Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/456

Rh Schelling, Hegel; with such later offshoots as in Spencer, Fiske, T. H. Green, the two Cairds, Bradley, and Royce, — all tracing back, in the last resort, to the great Oriental philosophies of which the Vedanta is the type. Here, upon the whole, critical interpretation must place the general views of Plato and of Aristotle, the great fountain-heads of the manifold idealisms of the West. In this group belong, too, unless I quite misunderstand them, the systems of Dr. W. T. Harris, Professor Kedney, and Professor Macbride Sterrett.

Third, those that abandon every sort of consciousness as a First Principle, drop Final Cause from the list of causes, and so make Matter the producing source of every one of its forms, through the force supposed to be inherent in it or commanent with it. These are the manifold materialisms, atomic or other, from Democritus to Büchner, Vogt, or Dühring.

Fourth, those that repudiate the search into causes as baseless and futile. They demand that philosophy, to be sound, shall drop metaphysics as well as theology, and confine itself rigidly to observational and experimental science, merely describing with precision, though as comprehensively as possible, the facts of history and experience. This view is known as positivism, and bears but one noted name, that of Comte, though all the strictly sceptical systems have contributed to it, from the Later Academy down to Hume. In its own way, it frees itself from creationism utterly. But this way is the way of confessed and open atheism.

Considering these four groups with reference to their bearing on the possibility of moral action, we at once throw out the third and the fourth, as systems of confessed necessarianism, which do not even pretend to furnish any basis for individual freedom or for the pursuit of a rational aim (such as fulness of life in the whole spirit) from conviction and choice. On the ground either of positivism or of