He who reads as reflectively as he should will soon find out that philosophers “call names” much as other men do, and that one should always be on one’s guard.  “Every form of phenomenalism,” asseverated a learned and energetic old gentleman, who for many years occupied a chair in one of our leading institutions of learning, “necessarily leads to atheism.”  He inspired a considerable number of students with such a horror for “phenomenalism” that they never took pains to find out what it was.

I mention these things in this connection, because I suspect that not a few in our own day are unduly influenced by the associations which cling to the words “realism” and “idealism.”  Realism in literature, as many persons understand it, means the degradation of literature to the portrayal of what is coarse and degrading, in a coarse and offensive way.  Realism in painting often means the laborious representation upon canvas of things from which we would gladly avert our eyes if we met them in real life.  With the word “idealism,” on the other hand, we are apt to connect the possession of ideals, a regard for what is best and noblest in life and literature.

The reader must have seen that realism in the philosophic sense of the word has nothing whatever to do with realism in the senses just mentioned.  The word is given a special meaning, and it is a weakness to allow associations drawn from other senses of the word to color our judgment when we use it.

And it should be carefully held in view that the word “idealism” is given a special sense when it is used to indicate a type of doctrine contrasted with the doctrine of the realist.  Some forms of philosophical idealism have undoubtedly been inspiring; but some have been, and are, far from inspiring.  They should not be allowed to posture as saints merely because they are cloaked with an ambiguous name.

53.  IDEALISM.—­Idealism we may broadly define as the doctrine that all existence is mental existence.  So far from regarding the external world as beyond and independent of mind, it maintains that it can have its being only in consciousness.

We have seen (section 49) how men were led to take the step to idealism.  It is not a step which the plain man is impelled to take without preparation.  To say that the real world of things in which we perceive ourselves to live and move is a something that exists only in the mind strikes him as little better than insane.  He who becomes an idealist usually does so, I think, after weighing the arguments presented by the hypothetical realist, and finding that they seem to carry one farther than the latter appears to recognize.

The type of idealism represented by Berkeley has been called Subjective Idealism.  Ordinarily our use of the words “subjective” and “objective” is to call attention to the distinction between what belongs to the mind and what belongs to the external order of things.  My sensations are subjective, they are referred to my mind, and it is assumed that they can have no existence except in my mind; the qualities of things are regarded as objective, that is, it is commonly believed that they exist independently of my perception of them.