Winds of Doctrine | Page 6

refer to their objects unless both
were ideas identified in my mind. In practice, therefore, idealists feel
free to ignore the gratuitous possibility of existences lying outside the
circle of objects knowable to the thinker, which, according to them, is
the circle of his ideas. In this way they turn a human method of
approach into a charter for existence and non-existence, and their point
of view becomes the creative power. When the idealist studies
astronomy, does he learn anything about the stars that God made? Far
from him so naive a thought! His astronomy consists of two activities
of his own (and he is very fond of activity): star-gazing and calculation.
When he has become quite proficient he knows all about star-gazing
and calculation; but he knows nothing of any stars that God made; for
there are no stars except his visual images of stars, and there is no God
but himself. It is true that to soften this hard saying a little he would
correct me and say his higher self; but as his lower self is only the idea
of himself which he may have framed, it is his higher self that is
himself simply: although whether he or his idea of himself is really the

higher might seem doubtful to an outsider.]
This explanation, in pretending to refute solipsism, of course assumes
and confirms it; for all these cans and musts touch only your idea of
yourself, not your actual being, and there is no thinkable world that is
not within you, as you exist really. Thus idealists are wedded to
solipsism irrevocably; and it is a happy marriage, only the name of the
lady has to be changed.
Nevertheless, lest peace should come (and peace nowadays is neither
possible nor desired), a counter-current at once overtakes the
philosophy of the immediate and carries it violently to the opposite
pole of speculation--from mystic intuition to a commercial cult of
action and a materialisation of the mind such as no materialist had ever
dreamt of. The tenderness which the pragmatists feel for life in general,
and especially for an accelerated modern life, has doubtless contributed
to this revulsion, but the speculative consideration of the immediate
might have led to it independently. For in the immediate there is
marked expectancy, craving, prayer; nothing absorbs consciousness so
much as what is not quite given. Therefore it is a good reading of the
immediate, as well as a congenial thing to say to the contemporary
world, that reality is change, growth, action, creation. Similarly the
sudden materialisation of mind, the unlooked-for assertion that
consciousness does not exist, has its justification in the same quarter. In
the immediate what appears is the thing, not the mind to which the
thing appears. Even in the passions, when closely scanned
introspectively, you will find a new sensitiveness or ebullition of the
body, or a rush of images and words; you will hardly find a separate
object called anger or love. The passions, therefore, when their moral
essence is forgotten, may be said to be literally nothing but a movement
of their organs and their objects, just as ideas may be said to be nothing
but fragments or cross-threads of the material world. Thus the mind and
the object are rolled into one moving mass; motions are identified with
passions, things are perceptions extended, perceptions are things cut
down. And, by a curious revolution in sentiment, it is things and
motions that are reputed to have the fuller and the nobler reality. Under
cover of a fusion or neutrality between idealism and realism, moral

materialism, the reverence for mere existence and power, takes
possession of the heart, and ethics becomes idolatrous. Idolatry,
however, is hardly possible if you have a cold and clear idea of blocks
and stones, attributing to them only the motions they are capable of;
and accordingly idealism, by way of compensation, has to take
possession of physics. The idol begins to wink and drop tears under the
wistful gaze of the worshipper. Matter is felt to yearn, and evolution is
held to be more divinely inspired than policy or reason could ever be.
Extremes meet, and the tendency to practical materialism was never
wholly absent from the idealism of the moderns. Certainly, the tumid
respectability of Anglo-German philosophy had somehow to be left
behind; and Darwinian England and Bismarckian Germany had another
inspiration as well to guide them, if it could only come to
consciousness in the professors. The worship of power is an old
religion, and Hegel, to go no farther back, is full of it; but like
traditional religion his system qualified its veneration for success by
attributing success, in the future at least, to what could really inspire
veneration; and such a master in equivocation could have no difficulty