EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



posed to shut men's eyes to every attribute and 

 indication and significance of matter that was 

 worthy of the philosopher's attention, so the ideal- 

 ism which fancies that consciousness all the mind 

 it knows is the noumenon, the reality of mind, 

 proposes to shut men's eyes to every fact of mind 

 that bears upon the sole and supreme question of 

 philosophy, which is the quest of reality of things 

 not as they seem, but as they are, as Plato would 

 have said, or of essences, not accidents, in 'the 

 phraseology of the school-men. 



Hence it is that our academic philosophers, who, 

 just now, are followers of Hegel in accordance 

 with the generalization that " Good German philos- 

 ophies, when they die, go to Oxford" and who 

 regard their own consciousness as portions of reality 

 directly and wholly known to them, are to be 

 heard discussing, for instance, the psychology of 

 Herbert Spencer, on the ground that he speaks 

 of mental facts as phenomena (or appearances), 

 whereas the term should properly be confined, they 

 say, to material facts. To discuss the "phenom- 

 enal ego," they aver, is to abuse language and 

 evidence an incapacity for appreciating the con- 

 ditions of the problems under discussion, for the 

 ego is that to which the non-ego appears i. e., is 

 phenomenal. The one thing known as it is/ not 

 as it appears, is the ego, and from it may, therefore, 

 be constructed a complete dogmatic system of the 

 Cosmos, not as it appears, but as it verily is. 



But as we well know to-day, academic idealism 

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