Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 80:320 (Oct 1923)
Article: The Trend Toward Idealism
Author: Robert Scott Calder

BSac 80:320 (Oct 1923) p. 440

The Trend Toward Idealism

Robert Scott Calder

To say that our modern civilization has been characterized by unprecedented material and industrial progress is but to put the hallmark of realism upon it. It has been a practical age in which interest has centered in things. Both head and hands have been occupied with the world of sense; the scientist with his test tubes and microscopes and telescopes, the laborer in smelting plants or factories. Literature, too, and education and art have felt the realistic spirit and responded to it. The sciences have replaced the humanities. The greatest intellectual activities of the time have been along scientific lines, the study of nature, and of man as a part of nature.

It was to be expected that the philosophical conceptions of such a period would partake something of the same color and tone. In an age when commerce rather than culture dominates life, when the physical more than the spiritual engages men’s thoughts, when matter is regarded as more ultimate and real than mind,—what is all this but materialistic thinking and philosophy? For it does not look beyond experience for the explanation of experience. It assumes that nature is explained when nature’s operations and laws of action are discovered; that by reducing matter to atoms and molecules and electrons we arrive at the ultimate nature of matter, that we reach mind and consciousness by tracing the external physical stimulus along the nerve tracks through the lower to the higher centres of the nervous system to a cell in the cortex of the brain. There, it is claimed, because we have come to the end of a long chain of physical links, we have come upon thought, knowledge, love. And these mental, moral or spiritual concepts or feelings are thus shown, it is assumed, to be only a material change, a movement or activity, that is muscular or chemical or nervous in character.

Pragmatism and Neo-realism are the latest attempts to build a philosophy upon such a naturalistic foundation.

BSac 80:320 (Oct 1923) p. 441

Their appeal is strong, of course, to the practical, commercial, utilitarian, sense that is characteristic of the age, but they fail to satisfy our deepest thought or our profoundest and persistent hopes. They may modify, but they cannot stem, the increasing tide of idealistic tendencies.

The popular verdict of the last century would seem to be in favor of realism. Reality was conceived to be material rather than spiritual, external and not inner. That, at least, is the practical pronouncement of the age. But there is another side. “Things are not what they seem.” There was much in the life and thought of the last hundred years and more that was essentially idealistic. Men have no...