IDEALISM and ITS TYPES

In the popular mind the term idealist has a meaning which is quite different from the
philosophical use of the term. Popularly, the word may mean:
(1) One who accepts and lives by lofty moral, aesthetic, and religious standards. Such a man is
said to be a man of ideals, or an idealist.
(2) One who is able to see and to advocate some plan or program which does not yet exist.
Every social reformer and prophet is an idealist in this sense because he is supporting that
which has not yet come into existence. Those who work for permanent peace or for the
elimination of poverty may be called idealists. The term may be used in a complimentary sense,
meaning that which is excellent of its kind. It may be used as a term of reproach. For example,
a person may be called a "fanatical idealist" if he stands for what other persons believe to be
unattainable goals or if he seems to ignore the "facts" and practical conditions of any situation.
The philosophical meaning of the term idealism is determined more by the meaning of the
terms idea and mind than by the term ideal. Professor W. E. Hocking, an idealist, says that for
sense the term "idea-ism would be more to the point. " The letter has been inserted for
euphonious reasons. Idealism asserts that reality is akin to ideas, thought, mind, or selves rather
than to material forces.
WHAT IDEALISM IS
Idealism is a way of interpreting human experience and the world which places emphasis on
mind as in some way prior to matter. Just as materialism emphasizes matter, so idealism
stresses mind. Whereas materialism says that matter is the real and mind is an accompanying
phenomenon, idealism contends that mind is real and matter is in a sense a by-product. On the
negative side, idealism is a denial that the world is basically a great machine to be interpreted
in terms of matter and mechanism or in terms of energy and the physical sciences alone. More
positively, idealism is a world view or a metaphysics which holds that the basic reality is
constituted of, or closely related to, mind, ideas, thought, or selves. The real is the rational and
the intelligible. The world has a meaning apart from its surface appearance. The approach to
the meaning of things is through the self rather than through an objective analysis of nature.
The world is interpreted by means of a study of the laws of thought and of consciousness and
not exclusively by means of objective science.
Since the universe has a meaning, there is a kind of inner harmony between the world and man.
What is "highest in spirit" is also "deepest in nature." Man is "at home" in the universe and not
an alien or a mere creature of chance, since the universe is in some sense a logical and a spiritual
system. The self is not an isolated entity; it is a genuine part of the world process. This process
at its high levels manifests itself as creativity, mind, and selves, or persons. Man, as a part of
the cosmos, expresses its inner structure in his own life. Nature, or the objective world, is real
in the sense that it exists and demands our attention and adjustment to it. Nature, however, is
not sufficient in and of itself since it depends to a certain degree upon mind. In nature we find
matter, life, mind, and values. Idealists believe that nature is to be interpreted in terms of its
later and higher manifestations rather than in terms of its earlier and lower ones. Idealists are
willing to let the physical scientists tell us what matter is providing they do not reduce
everything in the world to that category. They are willing to let the biological sciences describe

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life and its processes providing they do not reduce all other levels to the biological or the
physiological. Idealists stress the organic unity of the world process. Whole and parts cannot
be separated except by a dangerous abstraction. There is an inner unity, an unfolding series of
levels, from matter to vegetable forms, through animals to man, mind, and spirit. Thus a central
principle of idealism is that of organic wholeness.
TYPES OF IDEALISM
SUBJECTIVE IDEALISM
This type of idealism is sometimes called mentalism or even phenomenalism. It is the least
significant and prevalent type and the one most frequently attacked by opponents of idealism.
Minds or spirits and their perceptions or ideas are all that exist. The "objects" of experience are
not material things; they arcf merely perceptions. Things such as buildings and trees exist, butf
they have no independent existence apart from a mind that per-/ ceives them. The subjective
idealist does not deny the existence of what we call the "real" world; the question at issue is
not its existence but how it is to be interpreted. It is not independently real apart from a knower.
No one can get outside or beyond his own experience.
This type of idealism is probably best represented by George Berkeley (1685-1753), an Irish
philosopher. Berkeley accepted the psychology of John Locke (i 632-1 704), who said that our
knowledge deals only with ideas. Locke accepted the existence of spiritual substance, ideas,
and material substance. He distinguished between the primary qualities of matter (form,
extension, solidity, figure, motion, number, and so on) and secondary qualities (colors, sounds,
tastes, odors, and the like). The secondary qualities are not in the material substance; they are
in the mind or they are the way in which the primary qualities affect the mind or knower. The
secondary qualities vary from person to person.
Berkeley went further than Locke and attempted to show that the primary qualities have no
existence apart from minds. Berkeley insisted that the arguments used by Locke to prove the
subjectivity of secondary qualities apply equally well to the primary qualities. For Berkeley,
minds and ideas are therefore all that exist. Esse est percepi, "to be is to be perceived," is the
center of his philosophy. An idea, according to Berkeley, is an object known. Objects exist
only as they are perceived. There is no distinction between primary qualities and secondary
qualities, since both are in the mind. All that is real is a conscious mind or some perception or
idea held by such a mind. How, he asks, could we speak of anything that was other than an idea
or a perception? When we assert that we can imagine objects existing when they are not seen,
and that men do believe in the independent existence of an external world, Berkeley tells us
that the order and consistency of the world of nature is due to active spirit, even though I, as an
individual, am not responsible for it.
God is the author and the governing spirit of nature, and God's will is the Law of Nature. He
determines the succession and the order of our ideas. This explains why we cannot determine
what we shall .see when we open our eyes. When we say that any object exists, we mean that
it is perceived by some mind. The subjectivist holds, then, that there can be no object without
a knower; that the subject (mind or knower) in some way creates its object (matter, or thing
known); and that all that is real must be a conscious mind or a perception by such a mind. To
say that a thing exists is merely to say that it is perceived. What anything would or could be

