Idealism Author:William Graham Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: § 2. Tendency to Idealism in Modern Speculation.— The final aim of all Philosophy has, indeed, ever been one and the same from Plato to Hegel—to find the One in ... more »the Many, to discover a unity under all knowledge, a single principle of connexion for all the phenomena of External and Human Nature, and from this principle incidentally to receive answers to certain questions, deeply interesting to each individual, as the Whence and the Whither of the world and ourselves. But, conditioning this final solution, and even its possibility, on the way to it there arise preparatory questions which present themselves differently to different ages and nations of the world. The Sceptic of Philosophy thinks these arise to bar us from ever getting nearer to the answer; the Philosopher, that these new questions are simply clearer conceptions of the problem to be solved, and a nearer step to its resolution. Prudens inter- rogatio dimidium est Scientice, and so in Philosophy, a judiciously put question may contain in itself a half revelation, and direct the course of speculation for the future into the only profitable channel of investigation. A new hypothesis which may contain the whole solution presents itself first in the form of a question which awaits the man of genius to give it clear and definite shape. Such a question was that raised by Berkeley, nearly a century after it had been confusedly suggested to Des Cartes, namely,does Matter exist as an entity per se ? or, to put it differently, has the Erernal World for sentient beings any meaning, and, therefore, for them any existence apart from those perceptions of the senses, through which alone it is revealed to them ? Since our perception of an External World is through an actual sensation, and our conception of it a congeries of imagin...« less