64 THE METAPHYSICAL BASIS- 



fection the ruinous imperfection of possessing only a 

 half-truth infects its results. It is not merely that there 

 remains before it the difficult and long enterprise of 

 applying its spiritual hypothesis to facts. It is giving an 

 abstract, and therefore erroneous, interpretation of its own 

 primary principle. Idealism is itself the victim of physical 

 metaphors which it has done more than any other theory 

 to expose ; for it still sets unity against difference, it still 

 employs the categories of exclusion. 1 And until it escapes 

 from the domination of such categories it cannot furnish 

 the clue to the nature nor the key to the problems of social 

 life. 



This is a matter of cardinal importance ; for to misin- 

 terpret the main hypothesis of a science is to distort, or to 

 render unintelligible, all the facts that fall within its scope. 

 I must first indicate in a few words what Idealism has done, 

 what truth it has discovered. Then I shall indicate in 

 what ways I consider its truth to be only a half-truth. And 

 lastly, I shall try to show how its half-truth turns in the 

 hands of some of its best exponents into opposite errors. 

 The discussion must be philosophical ; but at no less cost 

 can we deal with the fundamental principles on which social 

 theory must rest, and in the comprehension of which alone 

 lies the possibility of progressive social evolution. 



Idealism has proved that every object, actual or possible, 

 physical or spiritual, is essentially implicated in the subject, 

 and that spirit gives subjective form to its content, or 

 possesses it in what I may call a personal way. It has 

 detected the ideal nature of all reality ; it has revealed its 



1 This defect is less characteristic of Hegel's theory than of the version 

 of it usually given by his disciples. Hegel is the most objective of all 

 modern Idealists. 



