In re e symbolic art of the Orient, but most perfectly the romantic art of the modern period. gion the absolute idea is expressed in the imagiation through worship. In Oriental pantheism, he individual is overwhelmed by his sense of the universal; in Greek religion, God is but a higher nan; while in Christianity God and man are perfectly united in Christ. Finally, in philosophy the absolute idea reaches its highest possible expression in articulate thought. § 181. Such is absolute idealism approached from the stand-point of antecedent metaphysics. Résumé. Fai ure of Absolute Idealism to Solve the Problem of Evil. It is the most elaborate and subtle provision for antagonistic differences within unity that the speculative mind of man has as yet been able to make. It is the last and most thorough attempt to resolve individual and universal, temporal and eternal, natural and ideal, good and evil, into an absolute unity in which the universal, eternal, ideal, and good shall dominate, and in which all terms shall be related with such necessity as obtains in the definitions and theorems of geometry. There is to be some absolute meaning which is rational to the uttermost and the necessary ground of all the incidents of existence. Thought could undertake no more ambitious and exacting task. Nor is it dent after all that absolute idealism enjoys e better success in this task than absolute real The difference between them becomes much marked when we reflect that the former, like latter, must reserve the predicate of being for unity of the whole. Even though evil and e tradiction belong to the essence of things, move the secret heart of a spiritual universe, the rea is not these in their severalty, but that life with which they fall, the story within which th earn a place." And if absolute idealism has defined a new perfection, it has at the same ti defined a new imperfection. The perfection is rich in contrast, and thus inclusive of both the lights and shades of experience; but the perfection belongs only to the composition of these elements within a single view. It is not necessary to such perfection that the evil should ever be viewed in isolation. The idealist employs the analogy of the drama or the picture whose very significance re quires the balance of opposing forces; or the analogy of the symphony in which a higher musical quality is realized through the resolution of discord into harmony. But none of these unities requires any element whatsoever that does not partake of its eauty. It is quite irrelevant to the drama that he hero should himself have his own view of vents with no understanding of their dramatic alue, as it is irrelevant to the picture that an unbalanced fragment of it should dwell apart, or So the symphony that the discord should be heard without the harmony. One may multiply without end the internal differences and antagonisms that contribute to the internal meaning, and be as far as ever from understanding the external detachment of experiences that are not rational or good in themselves. And it is precisely this kind of fact that precipitates the whole problem. We do not judge of sin and error from experiences in which they conduct to goodness and truth, but from experiences in which they are stark and unresolved. In view of such considerations many idealists have been willing to confess their inability to solve this problem. To quote a recent expositor of Hegel, "We need not, after all, be surprised at the apparently insoluble problem which confronts us. For the question has developed into the old difficulty of the origin of evil, which has always baffled both theologians and philosophers. An idealism which declares that the universe is in reality perfect, can find, as most forms of popular idealism do, an escape from the difficulties of the istence of evil, by declaring that the universe is £ only growing towards its ideal perfection. Bu refuge disappears with the reality of time, and left with an awkward difference between what phils tells us must be, and what our life tells us actually If the philosophy of eternal perfection persis its fundamental doctrine in spite of this irrew.. able conflict with life, it is because it is belie that that doctrine must be true. Let us turnta to its more constructive and compelling argum $182. The proof of absolute idealism is posed by the majority of its exponents to foll The Construc- from the problem of epistemology, a more particularly from the manifes tive Argument for Absolute Idealism is Theory of Based upon the dependence of truth upon the knowing Subjectivistic mind. In its initial In its initial phase absolut idealism is indistinguishable from subjectivism. Like that philosophy it finds that the object of knowledge is inseparable from the state of knowledge throughout the whole range of es perience. Since the knower can never escape. self, it may be set down as an elementary fact that reality (at any rate whatever reality can be known or even talked about) owes its being to mind. • McTaggart: Studies in Hegelian Dialectic, p. 181. ex him Thus Green, the English neo-Hegelian, maintains hat “an object which no consciousness presented to itself would not be an object at all," and wonders that this principle is not generally taken for granted and made the starting-point for philosophy. However, unless the very term "object" is intended to imply presence to a subject, this principle is by no means self-evident, and must be traced to its sources. We have already followed the fortunes of that empirical subjectivism which issues from the relativity of perception. At the very dawn of philosophy it was observed that what is seen, heard, or otherwise experienced through the senses, depends not only upon the use of sense-organs, but upon the special point of view occupied by each individual sentient being. It was therefore concluded that the perceptual world belonged to the human knower with his limitations and perspective, rather than to being itself. It was this epistemological principle upon which Berkeley founded his empirical idealism. Believing knowledge to consist essentially in perception, and believing perception to be subjective, he had to choose between the relegation of being to a region inac 'Green: Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 15. |