Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/332

 318 J. S. MACKENZIE : much further reflexion to see that all such conceptions as those that are put before us by Descartes, go beyond any- thing that is contained in our consciousness as an individual experience. This, I take it, was what Malebranche meant by his famous declaration that we ' see all things in God,' or, as we should express it in more modern phraseology, that we refer all our ideas to an objective system. And it is no doubt essentially the same point that Green has in his mind when he speaks of an ' eternal consciousness ' ; but this way of speaking of it is an attempt to represent it as being sub- jective after all. Even Berkeley came to see this to some extent in the end, and qualified his ' esse is percipi ' by recognising that it does not apply to those things of which we have what he calls pictured or experienced, but with reference to which it can be said, as he himself expresses it, that we ' understand what they mean '. And this, I think, is what all genuine Idealism must recognise. Indeed, I am tempted here to put forward another point, though possibly it is not an altogether fair one ; to affirm, namely, that, so far from its being true that Idealism rests on the principle that ' esse is percipi,' it would be much truer to say that it is Mr. Moore and the New Realists who rest upon that principle. It is true that they begin by inverting it. Their doctrine is not that ' esse is percipi ' ; but they do at least come very near to the doctrine that 'percipi is esse,' i.e. that an independent reality is to be ascribed to everything that appears as an immediate object of consciousness, whether it be pleasure or hunger or colour or an individual material thing or a general concept or a statement of relations. In philosophy, as in love, things often go by contraries. The man who preaches ' the will to believe ' is generally at heart a sceptic ; indeed, all our most recent dogmatism would seem to rest on ' philosophic doubt ' ; and so the new realist seems to be in truth one who is per- suaded that things are just as he apprehends them. 1 The idealist, on the other hand, maintains that what is directly perceived is never in itself real ; and that even the object brought before us in conceptual thinking is only a partial suggestion of reality. Reality for the idealist speaking generally is the concrete whole, which is never an object of direct apprehension, and perhaps never can be. This brings us back, you may say, to the point to which we previously referred the distinction between the per- 1 Cf. Joachim, The Nature of Truth, p. 55 sqq.
 * Notions ' i.e. those conceptions that cannot be directly