Page:Idealism and the Theory of Knowledge.djvu/15

Rh imperfectly integrated, experience, towards an organic system of knowledge, in which justice shall be done to all the differences and oppositions of appearances, without sacrifice of their essential unity. And it casts confusion upon the whole process, when we treat it as if it were confined to the work of building upon fixed foundations, which are given either in sensation or in thought, apart from any process at all. On the contrary, it cannot be adequately represented except as an evolution, in which it is only the last product that shows distinctly the meaning of the germ out of which it sprang.

The view that has just been stated contains, I think, the essentials of that conception of knowledge which has been maintained by the greatest representatives of modern idealism; and it is obvious that it has no special kindred with the philosophy of Berkeley, and, from that point of view, is no less realistic than it is idealistic. At the same time, it may be acknowledged that in the process of working towards this result and, especially, in seeking to reply to those who treated knowledge as something given to the mind from without, idealists have sometimes dwelt too exclusively on the subjective aspect of knowledge. This was the case, as we have seen, with Kant, and it is apt to be the case with those who go back to Kant and take their start from him. We may add that it is apt to seem to be the case with such writers, even when it is not really so. Thus the views of T. H. Green are often misunderstood by those who do not recognize how much his language is coloured by opposition to authors like John Stuart Mill, whose philosophy was in the ascendant when Green began to write, but whose views are no longer so prominent in the mind of this generation of philosophers as they were then. Hence difficulty is apt to be caused by Green’s constant insistence on the constructive activity of the mind in knowledge, carried, as it necessarily is, to the point of denying that any element of truth can be given to the mind apart from such activity. Such a doctrine seems to many to involve a denial of the objectivity of knowledge, and it has even provoked in some a reaction against all idealism, and a tendency to fall back upon ‘the given’ in the sense of naive realism, i.e. upon the idea that at least the basis of experience is presented to consciousness without any activity of its own. And even the most conclusive demonstrations that it is impossible to detect any such pure datum have failed of their effect, because of a lurking suspicion that the reality of the objects of consciousness was being undermined. When Disraeli on one occasion was questioned as to the political platform on which he stood for election to a seat in parliament, he answered that he ‘stood