APPENDIX B 395 



SchelHng, Hegel ; with such later offshoots as in Spencer, 

 Fiske, T. H. Green, the two Cairds, Bradley, and Royce, — 

 all tracing back, in the last resort, to the great Oriental 

 philosophies of which the Vedanta is the type. Here, upon 

 the whole, critical interpretation must place the general 

 views of Plato and of Aristotle, the great fountain-heads of 

 the manifold idealisms of the West. In this group belong, 

 too, unless I quite misunderstand them, the systems of Dr. 

 W. T. Harris, Professor Kedney, and Professor Macbride 

 Sterrett. 



Third, those that abandon every sort of consciousness as 

 a First Principle, drop Final Cause from the list of causes, 

 and so make Matter the producing source of every one of 

 its forms, through the force supposed to be inherent in it or 

 commanent with it. These are the manifold materialisms, 

 atomic or other, from Democritus to Biichner, Vogt, or 

 Dtihring. 



Fourth, those that repudiate the search into causes as 

 baseless and futile. They demand that philosophy, to be 

 sound, shall drop metaphysics as well as theology, and con- 

 fine itself rigidly to observational and experimental science, 

 merely describing with precision, though as comprehensively 

 as possible, the facts of history and experience. This view 

 is known as positivism, and bears but one noted name, that 

 of Comte, though all the strictly sceptical systems have con- 

 tributed to it, from the Later Academy down to Hume. In 

 its own way, it frees itself from creationism utterly. But this 

 way is the way of confessed and open atheism. 



Considering these four groups with reference to their 

 bearing on the possibility of moral action, we at once throw 

 out the third and the fourth, as systems of confessed neces- 

 sarianism, which do not even pretend to furnish any basis 

 for individual freedom or for the pursuit of a rational aim 

 (such as fulness of life in the whole si)irit) from conviction 

 and choice. On the ground either of positivism or of 



