CHAP. III.] THE EXTERNAL WORLD. 57 



one as soon as the other, though at first it can of course 

 recognise neither. 



He who is often spoken of as the parent of idealism, 

 Berkeley, taught that nothing existed outside us but other 

 minds, and that the apparently existing external world was 

 but the action of the Divine mind upon created minds; and 

 some modification of idealism, of a less pious nature,is professed 

 by most of the writers on philosophy popular in England 

 to-day by Tyndall and by Huxley equally with Bain and Mill. 



John Stuart Mill conceived the material world as made 

 up of &quot;permanent possibilities of sensation,&quot; but Mr. John 

 admitted the reasonableness of the belief in some s 

 kind of an external world beyond consciousness, and in the 

 existence of other &quot; threads of consciousness &quot; besides our 

 own. Mill, for a logician, had a singular tendency to con 

 tradict and refute himself, and Mr. Martiiieau has pointed 

 out * how, by Mill s system, &quot; we are landed in this singular 

 result ; our only sphere of cognisable reality is subjective : 

 and that is generated from an objective world which we have 

 no reason to believe exists. In our author s theory of 

 cognition, the non-ego disappears in the ego ; in the theory 

 of being, the ego lapses back into the non-ego. Idealist in 

 the former, he is materialist in the latter.&quot; 



But if Mill is open to this charge of inconsistency, a 

 fortiori are those teachers of physical science or psychology 

 open to it, who, professing idealism, teach what is practically 

 materialism keeping &quot; the word of promise to our ear to 

 break it to our hope.&quot; As to such teachers, Mr. Sterling 

 remarks f (referring immediately to Mr. Bain): &quot;is not 

 materialism all that is for them fundamental? and is not the 

 idealism but, profanely to say it, the tongue in the cheek 

 to the priest, who incontinently sinks silent, dumbfounded ?&quot; 



Mr. Herbert Spencer differs notably from the general run 

 of thinkers of the school of Mill in that he asserts Mr. spencer s 

 himself to be not an Idealist but a Realist, and Realism. 



Essays, p. 101. t As regards Protoplasm, p. 62. 



