Footnote 5: _Mind_, 1876, p. 185.]

[Footnote 6: _Mind_, 1876, p. 9.]

[Footnote 7: _Appearance and Reality_.]

XXIII.

IDEALISM IN STRAITS.

"Can any good come out of Trinity?" is a question that has been asked
and answered in various senses during the recent Catholic University
controversies in Ireland; but for whatever other good Catholics might
look to that staunchly Elizabethan institution, they would scarcely turn
thither for theological guidance. Yet all definition is negative as well
as positive; exclusive as well as inclusive; and we always know our
position more deeply and accurately in the measure that we comprehend
those other positions to which it is opposed. The educative value of
comparing notes, quite apart from all prospect of coming to an
agreement, or even of flaying our adversaries alive, is simply
inestimable; we do not rightly know where we stand, except in so far as
we know where others stand--for place is relative.

The Donnellan Lecturer for 1897-8 [1] took for his subject the doctrine
of the Blessed Trinity in relation to contemporary idealistic
philosophy. The scope of these lectures is, not to prove the doctrine of
the Trinity philosophically, but to show that the difficulty besetting
the conception of a multiplicity of persons united by a superpersonal
bond, is just the same difficulty that brings idealistic philosophy to a
dead-lock when it endeavours (1) to escape from solipsism, (2) to
vindicate free-will,(3) to solve the problem of evil. He naturally
speaks of Idealism as "the only philosophy which can now be truly called
living," in the sense in which a language is said to live; that is,
which is growing and changing, and endeavouring to bring new tracts of
experience under its synthesis; which is current in universities of the
day. Of the Realism which survives in the seminaries of the
ecclesiastical world he naturally knows nothing; addressing himself to a
wholly different public, he speaks to it on its own assumptions, in its
own mental language; and indeed he knows no other. But having weighed
idealism in the balance of criticism, he finds it far short of its
pretensions to be an adequate accounting for the data of experience; he
finds that it leads the mind in all directions to impassable chasms
which only faith can overleap. It does not demand or suggest the mystery
of the Trinity, but reveals a void which, as a fact that doctrine alone
does fill. The convinced Realis