Objective Idealism at least aims to be an interpretation of experience, and not a short and easy explanation of it, as this view of it implies. Nevertheless, the Idealist, while disclaiming their application to his own position, will welcome the fresh and telling way in which the arguments against Subjective Idealism have been restated, and even recognize some useful additions. And he must also admit, as Professor Caird has recently pointed out, that there has been a certain subjectivism about the discussions of some recent English Idealists, a tendency to speak of the mind as 'creating relations' or 'constructing reality,' to which these criticisms legitimately apply.[1]
It has been said above that there is one exception to this restriction of the realistic criticism to esse est percipi. Mr. G. E. Moore, in the course of a long and minute argument of some fifty pages, pauses once, and, merely in passing, devotes a half page to two other definitions of reality. "Some philosophers," he says, "have sometimes suggested that when we call a thing 'real,' we mean that it is 'systematically connected' in some way with other things. But when we look into their meaning, we find that what they mean is . . . systematically connected with other real things. . . . And other philosophers have suggested that what we mean by 'real' is . . . connected in some way with a purpose. . . . But if we look into this meaning, we find they mean connected with a real purpose."[2] Both definitions, therefore, are circular, for both presuppose reality in some simpler sense.
Now this criticism is vitiated by an assumption which seems to the Idealist very common in realistic arguments. This assumption is that there are many possible systems of things, but only one among them is real, and so qualified to serve as a test to apply to any object claiming reality. Therefore we must look for some more ultimate reality to distinguish the real system from those which are not real, and this we can find only in that reality
- ↑ Cf. "Idealism and the Theory of Knowledge," in Proceedings of the British Academy, 1903-1904, p. 105.
- ↑ In Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1905-1906. Mr. B. Russell has also recently made use of this idea in criticising the 'coherence-theory.' Cf. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1906-1907, p. 34.
