idealism produced another mistake—the tendency to a modicum
of realism, as much as seemed to this or that author to follow from
psychological idealism. In Germany, since the victory of Kant
over Wolff, realism has always been in difficulties, which we
can appreciate when we reflect that the Germans by preference
apply the term “realism” to the paradoxes of Herbart (1776–1841),
who, in order to avoid supposed contradictions, supposed
that bodies are not substances, but show (Schein), while “reals”
are simple substances, each with a simple quality, and all preserving
themselves against disturbance by one another, whether
physically or psychologically, but not known to be either material
or spiritual because we do not know the simple quality in which
the nature of the real consists. There have indeed been other
realisms in Germany. Trendelenburg (1802–1872), a formidable
opponent of Hegel, tried to surmount Kant’s transcendental
idealism by supposing that motion, and therefore time, space and
the categories, though a priori, are common to thought and being.
Dühring, with a similar object, makes matter a common basis.
While these realisms come dangerously near to materialism, that
of the Roman Catholic A. Günther (1783–1863), “Cartesius correctus,”
erected too mystical an edifice on the psychological basis
of Descartes to sustain a satisfactory realism. Yet Güntherism
has produced a school, of which the most distinguished
representative is the Old Catholic bishop in Bonn, Th. Weber, whose
Metaphysik, completed in 1891, starting from the ego and the
analysis of consciousness, aims at arriving at the distinction
between spirit and nature, and at rising to the spirit of God the
Creator. Other realistic systems are those of J. H. von Kirchmann
(1802–1884) , author, among other works, of Die Philosophie
des Wissens (1864) and Ueber die Principien des Realismus (1875);
Goswin Uphues (b. 1841; professor of philosophy at Halle),
directed against the scepticism of Shute’s Discourse on Truth;
and Hermann Schwarz (born 1864), who completes the psychological
view of Uphues that we can know objects as they are, by
the metaphysical view that they can be as we know them. But
German realism lacks critical power, and is little better than a
weed overshadowed by the luxuriant forest of German idealism.
In France, the home of Cartesian realism, after the vicissitudes of sensationalism and materialism, which became connected in the French mind with the Revolution, the spirit of Descartes revived in the 19th century in the spiritualistic realism of Victor Cousin. But Cousin’s psychological method of proceeding from consciousness outwards, and the French Realism. emphasis laid by him on spirit in comparison with body, prevented a real revival of realism. He essayed to answer Locke by Kant, and Kant by Reid, Maine de Biran and Schelling. From Reid he adopted the belief in an external world beyond sensation, from Biran the explanation of personality by will, from Schelling the identification of all reason in what he called “impersonal reason,” which he supposed to be identical in God and man, to be subjective and objective, psychological and ontological. We start, according to him, from a psychological triplicity in consciousness, consisting of sensation, personal will and impersonal reason, which by a priori laws of causality and substance carries us to the ontological triplicity of oneself as ego willing, the non-ego as cause of sensation, and God as the absolute cause beneath these relative causes. So far this ontological triplicity is realism. But when we examine his theory of the non-ego, and find that it resolves matter into active force and this into animated activity, identifies law with reason, and calls God absolute substance, we see at once that this spiritual realism is not very far from idealism. About 1840, owing largely to the teaching of E. Saisset in the spiritualistic school, the influence of Descartes began to give way to that of Leibnitz. Leibnitz has been used both realistically and idealistically in France. He was taken literally by spiritual realists, e.g. by Paul Janet (q.v.). Janet accepted the traditional ontological triplicity—God, souls and bodies—and, in answer to Ravaisson, who called this realism “demi-spiritualisme,” rejoined that he was content to accept the title. At the same time, like Cousin, his works show a tendency to underrate body, tending as they do to the Leibnitzian analysis of the material into the immaterial, and to the supposition that the unity of the body is only given by the soul. His emphasis is on spirit, and he goes so far as to admit that “no spiritualist is engaged to defend the existence of matter.” The strength of Janet’s position is his perception that the argument from final causes is in favour of an omnipresent rational will making matter a means to ends, and not in favour of an immanent mind of Nature working out her own ends.
