mperishable and immutable. What is it? In
Spinoza's view, the absolute existence is God. All that exists, exists
in and by God. Taking the words of St. Paul, "In Him we live and move
and have our being," as his motto, he undertook to trace the relations
of the world to God and to man, and those of man to society.

To John Locke, born at Wrington, in Somerset, in 1632, the problem
presented itself in another way. Instead of accepting the validity of
clear ideas, as Descartes and Spinoza did, he adopted the Baconian
method, and opened the inquiry into the origin and formation of ideas.
Separating himself from the philosophers who held that the mind was
capable of arriving at knowledge independent of experience, and from the
sceptics who maintained that the senses were the only channels of
information, he showed that ideas were derived from two
sources--sensation and reflection.

He was succeeded by George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, born at Kilcrin
in Kilkenny, in 1684. He defeated the sceptics on their own ground.
There is nothing in the world, he says, except our own sensations and
ideas. In order to exist for us, things have to be perceived by the
mind; therefore, everything, in order to exist, must exist in the mind
of God. But when Berkeley had proved that matter was figment, David
Hume, born in 1711, came forward and showed that mind was also an
illusion. You know nothing of matter, said Berkeley; you have only
perceptions and the ideas based thereon. You know nothing of mind,
replied Hume; you have only a succession of sensations and ideas.

Against Hume rose up in Germany a famous school of philosophers
beginning with Immanuel Kant, who was born in Prussia in 1724. Kant
attempted to prove that the human reason was not untrustworthy, as Hume
assumed, but limited, and that, within certain bounds, it was capable
of arriving at practical truths. Kant's disciples, however, were not
content with this modest restatement. Taking it too readily for granted
that Hume's objections had been overcome, they proceeded to revive that
unbounded faith in mere speculation which had been the distemper of the
Greek mind. Fichte and Schelling were the first thinkers of note to
attempt again to solve by logic the mystery of the universe.

But their works are now obscured by the achievement of Hegel, who began
to teach at Berlin in 1818. Hegel holds that the real universe is a
universe of ideas to which his philosophy is the key, but,