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Rh idealism produced another mistake—the tendency to a modicum of realism, as much as seemed to this or that author to follow from psychological idealism. In Germany, since the victory of Kant over Wolff, realism has always been in difficulties, which we can appreciate when we reflect that the Germans by preference apply the term “realism” to the paradoxes of Herbart (1776–1841), who, in order to avoid supposed contradictions, supposed that bodies are not substances, but show (Schein), while “reals” are simple substances, each with a simple quality, and all preserving themselves against disturbance by one another, whether physically or psychologically, but not known to be either material or spiritual because we do not know the simple quality in which the nature of the real consists. There have indeed been other realisms in Germany. Trendelenburg (1802–1872), a formidable opponent of Hegel, tried to surmount Kant’s transcendental idealism by supposing that motion, and therefore time, space and the categories, though a priori, are common to thought and being. Dühring, with a similar object, makes matter a common basis. While these realisms come dangerously near to materialism, that of the Roman Catholic A. Günther (1783–1863), “Cartesius correctus,” erected too mystical an edifice on the psychological basis of Descartes to sustain a satisfactory realism. Yet Güntherism has produced a school, of which the most distinguished representative is the Old Catholic bishop in Bonn, Th. Weber, whose Metaphysik, completed in 1891, starting from the ego and the analysis of consciousness, aims at arriving at the distinction between spirit and nature, and at rising to the spirit of God the Creator. Other realistic systems are those of J. H. von Kirchmann (1802–1884), author, among other works, of Die Philosophie des Wissens (1864) and Ueber die Principien des Realismus (1875); Goswin Uphues (b. 1841; professor of philosophy at Halle), directed against the scepticism of Shute’s Discourse on Truth; and Hermann Schwarz (born 1864), who completes the psychological view of Uphues that we can know objects as they are, by the metaphysical view that they can be as we know them. But German realism lacks critical power, and is little better than a weed overshadowed by the luxuriant forest of German idealism.

In France, the home of Cartesian realism, after the vicissitudes of sensationalism and materialism, which became connected in the French mind with the Revolution, the spirit of Descartes revived in the 19th century in the spiritualistic realism of Victor Cousin. But Cousin’s psychological method of proceeding from consciousness outwards, and the

emphasis laid by him on spirit in comparison with body, prevented a real revival of realism. He essayed to answer Locke by Kant, and Kant by Reid, Maine de Biran and Schelling. From Reid he adopted the belief in an external world beyond sensation, from Biran the explanation of personality by will, from Schelling the identification of all reason in what he called “impersonal reason,” which he supposed to be identical in God and man, to be subjective and objective, psychological and ontological. We start, according to him, from a psychological triplicity in consciousness, consisting of sensation, personal will and impersonal reason, which by a priori laws of causality and substance carries us to the ontological triplicity of oneself as ego willing, the non-ego as cause of sensation, and God as the absolute cause beneath these relative causes. So far this ontological triplicity is realism. But when we examine his theory of the non-ego, and find that it resolves matter into active force and this into animated activity, identifies law with reason, and calls God absolute substance, we see at once that this spiritual realism is not very far from idealism. About 1840, owing largely to the teaching of E. Saisset in the spiritualistic school, the influence of Descartes began to give way to that of Leibnitz. Leibnitz has been used both realistically and idealistically in France. He was taken literally by spiritual realists, e.g. by (q.v.). Janet accepted the traditional ontological triplicity—God, souls and bodies—and, in answer to Ravaisson, who called this realism “demi-spiritualisme,” rejoined that he was content to accept the title. At the same time, like Cousin, his works show a tendency to underrate body, tending as they do to the Leibnitzian analysis of the material into the immaterial, and to the supposition that

the unity of the body is only given by the soul. His emphasis is on spirit, and he goes so far as to admit that “no spiritualist is engaged to defend the existence of matter.” The strength of Janet’s position is his perception that the argument from final causes is in favour of an omnipresent rational will making matter a means to ends, and not in favour of an immanent mind of Nature working out her own ends.

In England, the land of Bacon and Locke, the realistic tendency has been more active, and is exhibited in Bacon’s Novum organum and De Augmentis scientiarum, as well as to a less degree in the Fourth Book of Locke’s Essay. After the metaphysical idealism, begun by Berkeley, had eventuated in Hume’s reduction of the

objects of knowledge to sensations, ideas and associations, the Scottish school, applying the Baconian method to the study of mind, began to inquire once more for the evidences of our knowledge, and produced the natural or intuitive realism of T. Reid, Dugald Stewart and Sir William Hamilton, who, having been followed by H. L. Mansel, as well as by J. Veitch, H. Calderwood and J. M‘Cosh, prolonged the existence of the school, in which we may venture to place L. T. Hobhouse and F. W. Bain, author of The Realization of the Possible (1899), down to our own time.

Its main tenet, that we have an immediate perception of the external world, is roughly expressed in the following words of Reid: “I do perceive matter objectively—that is, something