Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 45:177 (Jan 1888)
Article: Modern Idealism
Author: Augustus H. Strong

BSac 45:177 (Jan 1888) p. 84

Modern Idealism

Rev. Professor Augustus H. Strong

The method of thought which I purpose to consider regards ideas as the only objects of knowledge and denies the independent existence of the external world. It is the development of a principle found as far back as Locke. Locke derived all our knowledge from sensation. If any object to this account of Locke’s system, and insist that he recognized reflection also as a source of knowledge, we reply that this reflection is with Locke only the mind’s putting together of ideas derived from the senses or from its own operations about them.1 The mind brings no knowledge with it, has no original power; it is merely the passive recipient and manipulator of ideas received from sensation, finding in its own operations no new material, but only the reflection of what originally came from sense. I do not mean that Locke is always consistent with himself; this he could not be, for, with all his effort to derive knowledge from the senses, there were objects, such as substance and cause, right and God, which persistently refused to be explained in this way. To Locke’s statement “There is nothing in the intellect which was not beforehand in the sense,” Leibnitz well replied: “Nothing but the intellect itself.” But this reply recognized original powers of the mind, and the mind’s cognition, upon occasion of sensation, of realities not perceived by sensation or derived from sensation. Locke’s denial of such original powers and cognitions opened the way to the exclusive sensationalism of the French Condillac and Baron d’Holbach. So his system

BSac 45:177 (Jan 1888) p. 85

led to utilitarianism in morals and to scepticism in religion; for how could the ideas of right or of God be derived from sense? and, if they did not come from sense, what right had they on this theory to exist at all?

Bishop Berkeley, alarmed at what he thought the necessarily materialistic implications of Locke’s philosophy, attempted to save the idea of spirit by giving up the idea of matter; or, to speak more accurately, by maintaining that we have no evidence that matter exists except in idea. The sensations which lead us to infer the existence of an outer world are themselves the direct objects of our knowledge—why postulate external matter as causing them? They may be caused directly by God, whose omnipresent intelligence and power are capable of producing uniform and consistent impressions in or upon the minds of his creatures. This thought, existence, or ideal existence, Berkeley would say, is the only existence of the outer world worth contending for. An existence like this being assumed, materialism is vanquished, for the cause of ideas is to be found not...