IDEALISM

(Yunanca köken — orijinale bakınız.) A term applied to several metaphysical systems, varying in its signification according to the meaning attached in each particular scheme to the word idea; from which it is derived. In England the best known system of idealism is that of Berkeley. In reference to this philosopher's doctrines, the word is used in its empirical sense for the object of consciousne in sensation. (See Perception.) In its Platonic or transcendental sense, the term idealism has been applied to the doctrines of Kant and Schelling; neither of whom is an idealist in the way in which Berkeley may be so called. The system of Berkeley may be thus expre ed: — The qualities of supposed objects cannot be perceived distinct from the mind that perceives them; and these qualities, it will be allowed, are all that we can know of such objects. If, therefore, there were external bodies, it is impo ible we should ever know it; and if there were not, we should have exactly the same reason for believing there were as we have now. All, therefore, which really exists is spirit, or the thinking principle. — ourselves, our fellow men, and God. What we call ideas are presented to us by God in a certain order of succe ion, which order of succe ive presentation is what we mean by the laws of nature. IDENTITY, PERSONAL, denotes the samene of the conscious subject, /, throughout all the various states of which it is the subject. The question. Wherein consists our identity, and what is its evidence? has been a source of manifold controversy to modern metaphysicians. By philosophers of the materialist school the doctrine has been ejected, as incompatible with daily and obvious experience. But independently of any hypothesis respecting the nature of the soul in itself, it has been argued, and with some plausibility, that as all our knowledge of a substince is derived from the qualities or phenomena which it presents to our senses, so that all we can mean by a substance being the same with itself is that it po e es the same qualities which it previously did (for if not, the substance is changed); so all we can know of the substance mind in particular is derived from observation of the changes which it undergoes. But we find that what we conceive to be the same individual does, at different periods, a ume under the same circumstances widely varying appearances. A man shall laugh at what when he was a child would have excited his anger or jealousy. This reasoning contains an evident fallacy. It does, in fact, like all otlier reasoning of the same kind, 584 IDIOPATHIC. imply that very doctrine which it means to refute. Consciousne , it is a erted, is the joint effect of two substances acting one on the other. How, then, can we affirm that one of these substances is changed, unle by a uming that the other remains the same? How can we show that the phenomenon laughter in the man is different from the phenomenon jealousy or anger in the boy, unle we admit that we who observe these phenomena, — ». e. by the premises, on whom these phenomena produce a given effect— remain the same as we were when we were affected previously in a different manner. A lump of sugar, as We take it to be, no longer melts in what we take to be water. A uming that the water remains water, we may fairly infer that the lump in question is not sugar, or vice vers a; not so if we profe ourselves equally ignorant of the identity of both substances. This argument, it will be seen, applies equally to the materialist and non-materialist. Such may be said to be the 7iegaiive evidence of our identity. Its positive evidence rests on the nece ity and universality of its belief, as implied in every act of memory. To remember is to refer a past state of consciousne to the same subject which now at the present moment recals it. (See Bishop Butler's Treatise on Personal Identity; Brown's Phil, of Human Mind. Lect. 12, 13, 14. . .) IDENTITY, [s. 597]