Of course, when a man becomes an idealist, he cannot keep just this distinction.  The question may, then, fairly be raised:  How can he be a subjective idealist?  Has not the word “subjective” lost its significance?

To this one has to answer:  It has, and it has not.  The man who, with strict consistency, makes the desk at which he sits as much his “idea” as is the pain in his finger or his memory of yesterday, cannot keep hold of the distinction of subjective and objective.  But men are not always as consistent as this.  Remember the illustration of the “telephone exchange” (section 14).  The mind is represented as situated at the brain terminals of the sensory nerves; and then brain, nerves, and all else are turned into ideas in this mind, which are merely “projected outwards.”

Now, in placing the mind at a definite location in the world, and contrasting it with the world, we retain the distinction between subjective and objective—­what is in the mind can be distinguished from what is beyond it.  On the other hand, in making the whole system of external things a complex of ideas in the mind, we become idealists, and repudiate realism.  The position is an inconsistent one, of course, but it is possible for men to take it, for men have taken it often enough.

The idealism of Professor Pearson (section 14) is more palpably subjective than that of Berkeley, for the latter never puts the mind in a “telephone exchange.”  Nevertheless, he names the objects of sense, which other men call material things, “ideas,” and he evidently assimilates them to what we commonly call ideas and contrast with things.  Moreover, he holds them in some of the contempt which men reserve for “mere ideas,” for he believes that idolaters might be induced to give over worshiping the heavenly bodies could they be persuaded that these are nothing more than their own ideas.

With the various forms of subjective idealism it is usual to contrast the doctrine of Objective Idealism.  This does not maintain that the world which I perceive is my “idea”; it maintains that the world is “idea.”

It is rather a nice question, and one which no man should decide without a careful examination of the whole matter, whether we have any right to retain the word “idea” when we have rubbed out the distinction which is usually drawn between ideas and external things.  If we maintain that all men are always necessarily selfish, we stretch the meaning of the word quite beyond what is customary, and selfishness becomes a thing we have no reason to disapprove, since it characterizes saint and sinner alike.  Similarly, if we decide to name “idea,” not only what the plain man and the realist admit to have a right to that name, but also the great system which these men call an external material world, it seems right to ask; Why use the word “idea” at all?  What does it serve to indicate?  Not a distinction, surely, for the word seems to be applicable to all things without distinction.