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apart from its being known, no one can think or say. What we see or think is a mental fact, and
the world is a mental world.
.Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is a phenomenalist who stands about midway between the
subjective and the objective idealists. Since his world is in some sense a mind-made world, let
us make the transition to objective idealism through his interpretation. For Kant there are three
realms. There is the inner world of subjective states, which is a purely personal world and not
a realm of knowledge. There is the outer world of ultimate reality, the noumenon, which is
unknown and unknowable, Man's contact with this world is through the sense of duty or the
moral law. There is also the world of nature or phenomenon, which is the realm of human
knowledge. According to Kant, the mind has an innate way of working. Form and order are
thrust on nature by the mind. Sensory experience merely furnishes the content. The mind is
active; it forms into a system of knowledge the raw material brought in by the senses. Just as
the potter takes the formless clay and fashions it into one form or another, so the mind forms
or organizes the material of the senses. Thus our thoughts regarding the world are determined
in large part by the structure of the mind. The understanding prescribes its laws to nature.

OBJECTIVE IDEALISM
A large number of idealists, from Plato to Hegel and the present, reject subjectivism, or
mentalism, and also the view that the world is in any real sense man-made. They do not accept
the principle of esse est percipi ("to be is to be perceived"). They regard the organization and
form of the world, and hence knowledge, as determined by the nature of the world itself. The
mind discovers what there is in the order of the world. They are idealists in that they interpret
the universe as an intelligible order whose systematic structure is expressive of rational order
and value. When they say that the ultimate nature of the universe is mind, they mean that the
universe is expressive essentially of the mental or spiritual in character and that it is an organic
whole.
Although the term idealism has been used only in recent times to designate a school of
philosophic thought, the beginnings of idealistic speculation in Western civilization are often
attributed to Plato (427-347 B.C.). Plato believed that behind the empirical world of change,
the phenomenal world which we see and feel, there is an ideal world of eternal essences, forms,
or "Ideas." He believed in the objective reality of our ideals and values. For Plato the world is
divided into two realms. There is, first, the world of sense perception, the world of sights,
sounds, and individual things. This concrete, temporal, perishable world is not the real world;
it is the world of appearances only. Second, there is the supersensible world of concepts, ideas,
universals, or eternal essences. The concept "man" has more reality than any individual person
has. We recognize individual things through our knowledge of these concepts or eternal
patterns. This second realm contains the patterns, forms, or types which serve asstandards for
the things of sense perception. Ideas are the original, transcendent pattern of things, the reality
of which perceptions and individual things are mere copies or shadows. Reality is found in
what is common to all individuals. While reality is thought of as immaterial, Plato would not
say that there is nothing real except mind and its experiences. The unchanging Ideas, or
essences, are known to man through his reason. The changing world of matter is known to him
through his senses. To Plato, the soul of man is an immaterial essence imprisoned for a time in

