within the limits of the special sciences. This is Wundt’s view, but only in the sense that reason passes from ideas to “ideals,” whether in the special sciences or in metaphysics. Reason, as in most modern psychologies and idealisms, is introduced by Wundt, after all sorts of operations, too late; and, when at length introduced, it is described as going beyond ideas and notions to “ideals” (Ideen), as an ideal continuation of series of thoughts beyond given experience—nothing more. Reason, according to Wundt, is like pure reason according to Kant; except that Wundt, receiving Kantism through Neo-Kantism, thinks that reason arrives at “ideals” not a priori, but by the logical process of ground and consequent, and, having abolished the thing in itself, will not follow Kant in his inconsequent passage from pure to practical reason in order to postulate a reality corresponding to “ideals” beyond experience. Wundt, in fact, agrees with Lange: that reason transcends experience of phenomena only to conceive “ideals.” This being so, he finds in mathematics two kinds of transcendence—real, where the transcendent, though not actual in experience, can become partly so, e.g. the divisibility of magnitudes; imaginary, where it cannot, e.g. n-dimensions. He supposes in metaphysics the same transcendence in forming cosmological, psychological, and ontological “ideals.” He supposes real as well as imaginary transcendence in cosmological “ideals”; the former as to the forms of space and time, the latter as to content, e.g. atoms. But he limits psychological and ontological “ideals” entirely to imaginary transcendence. The result is that he confines metaphysical transcendence to “a process into the imaginary” as regards the substantial and causal content of cosmological “ideals,” and altogether as regards psychological and ontological “ideals.” Thus, according to him, in the first place reason forms a cosmological “ideal” of a multitude of simple units related; secondly, it forms a psychological “ideal” of a multitude of wills, or substance-generating activities, which communicate with one another by ideas so that will causes ideas in will, while together they constitute a collective will, and it goes on to form the moral ideal of humanity (das sittliche Menschheitsideal); and, thirdly, it forms an ontological “ideal” of God as ground of this moral “ideal,” and therewith of all being as means to this end, and an “ideal” of God as world-will, of which the world is development, and in which individual wills participate each in its sphere. “Herein,” says Wundt, “consists the imperishable truth of the Kantian proposition that the moral order of the world is the single real proof of the existence of God” (System, 405; cf. 439). “Only,” he adds, “the expression proof is here not admissible. Rational 'ideals' are in general not provable.” As the same limit is applied by him to all transcendent rational “ideals,” and especially to those which refer to the content of the notion of the world, and, like all psychological and ontological “ideals,” belong to the imaginary transcendent, his conclusion is that reason, in transcending experience, logically conceives “ideals,” but never logically infers corresponding realities.
The conclusion that reason in transcending experience can show no more than the necessity of “ideals” is the only conclusion which could follow from Wundt’s phenomenalism in psychology, logic, and epistemology. If knowledge is experience of ideas distinguished by inner will of apperception into subject and object in inseparable connexion, if the starting-point is ideas, if judgment is analysis of an aggregate idea, if inference is a mediate reference of the members of an aggregate of ideas to one another, then, as Wundt says, all we can know, and all reason can logically infer from such data, is in our ideas, and consciousness without an object of idea is an abstraction; so that reason, in transcending experience, can show the necessity of ideas and “ideals,” but infer no corresponding reality beyond, whether in nature, or in Man, or in God. Wundt, starting from a psychology of unitary experience, deduces a consistent metaphysics of no inference of things transcending experience throughout—or rather until he came to the very last sentence of his System der Philosophie (1889), where he suddenly passes from a necessity of “ideals” (Ideen), to a necessity of “faith” (Glauben), without “knowledge” (Wissen). He forgets apparently that faith is a belief in things beyond ideas and ideals, which is impossible in his psychology of judgment and logic of inference. The fact is that his System may easily seem to prove more than it does. He describes it as idealism in the form of ideal realism, because it recognizes an ideating will requiring substance as substratum or matter for outer relations of phenomena. But when we look for the evidence of any such will beyond ourselves and our experience, we find Wundt offering nothing but an ontological “ideal” of reason, and a moral “ideal” requiring a religious “ideal,” but without any power of inferring a corresponding reality. The System then ends with the necessity of an “ideal” of God as world-will, but provides no ground for the necessity of any belief whatever in the being of God, or indeed in any being at all beyond our own unitary experience.
Wundt, however, afterwards wrote an Einleitung in die Philosophie (1901; 4th ed., 1906), in which he speaks of realism in the form of ideal realism as the philosophy of the future. It is not to be idealism which resolves everything into spirit, but realism which gives the spiritual and the material each its own place in harmony with scientific consciousness. It is not to be dualistic but monistic realism, because matter is not separate from spirit. It is not to be materialistic but ideal realism, because the physical and the psychical are inseparable parallels inexplicable by one another. It is to be monistic ideal realism, like that of Fichte and Hegel; not, however, like theirs idealistic in method, a Phantastisches Begriffsgebäude, but realistic in method, a Wissenschaftliche Philosophie. It is to be ideal realism, as in the System. It is not to be a species of idealism, as in the System—but of realism. How are we to understand this change of front? We can only explain it by supposing that Wundt wishes to believe that, beyond the “ideal,” there really is proof of a transcendent, ideating, substance-generating will of God; and that he is approaching the noumenal voluntarism of his younger contemporary Paulsen. But to make such a conversion from phenomenalism plausible, it is necessary to be silent about his whole psychology, logic, and epistemology, and the consequent limitation of knowledge to experience, and of reason to ideas and “ideals,” without any power of inferring corresponding things.
What a pity it is that Wundt had committed himself by his psychology to phenomenalism, to unitary experience, and to the limitation of judgment and reason to ideas and ideals! For his phenomenalism prevents him from consistently saying the truth inferred by reason—that there is a world beyond experience, a world of Nature, and a will of God, real as well as ideal. To understand Wundt is to discover what a mess modern psychology has made to metaphysics. To understand phenomenal idealism in Germany is to discover what a narrow world is to be known from the transcendental idealism of Kant shorn of Kant’s inconsistencies. To understand noumenal idealism in Germany and the rise of metaphysical idealism in modern times is to discover that psychological is the origin of all metaphysical idealism. If we perceive only what is mental, all that we know is only mental. But who has proved that psychological starting-point? Who has proved that, when I scent an odour in my nostrils, I apprehend not odour but a sensation of odour; and so for the other senses? Sensation, as Aristotle said, is not of itself: it is the apprehension of a sensible object in the organism. I perceive pressure, heat, colour, sound, flavour, odour, in my five senses. Having felt reciprocal pressures in touch, I infer similar pressures between myself and the external world.
6.—English Idealism
1. The Followers of Hume’s Phenomenalism.—Compared with the great systems of the Germans, English idealism in the 19th century shows but little originality. It has been largely borrowed either from previous English or from later German idealism, and what originality it has possessed has been mainly shown in that spirit of eclectic compromise which is so dear to the English mind. The predominant influence, on the whole,
