APPENDIX C 407 



and all its ways as Professor James miglit still rank as an 

 idealist of idealists. Idealism is constituted by the meta- 

 physical value it sets upon ideals, not by the aesthetic or 

 the ethical, and rather by its method of putting them on the 

 throne of things than by the mere intent to have them there. 

 It is always distinct from mysticism (which at the core is 

 simply emotionalism), and still more so from voluntarism. 

 Its method is, at bottom, to vindicate the human ideals by 

 showing them to be not merely ideals but realities, and to 

 effect this by exhibiting conscious being as the only absolute 

 reality; this, again, it aims to accomplish by setting the 

 reality of conscious being in the only trans-subjective aspect 

 thereof, namely, intelhgence. 



So the fact comes about that ideahsm gets its essential 

 character from its discovery that intelligent certainty de- 

 pends on such an interpretation of reality as makes the 

 knowledge of reality by the spontaneous light of intelligence 

 conceivable ; in short, that idealism is necessarily rational- 

 ism, that is, implies an apriorist theory of knowledge. No 

 sort of experientialism, so far as it is consistent, can rightly 

 be called idealism. Voluntarism or emotive mysticism it 

 readily may be, but then it is simply subjectivism ; and if 

 it be taken in cognitive terms, it cannot get beyond sensa- 

 tionism, unable as it is to provide for any changeless and 

 universal ideas with which to organise experiences into 

 objects that are inalterably the same for all subjects and 

 therefore abidingly real. Not even such a theory as Berke- 

 ley's (to which one of the eight essayists appears to hold, 

 with some added helps from Kant) can be consistently called 

 idealism ; for though it teaches that there is an immutable 

 principle at the basis of our experiences, namely, the opera- 

 tion of tlie eternal ideas in the Divine intelligence, con- 

 trolHng God's communication of sensations to us, yet the 

 assumption of this Divine Mind is unwarranted by the strict 

 experientialism from which the theory takes its departure. 



