popular idealism do, an
escape from the difficulties of the existence of evil, by
declaring that the universe is as yet only growing towards its
ideal perfection. But this refuge disappears with the reality
of time, and we are left with an awkward difference between
what philosophy tells us must be, and what our life tells us
actually is."[368:6]

If the philosophy of eternal perfection persists in its fundamental
doctrine in spite of this irreconcilable conflict with life, it is
because it is believed that that doctrine _must_ be true. Let us turn,
then, to its more constructive and compelling argument.

[Sidenote: The Constructive Argument for Absolute Idealism is Based upon
the Subjectivistic Theory of Knowledge.]

Sect. 182. The proof of absolute idealism is supposed by the majority of
its exponents to follow from the problem of epistemology, and more
particularly from the manifest dependence of truth upon the knowing
mind. In its initial phase absolute idealism is indistinguishable from
subjectivism. Like that philosophy it finds that the object of knowledge
is inseparable from the state of knowledge throughout the whole range of
experience. Since the knower can never escape himself, it may be set
down as an elementary fact that reality (at any rate whatever reality
can be known or even talked about) owes its being to mind.

Thus Green, the English neo-Hegelian, maintains that "an object which
no consciousness presented to itself would not be an object at all," and
wonders that this principle is not generally taken for granted and made
the starting-point for philosophy.[369:7] However, unless the very term
"object" is intended to imply presence to a subject, this principle is
by no means self-evident, and must be traced to its sources.

We have already followed the fortunes of that empirical subjectivism
which issues from the relativity of perception. At the very dawn of
philosophy it was observed that what is seen, heard, or otherwise
experienced through the senses, depends not only upon the use of
sense-organs, but upon the special point of view occupied by each
individual sentient being. It was therefore concluded that the
perceptual world belonged to the human knower with his limitations and
perspective, rather than to being itself. It was this epistemological
principle upon which Berkeley founded his empirical idealism. Believing
knowledge to consist essentially in perceptio