Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/224

205 own time. These thinkers are not mere empiricists. They are students of science, sometimes too of ethics, and frequently also of religion. They are doubtful, not infrequently quite negative, in their attitude towards Realism. They condemn the notion of things in themselves, and insist either that man’s limited insight can never reach the truth about any realistically conceived independent world, or else that there is no such world at all. On the other hand, they are hostile to constructive Idealism, regard the whole recent constructively idealistic movement as a mere dream, and often repeat that, in our philosophy, we must be guided solely by the spirit of Modern Science. In theology they condemn theoretical construction, and if they are positively disposed, prefer a reasonable and chastened moral faith. But the one thing to which they remain steadfastly loyal, is the Validity of some region of decidedly impersonal Truth. As such a realm of impersonal truth they conceive perhaps the moral law, perhaps the realm of natural law revealed to us by science, perhaps the lawful structure of that social order which is now so favorite a topic of study. Their spiritual father is Kant, although they often ignore their parentage. Their philosophical creations are a collection of impersonal principles in whose independent or realistic Being no one altogether believes, but whose value as giving reasonable unity to the realm of phenomena, justifies, to the present age, their validity. These principles are such as Energy; or in the modern sense of the term, Evolution, viewed as the name for a universal tendency in nature; or the Unconscious, taken as a principle for explaining