ive 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