has been the phenomenalism of Hume, with its slender store of
sensations, ideas and associations, and its conclusion that all
we know is sensations without any known thinkers or any other
known things. This phenomenalism was developed by James
Mill (1773–1836) and J. S. Mill (1806–1873), and has since
been continued by A. Bain. It also became the basis of the
philosophies of Huxley and of Spencer on their phenomenalistic
side. It is true that Spencer’s “transfigured realism” contains
much that was not dreamt of by Hume. Spencer widens the
empirical theory of the origin of knowledge by his brilliant
hypothesis of inherited organized tendencies, which has influenced
all later psychology and epistemology, and tends to a kind
of compromise between Hume and Kant. He describes his
belief in an unknowable absolute as “carrying a step farther
the doctrine put into shape by Hamilton and Mansel.” He
develops this belief in an absolute in connexion with his own
theory of evolution into something different both from the
idealism of Hume and the realism of Hamilton, and rather
falling under the head of materialism. Nevertheless, as he
believes all the time that everything knowable throughout the
whole world of evolution is phenomena in the sense of subjective
affections of consciousness, and as he applies Hume’s distinction
of impressions and ideas as a distinction of vivid and faint
states of consciousness to the distinction of ego and non-ego,
spirit and matter, inner and outer phenomena, his philosophy of
the world as knowable remains within the limits of phenomenalism.
Nothing could be more like Hume than his final statement
that what we are conscious of is subjective affections produced
by objective agencies unknown and unknowable. The “anti-realism,”
which takes the lion’s share in “transfigured
realism,” is simply a development of the phenomenalism of
Hume. Hume was also at the bottom of the philosophies of
G. H. Lewes, who held that there is nothing but feelings, and
of W. K. Clifford. Nor is Hume yet dethroned, as we see
from the works of Karl Pearson and of William James, who,
though an American, has exercised a considerable influence on
English thought. The most flourishing time of phenomenalism,
however, was during the lifetime of J. S. Mill. It was
counteracted to some extent by the study at the universities
of the deductive logic of Aristotle and the inductive logic of
Bacon, by parts of Mill’s own logic, and by the natural realism
of Reid, Stewart, and Hamilton, which met Hume’s scepticism
by asserting a direct perception of the external world. But
natural realism, as finally interpreted by Hamilton, was too
dogmatic, too unsystematic, and too confused with elements
derived from Kantian idealism to withstand the brilliant
criticism of Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s
Philosophy (1865), a work which for a time almost persuaded us
that Nature as we know it from sensations is nothing but permanent
possibilities of sensation, and oneself only a series of
states of consciousness.
2. The Influence of Kant and Hegel.—Nevertheless, there have never been wanting more soaring spirits who, shocked at the narrowness of the popular phenomenalism of Hume, have tried to find a wider idealism. They have, as a rule, sought it in Germany. Before the beginning of the 19th century, Kant had made his way to England in a translation of some of his works, and in an account of the Elements of the Critical Philosophy by A. F. M. Willich, both published in 1798. After a period of struggle, the influence of Kant gradually extended, and, as we see in the writings of Coleridge and Carlyle, of Hamilton and Mansel, of Green and Caird, of Laurie, Martineau and others, has secured an authority over English thought almost equal to that of Hume (see Idealism). Both philosophers appeal to the English love of experience, and Kant had these advantages over Hume: that within the narrow circle of sensible phenomena his theory of understanding gave to experience a fuller content, and that beyond phenomena, however inconsistently, his theory of reason postulated the reality of God, freedom and immortality. Other and wider German philosophies gradually followed that of Kant to England. Coleridge (1772–1834) not only called attention to Kant’s distinction between understanding and reason, but also introduced his countrymen to the noumenal idealism of Schelling. In the Biographia Literaria (1817) he says that in Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and System des transcendentalen Idealismus he first found a general coincidence with much that he had toiled out for himself, and he repeated some of the main tenets of Schelling. Carlyle (1795–1881) laid more emphasis on Fichte. At the height of his career, when between 1840 and 1850 many of Fichte’s works were being translated in the Catholic Series, he called attention to Fichte’s later view that all earthly things are but as a vesture or appearance under which the Divine idea of the world is the reality. Extravagant as this noumenalism is, it was a healthy antidote to the phenomenalism of the day. Among other followers of German idealism were J. F. Ferrier (q.v.), who adopted the hypothesis of Schelling and Hegel that there is one absolute intelligence (see his Lectures and Philosophical Remains, 1866, i. 1–33; ii. 545–568), and J. Hutchison Stirling (q.v.). About the same time Benjamin Jowett (q.v.) had been studying the philosophy of Hegel; but, being a man endowed with much love of truth but with little belief in first principles, he was too wise to take for a principle Hegel’s assumption that different things are the same. He had, however, sown seeds in the minds of two distinguished pupils, T. H. Green and E. Caird (q.v.). Both proceeded to take Hegelianism seriously, and between them spread a kind of Hegelian orthodoxy in metaphysics and in theology throughout Great T. H. Green. Britain. Green (Prolegomena to Ethics, 1883) tried to effect a harmony of Kant and Hegel by proceeding from the epistemology of the former to the metaphysics of the latter. Taken for granted the Kantian hypothesis of a sense of sensations requiring synthesis by understanding, and the Kantian conclusion that Nature as known consists of phenomena united by categories as objects of experience, Green argued, in accordance with Kant’s first position, that knowledge, in order to unite the manifold of sensations by relations into related phenomena, requires unifying intelligence, or what Kant called synthetic unity of apperception, which cannot itself be sensation, because it arranges sensations; and he argued, in accordance with Kant’s second position, that therefore Nature itself as known requires unifying intelligence to constitute the relations of its phenomena, and to make it a connected world of experience. When Green said that “Nature is the system of related appearances, and related appearances are impossible apart from the action of an intelligence,” he was speaking as a pure Kantian, who could be answered only by the Aristotelian position that Nature consists of related bodies beyond appearances, and by the realistic supposition that there is a tactical sense of related bodies, of the inter-resisting members of the organism, from which reason infers similar related bodies beyond sense. But now, whatever opinion we may have about Nature, at all events, as Green saw, it does not come into existence in the process by which this person or that begins to think. Nature is not my nature, nor your nature, but one. From this fact of unity of Nature and of everything in Nature, combined with the two previous positions accepted, not from Nature, but from Kant, Green proceeded to argue, altogether beyond Kant, that Nature, being one, and also requiring unifying intelligence, requires one intelligence, an eternal intelligence, a single spiritual principle, prior to, and the condition of, our individual knowledge. According to him, therefore, Nature is one system of phenomena united by relations as objects of experience, one system of related appearances, one system of one eternal intelligence which reproduces itself in us. The “true account” of the world in his own words is “that the concrete whole, which may be described indifferently as an eternal intelligence realized in the related facts of the world, or as a system of related facts rendered possible by such an intelligence, partially and gradually reproduces itself in us, communicating piecemeal, but in inseparable correlation, understanding and the facts understood, experience and the experienced world.” Nobody can mistake the Schellingian and Hegelian nature of this conclusion. It is the Hegelian view that the world is a system of absolute reason. But it is
