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REV. CHANCELLOR LIAS^ M.A., ON 



They have revived the Realists of the Middle Ages, who con- 

 tended for the actual existence of abstract ideas. Their opponents, 

 the Nominalists, contended that abstract ideas were simply 

 formulae of classification — attempts of thinkers, that is, to dis- 

 tinguish between one class of phenomena or ideas and another. 

 So the Germans and their followers began to talk pompously 

 about the True, the Ideal, the Beautiful, and the like, and clever 

 young Englishmen like Bulwer Lytton were carried away by 

 the fascination of novelty, and plentifully besprinkled their 

 pages with these abstract formulae. Thackeray (I think it was), 

 on the other hand, made very merry with these would-be philo- 

 sophers, with their " the Beautiful, with a big B,'' " the True, 

 with a big T,'' and " the G-ood, with a big G." It was often 

 little more than a cheap way of gaining a reputation for intellect. 

 Meanwhile, our English philosophers, the Cambridge Platonists, 

 Hobbes, Locke, and our great Bishop Butler, plodded on their 

 weary way trying to arrange and co-ordinate simple facts in 

 matters purely intellectual or spiritual, and deduce from them a 

 system, without any attempt to soar into an empyrean of meta- 

 physics. Bacon, too, laid the foundations of physical — indeed of 

 all — science, and Newton and the mathematicians built on them. 

 From his day to our own, physical science has been making 

 one long stride in its translation of the unknown into the sphere 

 of the known, which we call science. Berkeley avoided falling 

 into one inconsistency by falling into another. He denied the 

 existence of matter, and argued that ideas, and ideas alone, had 

 a real existence. But he overlooked the fact that the word 

 matter as much involved one set of phenomena as mind did 

 another. 



But to return to German metaphysics. That it did lead to 

 some advance in our conceptions of facts outside the realm of 

 nature, cannot be denied. But the value of its contributions 

 to that end have been much exaggerated. When it pretends to 

 arrive at conclusions by isolating phenomena instead of relating 

 them, and imagines that by so doing it adds to our knowledge 

 of things unseen, it makes a serious mistake. And so the specula- 

 tions of the various German leaders of philosophic thought, as 

 well as their various definitions, were quite as often barriers to 

 progress as they were progress itself. In theology this is very 

 evident. God, we were told, was " the Infinite,'' " the Absolute,'' 

 and " the Unconditioned." Now, each of these statements is 

 directly contrary to fact. They strip the God of Scripture and 



