any definite statement about the relation of human selves to the Absolute self he is driven to one of two courses : he must either let his Absolute self fade to an almost nominal existence which does not interfere with the subordinate selves at all ; or he must merge the finite selves in that which includes them. Hegel, in his strictly scientific works at least, takes the latter course. Anglo- Hegelians tend to the former ; their Absolute is a constitutional monarch who reigns but leaves his subjects to manage their own affairs."

As a set-off we may add that there are other passages where the writer is so ingeniously obtuse that we are almost driven

to doubt whether he has grasped at all the doctrines he is combating.

The main purpose of the book is critical, and, as we said

before, we are prepared to admit that Mr. Sturt is, on the whole, a." very respectable person" in that field. Construc- tively the book is weak, and the weakness is a serious blemish, for in philosophy, at any rate, no one may destroy what he is riot prepared to build again. Even if the result is scepticism, he must at least provide a reasoned sceptical creed. Mr. Start finds philosophical salvation in that modern faith which is called pragmatism or humanism, and which traces its origin to Professor James. That eminent psychologist is, however, only indirectly responsible for it—his followers are not agreed in their faith, as may be seen if we compare Mr. Santayana

with Mr. Schiller—and its direct exponents are a younger school of teachers now living in Oxford. It is a kind of philosophical opportunism, the revolt of the English tempera- ment against metaphysics. Its central dogma is that truth is that which is satisfactory, which we can rest in, which is of practical value. Speculation must be applied only to human purposes, and all we want is a modicum of truth to help us to rub along in life. It perpetually confesses incapacity to advance, and perpetually adds that it does not matter. Its content is a set of working hypotheses, which are true because they work. "It seems both right and wise," says Mr. Start in one place, "to call attention to the limits of human intelli- gence in a matter that obviously transcends it." Truth, the central question of all philosophy, is a matter of convenience; we can make anything true by treating it as such. And so we find a passage like the following :—

" In ordinary or non-scientific inquiry the amount of come- apondence necessary to constitute truth is extremely variable. Being very hungry, we ask for bread. If we are told that there is bread in the cupboard, and go to look, we treat the answer as true if we find in the cupboard something near enough to satisfy our want. We do not care if what we find does not answer to the technical definition of bread, but should rather be called damper.' On the other hand, we should treat the answer as false if the person to whom we addressed the inquiry told us, knowing we were hungry, that there was bread in the cupboard, and we found a loaf there which from some accident had been rendered uneatable."

It is difficult to take this juggling with words seriously, but there is no lack of seriousness among the exponents of the creed. We have no space to deal with the obvious difficulties in which such a line of reasoning involves the inquirer, but we would point out two facts. The first is that it is not a wrong metaphysic, it is a negation of metaphysics altogether. "I hold," says Mr. Start, "that a principle must in the first instance be taken on trust : a standard of reality and intelligibility cannot be established by the ordinary mediate processes of proof ; it can only justify itself by success in explaining the world." Perfectly true ; but this philosophy of pragmatism makes no attempt to explain ; it is content with working solutions and a hand-to-mouth unifica- tion. The second is that it is a very old creed. Protagoras is its patron saint, and in the Theaetetus the reader will find a statement of it as full as that given by any modern exponent. For criticism of its fallacies we would recommend him also to refer to Plato.