Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/468

Rh and all its ways as Professor James might still rank as an idealist of idealists. Idealism is constituted by the metaphysical value it sets upon ideals, not by the æsthetic or the ethical, and rather by its method of putting them on the throne of things than by the mere intent to have them there. It is always distinct from mysticism (which at the core is simply emotionalism), and still more so from voluntarism. Its method is, at bottom, to vindicate the human ideals by showing them to be not merely ideals but realities, and to effect this by exhibiting conscious being as the only absolute reality; this, again, it aims to accomplish by setting the reality of conscious being in the only trans-subjective aspect thereof, namely, intelligence.

So the fact comes about that idealism gets its essential character from its discovery that intelligent certainty depends on such an interpretation of reality as makes the knowledge of reality by the spontaneous light of intelligence conceivable; in short, that idealism is necessarily rationalism, that is, implies an apriorist theory of knowledge. No sort of experientialism, so far as it is consistent, can rightly be called idealism. Voluntarism or emotive mysticism it readily may be, but then it is simply subjectivism; and if it be taken in cognitive terms, it cannot get beyond sensationism, unable as it is to provide for any changeless and universal ideas with which to organise experiences into objects that are inalterably the same for all subjects and therefore abidingly real. Not even such a theory as Berkeley’s (to which one of the eight essayists appears to hold, with some added helps from Kant) can be consistently called idealism; for though it teaches that there is an immutable principle at the basis of our experiences, namely, the operation of the eternal ideas in the Divine intelligence, controlling God’s communication of sensations to us, yet the assumption of this Divine Mind is unwarranted by the strict experientialism from which the theory takes its departure.