THE NEW BEALISM AND THE OLD IDEALISM. 309 tive philosophy in this country to be, in a broad sense, idealistic, or at least as Sidgwick would have preferred to call it " mentalistic ". It was only a question between a sensationalist and an intellectualist form of Idealism. The discussion turned on the distinction between Nominalism and Conceptualism or, as Dr. Bosanquet very happily put it, on the true theory of Identity. Against this there was hardly anything to be set but the somewhat crude material- ism that was generally supposed to be and sometimes actually was characteristic of the students of the natural sciences, and the still cruder spiritualism that was associated with popular religion. One very unfortunate result of this state of affairs was to create a general appearance of antagon- ism between the students of natural science and the students of philosophy, except so far as Agnosticism supplied them with a via media a reconciliation through mutual confession of ignorance with regard to the nature of ultimate reality, a confession which some conceived as giving satisfaction to religion as well. Recently, however, the whole situation has been consider- ably altered. The students of the physical sciences have to a large extent changed their attitude. They are more willing than formerly to recognise the limitations of their modes of explanation ; and some of the most distinguished of them, such as Sir Oliver Lodge and Principal Lloyd Morgan representing respectively the purely physical and the biological sciences are showing a disposition to accept idealistic interpretations as more ultimate than those that are provided by the special sciences themselves. 1 On the whole, therefore, the exponents of the natural sciences are not to be reckoned among the enemies of idealism ; and it can hardly be said that, among present scientific thinkers, there is any serious supporter of a purely materialistic explanation of the universe. Materialistic interpretations are at any rate practically always rounded off with a confes- sion of ultimate ignorance and mystery, -i.e., they are little more than a form of scepticism. Idealism might thus appear to have a free field for its interpretations ; and, as the old antagonism between poetry and philosophy, of which Plato speaks, has long since been forgotten, and the newer one between philosophy and religion is beginning to disap- pear, it might almost be thought that idealism had become completely triumphant, and that a universal harmony had 1 Perhaps I ought to add that I do not here express or imply any opinion as to the value of the particular ways in which such interpre- tations have been put forward or suggested. i
