Such is the incentive in the air, and such is the realist response. The effort of the will to believe has proved exhausting and it must be ended.

But we have not yet penetrated to the heart of the matter. We are told to go back to the methods which have yielded the magnificent results of science, to go back to its way of handling data and making inferences. But philosophy had got thus far before. Now, Mr Bosanquet, whose word in such a matter is surely authoritative, and who is certainly the last authority to say so easily, says that twentieth-century realism may fairly be described as a new situation in the philosophical world.'* We must endeavour, if we would understand it clearly, to grasp what is new about it; and this enterprise, we must admit at once, will make rather harder going for us than the above general outline.

The most general features of the movement which we have been tracing are not new. The common-sense' ground just described had already been found untenable by philosophy. It was this discovery, partly, which gave rise to the idealism of the present time in England. Idealism found common-sense philosophy in possession, found it wanting, and for it substituted itself. What we are witnessing now is the Idealism which supplanted common sense, itself on its trial. And to get at the root of its weakness, we have to ask wherein it found common sense weak. For, undoubtedly, by a recuperated and rearmed common sense it is now being attacked.

Viewing the matter in the broadest possible way, but using terms in a perfectly justifiable sense, the answer to the question, 'Where did Idealism find common sense wanting?' can be put, in a formal fashion, very shortly. It was characteristic of common sense, then as now, to rely on given facts and consistent logic. Putting it quite bluntly, then, the discovery which Idealism made was that those facts and that logic really lead you to God.t It acknowledged, of course, with the very next breath, that man is utterly incapable of seeing every step of the way thither. He does not see the way, except in the

The Distinction between Mind and its Objects,' p. 5.

+ Common sense, of course, could find its way there too; but not by its facts and its logic,

anticipatory vision of faith. But Idealism became convinced that thither the way must in the end lead; and that, not by courtesy only, but of its own necessity. Can we see at all how Idealism came to this view? How does such a conviction arise? We must be able to answer this question if we are to get Realism in its true perspective.

In the first place, God, if he is at all, is all that we can conceive of ourselves becoming. He is simply our imperfection perfected; that is to say, our incomplete knowledge completed and our unrealised ideals realised. He is, wholly and eternally, all that we are partially and fitfully. Now, the 'given' facts betray such a Being for these reasons. In the first place, once we see them as they really are, they are found to be very imperfectly described as merely 'given.' The whole array of them, far from being a mere agglomeration of dead externalities, are a strenuous energising. If we ask, further, what they are the energising of? the answer is: not any foreign force or anything which we can only know from the outside. On the contrary, they are found to be the energising towards its own perfection-of the one thing which we know from within. They are the energising of that which wells up in us as our own being when we are in any degree intelligent and good. Such are the 'facts' on which common sense would rely. The 'Logic,' on the other hand, once we get at what it really is, turns out to be simply the direction of that energising. It is the directed impetus of that whose energy we read as facts; it is its impetus towards its goal, its thrust towards its own completeness.

Idealists differ amongst themselves, but some such line of considerations is found to lie at the root of all their positions, once we insert ourselves properly into them. Such, to take a prominent example, is the positive side of the teaching of Mr F. H. Bradley in his extraordinarily misunderstood work 'Appearance and Reality.' He would quarrel, no doubt, as to whether the all-perfect is rightly to be called God; but that there is an allperfect, that you have not reached to the ultimate reality until you have made your way thither, and again, that thither you logically must endeavour to make your way— such is the central teaching of his book. That nothing

is ultimately real except a perfected individual experience is the thesis; and the reason assigned for it is that nothing less is ultimately logical. Thus, given facts and consistent logic, taken together, once the idealist has got to the bottom of them, seem to him to be nothing else than the energising of a spiritual universe towards the perfection of its individual experience.

It is not easy in an untechnical way to come still closer to the idealist position than this; to explain how 'facts' could ever come to seem such an energising, or 'logic' the direction of such energy. But some attempt must be made; for until we have actually reached the idealistic position it is impossible to see where exactly the New Realism has joined issue. There are various possible approaches to the matter; let us consider the idealist conception of the nature of truth.

