Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/359

334 writers have presented this idealism as a sort of prod- uct of poetical fantasy, and have thereby helped to bring it into disrepute. We profess no such enthu- siasm. If we are to give any foundation for our postulates by means of an idealistic doctrine, then this foundation must be no mere poetic fancy, but a well-framed philosophic doctrine, able to stand crit- icism, and to satisfy very unemotional aims, as well as the higher moral aims themselves. But if ideal- ism is to receive rigid theoretical tests, we may still, in view of our present discussion and its needs, be helped on our way more directly if we first consider very generally and briefly what idealism could do for us if it were established, thereafter going on to the theoretical consideration of its claims.

That the Eternal is a world of spiritual life is what the idealists of the past have maintained, and the religious force of their doctrine lay not so much in the insight that was thus offered concerning the nature of the powers that are in the world, as in an- other insight. Just here idealistic doctrine and its outcome has been seldom comprehended, even by the idealists themselves. The world, merely viewed as a heap of warring Powers, cannot be a world of spiritual life. If the real world is nevertheless a world of such spiritual life, it must be so because, beyond and above the Powers, there is this higher spiritual Life that includes them and watches over them as the spectator watches the tragedy, — a Life in which they live and move and have their being. The characters in a tragedy do not constitute as war- ring powers, in their separate existence, the signifi-