Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/260

236 in one great respect dissatisfied. We very certainly, namely, can never deduce from the idea of our common spirituality the idea of any particular sense thing, such as the moon. Or, to repeat one of my former illustrations, idealists can’t tell us why we are spiritually or rationally bound all alike to perceive a starry world, wherein there shall be a belt of telescopic asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Such facts idealists get, like their neighbors, from daily experience or from science. Ideal- ists may say in general, as Fichte said, that the moral law needs a world of outer experience as the material for its embodiment. They cannot show why just this material is needed. There remains, then, an element of brute fact, a residuum, if you choose, of spiritual caprice, in their world of the all-embracing self. Perhaps we have, as they say, the one deeper self in common, perhaps this deeper self has rational grounds for building in us all alike just this world of sense, of moons, of asteroids, of comets, of jelly-fish, and of all the rest, only there is still, from our finite point of view, a vast element of at least apparent caprice about the entire universe of the spirit as thus built. And all idealists have to recognize this fact of the seeming capriciousness of the external order. The universal reason builds the world, says idealism; but then does not the universal reason seem to build many irrational facts into its world? You see then the difficulty. Our common spiritual nature is to guarantee the truth of our common experience. Unless this nature has some hard and fast necessity in it, of which we can form an adequate conception, there is no satisfaction in our philosophy. But when we try to develop this idea of the universal necessity of the world of our common selfhood, we come once more against an element of the most stubborn caprice. Idealism seems to be an insight as suggestive and inspiring as it is limited. The nature of this divine self has something seemingly irrational about it. Our