And

The question What is the truth?' would plainly never arise if error did not continually get about. common sense has always tended to answer the question by saying simply that we have got the truth when what we have in our minds corresponds with the facts outside-repeats them, mirrors them, or in some way runs parallel to them. But so simple a view does not survive scrutiny. Idealistic criticism points out that our knowledge cannot correspond with anything except other knowledge. Corresponding with the facts' means corresponding with true knowledge. The result we get is plainly empty. Common sense has no theory. cannot tell you what the truth is. It can only say 'truth is truth.' Yet it must know; for it rejects some things as false. And thus we are still left with the question: What is it really doing when it decides that something is false, and that something else is the truth? What standard is it actually going by? What kind of thing does, in point of fact, manage to vindicate itself to common sense as true?

It

Idealism begins its answer in the way just pointed out-by recognising that there is no use in looking for 'correspondence.' Knowledge is part of experience; and there is nothing not experience for experience to correspond with. And the idealist goes on to find the nature of truth by asking quite a different sort of question. Not, Does knowledge correspond with this, that or the

The

other?' but, 'Is it internally coherent? Is it consistent with itself?'. For it is always what gives coherence to our knowledge that justifies itself as true. To grasp things in their order is to grasp things as they are. ideal of truth is to get the whole world into order, not physical facts only, but all others-æsthetic, economic, political, religious and moral. And once we have thus got a completed experience into a perfect order, we have reality. However imperfect and confused, therefore, our experience may be, even that confused, imperfect experience is reality, in so far as there is the completeness of coherent order in it. There is no point in taking this wholly or partially completed experiencc as 'our ideas,' and proceeding to ask whether reality corresponds.' Such experience is not merely 'ours'; and there is no such reality as could be opposed to it if it were. Reality itself is such a perfect experience; and in our having the same, we are entering into it.

This, then our being consciously in a reality which is coherent and complete consciousness (and which we are in, whether we be conscious of it or not)-this is to be the truth, or have the truth in us'; and it is what common sense is really making for when it is 'seeing to it' that its 'knowledge corresponds with the facts.' Really, it is seeing to it that one part of its experience is coherent with the rest. On this construction of things the ultimately real and true is the conservation of all value, the sum of all perfection. The false, the illusory, the erroneous, the evil, is that within the whole, which energises against its principle; and it takes its place, once the whole is seen in its power, as a discord within the higher harmony.

Such in very rough outline is the position which Idealism had already evolved as against the philosophy of uncritical common sense. It had not quarrelled with the resolve to abide by facts and logic. But it had perceived a virtue in the facts and logic which common sense itself had not suspected, and out of which the most important results could come. Now, what is new in Realism is the attack which it makes upon this entire attitude, in limine—rightly judging that the important thing about the whole construction is its first steps.

Why is there nothing not experience, for experience to correspond to? And why, even if there be nothing but experience, should it be a 'complete' experience?

These are the two cardinal questions which the New Realism has been instrumental in raising. They are the result of its renewal of the old demand for given facts and consistent logic. They are connected questions. An answer to both is involved in an answer to either. And an answer to both is to be found in all that the best representatives of the school have to teach. But in different cases the emphasis has fallen out differently. The first of the two questions figures prominently in the writings of Prof. Perry in America, and of Mr G. E. Moore in this country; while the latter has been most searchingly dealt with by Mr Bertrand Russell. We shall take up the two points in order. But first we must notice some symptoms of how the way has been prepared for the whole movement.

In considering what the realists are urging in connexion with these questions, it is important to notice from the outset that it is something the need for which has not been unknown to idealists themselves. In the case of at least one eminent representative of the view, Prof. Sir Henry Jones, we find not only an exceedingly clear consciousness of the general necessity out of which these questions have arisen-the necessity, namely, that philosophy should do more justice than it has lately been doing to the unideal that is in the world-but we find even the actual development of what has come to be the standing realist argument with respect to the first of the two points which we are now bringing under discussion. As regards the general position, the following passage is typical of what Sir H. Jones has long been urging:

'Philosophy, it seems to me, is crying aloud for a more objective expression of the truth. Having proved that the real world is ideal, it must prove that the ideal world is real; that space is real, and time is real, and matter is real, and that the self-exclusive relations of natural objects hold, just because they are all manifestations of spirit. For rational life also has its double movement. Spirit also scatters, as well as gathers. It surpasses natural life in the intensity of its oneness, for it is all in every part: it is itself the essence of all its elements. But it surpasses it, too, in the variety of Vol. 229.-No. 454.

K