2i 8 IDEALISM AND POLITICS 



or of a spiritual philosophy! Yet, if we follow Green, 

 we must." 



There is no doubt that in thus refusing to leave any 

 ultimate room or rights to the merely secular, Green is 

 rightly rendering the idealistic doctrine. And it is on this 

 account, above all others, that it has seemed to many critics 

 "to soften the hard contrast of right and wrong," to " sap 

 intellectual and moral sincerity," "to react against the 

 plain, human way of looking at life and its problems," " to 

 weaken the bases of reason," "to prepare the way for 

 scepticism," and so forth. In making "every institution 

 and every belief alike a manifestation of a spiritual prin- 

 ciple," it seems to raise them all to the same level, to leave 

 nothing to condemn and nothing to amend. It seems to 

 be an optimism which leaves no room for effort. The 

 ' ' nothingness and nullity of sin " is so clear to it, or at 

 least the victory of good over evil is so easy and so certain 

 that the moral struggle becomes a sham fight, and there 

 is no call for ' ' the dust and heat of social reform." 

 " God's in his heaven : all's right with the world." 



The antagonism of the strenuous moral and social con- 

 sciousness to Idealism on these accounts seems to me to 

 te perfectly natural. In refusing to admit differences 

 which are absolute, in reducing all differences into relative 

 differences, or differences within or of a unity, Idealism 

 must seem to the ordinary critic, with his one-sided way 

 of thought, to render them of no account. Idealism seems 

 to the theologian to lose man in God and to be mere 

 Pantheism ; to the philosopher to evaporate things into 

 thought and to sublimate matter into spirit ; to the moralist 

 to abolish the distinction between right and wrong ; and 

 to the logician to take away the opposition of falsehood 



