THE NEW REALISM AND THE OLD IDEALISM. 327 must not say, with Mr. Bradley, that the objects of our ex- perience have only degrees of reality. 1 Idealism, as I under- stand it, admits the reality of all the objects of our experience. It leaves us our cups and saucers, our suns and planets, our primroses and skylarks, our time and space, undisturbed. What it denies is that any of these things are to be regarded as distinct and independent realities, separable from one another and from us. It maintains that they can only be interpreted as parts of a whole ; that that whole is a living whole ; and that its ultimate interpretation can only be found in the development of intelligence within it. What I concede to the realist is that much, perhaps most or even all, of our British idealism has been far too subjec- tive. This is true, I should admit, not only of those definite speculative constructions that have been attempted, but even of the general habit of mind that has prevailed, and of the modes in which it has expressed itself in literature. Browning, for instance, seems to me to fail in the end, just as Berkeley fails, and just as Green and Mr. Bradley fail,, to give a truly idealistic interpretation of the world, through the fact that he has no real place for nature. He gave his attention, as he says, to ' incidents in the development of a soul ; little else is worth study '. The result of this as Prof. Henry Jones has so forcibly brought out is, as in the case of Berkeley, to lead to scepticism as to the possi- bility of real knowledge ; for the conditions that govern poetic thought are, after all, very similar to those that govern philosophic thought. Wordsworth, I think, showed in this a truer insight, when he looked to nature for the revelation of the spiritual significance of the universe ; and with Goethe, as we know, it is the Earth-spirit that ' weaves the living robe of Deity '. It is this that we have to learn from realism. The lesson for the idealist at the present time, if I may adapt a saying of Carlyle, is ' Close thy Browning open thy Goethe : Close thy Berkeley open thy Plato : Close thy Bradley open thy Hegel '. I hope that, when Browning, Berkeley, and Bradley are closed, they will not be hermetically sealed ; and that when Goethe, 1 There are no doubt successive stages in the development of our ap- prehension of reality ; but I feel bound to maintain, as strenuously as Parmenides, that reality itself is one and eternal. As I have already indicated, however, I believe it to be an eternal process, with many successive stages in its growth. It is not quite clear to me whether this is what is meant by those who affirm degrees of truth and reality ; but I think their meaning is somewhat different. In any case, the word ' degree ' does not seem to me quite satisfactory.
