There is therefore no need of refuting idealism, which is an honest examination of conscience in a reflective mind.  Refutations and proofs depend on pregnant meanings assigned to terms, meanings first rendered explicit and unambiguous by those very proofs or refutations.  On any different acceptation of those terms, these proofs and refutations fall to the ground; and it remains a question for good sense, not for logic at all, how far the terms in either case describe anything existent.  If by “knowledge” we understand intuition of essences, idealism follows; but it follows only in respect to essences given in intuition:  nothing follows concerning the seat, origin, conditions, or symptomatic value of such intuition, nor even that such intuition ever actually occurs.  Idealism, therefore, without being refuted, may be hemmed in and humanised by natural knowledge about it and about its place in human speculation; the most recalcitrant materialist (like myself) might see its plausibility during a somewhat adolescent phase of self-consciousness.  Consciousness itself he might accept and relish as the natural spiritual resonance of action and passion, recognising it in its proud isolation and specious autonomy, like the mountain republics of Andorra and San Marino.

German idealism is a mighty pose, an attitude always possible to a self-conscious and reflective being:  but it is hardly a system, since it contradicts beliefs which in action are inevitable; it may therefore be readily swallowed, but it can never be digested.  Neither of its two ingredients—­romantic scepticism and romantic superstition—­agrees particularly with the British stomach.  Not romantic scepticism:  for in England an instinctive distrust of too much clearness and logic, a difficulty in drawing all the consequences of any principle, soon gave to this most radical of philosophies a prim and religious air:  its purity was alloyed with all sorts of conventions:  so much so that we find British Hegelians often deeply engaged in psychology, cosmology, or religion, as if they took their idealism for a kind of physics, and wished merely to reinterpret the facts of nature in an edifying way, without uprooting them from their natural places.  This has been made easier by giving idealism an objective, non-psychological turn:  events, and especially feelings and ideas, will then be swallowed up in the essences which they display.  Thus Bradley maintained that two thoughts, no matter how remote from each other in time or space, were identically the same, and not merely similar, if only they contemplated the same idea.  Mind itself ceased in this way to mean a series of existing feelings and was identified with intelligence; and intelligence in its turn was identified with the Idea or Logos which might be the ultimate theme of intelligence.  There could be only one mind, so conceived, since there could be only one total system in the universe visible to omniscience.