The psychological metaphysics of Cousin and of Janet was, however, too flimsy a realism to withstand its passage into this very idealism of matter which has become the dominant French metaphysics. Étienne Vacherot (q.v.) deserted Descartes for Hegel. He accepted from Hegel “the real is rational” without the Hegelian method, for which he substituted conscious experience as a revelation of the divine. Matter he held to be mind at the minimum of its action, and evolution the “expansion de l’activité incessante de la cause finale.” God, according to his latest view, is the absolute being as first cause and final end. “Let us leave,” says he in deference to Janet, “the category of the ideal, which applies to nothing real or living.” But the most noticeable passage in Le Nouveau spiritualisme (1884) is its contrast between the old and the new; where he says that the old spiritualism opposed spirit to matter, God to Nature, the new spiritualism places matter in spirit, Nature in God (p. 377). F. Ravaisson (see Ravaisson-Mollien), by his Rapport (prepared for the Exhibition of 1867) on philosophy in France, gave a fresh impulse to the transition from spiritual realism to idealism, by developing the Aristotelian ἔφεσις of matter and the Leibnitzian appetition of monads into “l’amour” as the very being of things. Jules Lachelier (born 1832) agreed with Ravaisson that beauty is the last word of things, but, under the influence of Kant and his successors, put his idealism rather in the form that all is thought. A. Fouillée (q.v.) rightly objects that we must not thus impute thought and intention to Nature, and yet does not scruple to impute to it life, sensation and want. Starting from consciousness, he argues that all known things are phenomena of consciousness. Then, agreeing with evolutionism, that things are necessarily determined by forces, but with Leibnitz that body is merely passive, he infers that force, being active, is psychical—a force, which he describes as “idée-force,” and as “vouloir-vivre.” In connexion with the “idées directrices et organisatrices,” supposed by the French physiologist Claude Bernard, and the universal will supposed by German voluntarists, Fouillée concludes that the world is a society of wills. Meanwhile, more under the influence of Kant, C. B. Renouvier (q.v.) has worked out an idealism which he calls “Néo-criticisme,” rejecting the thing-in-itself, while limiting knowledge to phenomena constituted by a priori categories. Phenomena he identifies with “représentations représentatives et représentées.” But he takes the usual advantage of this most ambiguous of terms when he extends it to embrace God, freedom, and immortality required by the moral law. In his later work, La Nouvelle monadologie (1899), he maintains that each monad is a simple substance, endowed with representation, which is consciousness in form, phenomenon in matter as represented. In order to explain free will, he supposes, contrarily to Fouillée, that the laws of phenomena are indeterminate, contingent and liable to exceptions. Here we trace the influence of Leibnitz and Lotze, which is still more marked in La Contingence des lois de la nature (1874), by E. Boutroux. Fouillée meets the mechanics of evolution by the argument that will to live determines its necessary laws, Boutroux by denying the necessity. His point is, that the world only appears to be phenomena governed by necessary laws, and is really a spontaneity which makes new beginnings, such as life and consciousness, tending to good. These examples are enough to show that the psychological metaphysics of spiritual realism has not been able to withstand the rise and progress of spiritual idealism in France.
In England, the land of Bacon and Locke, the realistic tendency has been more active, and is exhibited in Bacon’s Novum organum and De Augmentis scientiarum, as well as to a less degree in the Fourth Book of Locke’s Essay. After the metaphysical idealism, begun by Berkeley, had eventuated in Hume’s reduction of the English Realism. objects of knowledge to sensations, ideas and associations, the Scottish school, applying the Baconian method to the study of mind, began to inquire once more for the evidences of our knowledge, and produced the natural or intuitive realism of T. Reid, Dugald Stewart and Sir William Hamilton, who, having been followed by H. L. Mansel, as well as by J. Veitch, H. Calderwood and J. M‘Cosh, prolonged the existence of the school, in which we may venture to place L. T. Hobhouse and F. W. Bain, author of The Realization of the Possible (1899), down to our own time.
Its main tenet, that we have an immediate perception of the external world, is roughly expressed in the following words of
Reid: “I do perceive matter objectively—that is, something