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the body. Plato's views have had a profound influence in the history of thought right down to
modern times.
Some idealists maintain that all parts of the world are included in one all-embracing order
which finds its unity in the ideals and purposes of an Absolute Mind. Hegel (1770-1831)
represents one of the best known systems of absolute or monistic idealism. His system is
sometimes called evolutionary, logical idealism. Thought is the essence of the universe, and
nature is the whole of mind objectified. The universe is an unfolding process of thought. Nature
is the Absolute Reason expressing itself in outward form. Consequently, the laws of thought
are also the laws of reality. History is the way the Absolute appears in nature and human
experience. Since the world is one and since it is purposive and intelligent, it must be of the
nature of thought. The world expresses itself in our thinking; our thinking does not determine
the nature of the world. When we think of the total world order as embracing the inorganic, the
organic, and the spiritual levels of existence in one all-inclusive order, we speak of the
Absolute, or the Absolute Spirit, or God.
Instead of the fixed or static reality and the separate and complete self of traditional philosophy,
Hegel sets forth a dynamic conception of a self that is so interrelated with its environment that
a clear-cut distinction cannot be drawn between the two. The self is in and is experiencing
reality at all times; thus we have the conception of a concrete universal. The universal is present
in all the experiences of the dynamic process. In such a philosophy, distinctions and differences
belong to the phenomenal world and are relative. They do not affect the unity of the one
purposive intelligence. Since the time of Hegel there have been many systems of objective
idealism.
The objective idealists do not deny the existence of an external or objective reality. In fact, they
believe that their position is the only one which does justice to the objective side of experience,
since they find in nature the same principles of order, reason, and purpose that men find within
themselves. There is purposive intelligence at the heart of nature. This is discovered, they
believe, and is not "read into" the world. Nature existed before me, the individual self, and will
exist after me. Nature also existed before the present community of selves. The existence of
meaning in the world, however, implies something akin to mind or thought at the core of reality.
Such a significant order of reality is given man to comprehend and to participate in. This belief
in meaning and intelligence in the structure of the world is a basic intuition underlying idealism.
Pan-psychism is a form of idealism standing somewhere between objective idealism and
personalism. Pan-psychism, which means literally "All-Soul," is the doctrine that reality is
psychic in character or that everything has mind. Mind is universal throughout nature so that
the world is alive. According to Leibnitz (1646-1716), the world is composed of monads, or
atoms of energy, which are really psychical in nature. There are no breaks in nature and nothing
is dead. The inorganic order represents the sleeping monads; in the animals they are dreaming,
in man they are waking, while God is the fully conscious Monad. The monads are separate and
distinct, but there is unity due to a pre-established cosmic harmony.
PERSONALISM, OR PERSONAL IDEALISM
Personalism is a protest against both mechanistic naturalism and monistic idealism. For the
personalist the basic fact is not abstract thought or a thought process but a person, a self, or a
thinker. Reality is of the nature of conscious personality. The self is an irreducible living unit

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which can be divided only by a false , abstraction. The personalists believe that recent
developments in modern science, including the theory of relativity, have added support to their
position. The "standpoint of the observer" is a ! concept coming to be recognized in recent
research. The knower ! or the spectator must be considered as well as the phenomena \ which
he observes. What is "out there" can be understood only in relation to what is "in here." Reality
is a system of personal selves, hence it is pluralistic. Personalists emphasize the reality i and
the worth of individual persons, of moral values, and of '( human freedom.
Nature, for the personalists, is a real objective order. However, it does not exist in and of itself.
Persons transcend or rise above \ nature in interpreting it. Science transcends itself through its
own theories, and the world of meaning and of values surpasses the world of nature as the final
explanation. Personalists such as ! Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817-1881), Borden P. Bowne
(1847- 1910), and the contemporary personalists have emphasized this point of view. Lotze
attempted to reconcile the mechanical view of nature as set forth by the special sciences with
the idealistic interpretation of a spiritual unity. For Bowne, self-conscious mind realizes itself
through the order of nature and transcends it. Nature was created by God, who is the Supreme
Self in a society of persons.
The Supreme Spirit has expressed Himself in the material world of atoms and in conscious
selves which emerge at distinct points in the world process. There is a society of persons, or
selves, related to supreme personality. Such a supreme personality is creatively present in the
on-going of the world. Ethical and spiritual values are reinforced by and gain their meaning
from the Personal Creative Spirit to whom all men are related. Personalism is theistic; it
furnishes both religion and ethics with metaphysical foundations. God may be thought of as
finite, as a struggling hero, working for lofty moral and religious ends. At least the goodness
of God must be retained, even though it may involve some limitation in his power. The goal of
life is a perfect society of selves who have achieved perfect personalities through struggle. As
a group, the personal idealists have shown more interest in ethics and less interest in logic than
have the absolute idealists. Logically, the personal idealists hold that life is more important
than any verbal forms of expression or fixed meanings. Ethically, they stress the realization of
the capacities and powers of the person through freedom and self-control. Since personality is
the greatest value, society must be so organized as to give each person fullness of life and of
opportunity.