Thus defined, idealism is opposed to ordinary common-sense dualism,
which regards knowledge or experience as the result of the more or less
accidental relation between two separate and independent entities--the
mind and its ideas on one side, the thing with its attributes on the
other--that serve to limit and condition each other from without. It is
equally opposed to the doctrine which represents the subject itself and
its state and judgments as the single immediate datum of consciousness,
and all else, whether the objects of an external world or person other
than the individual subject whose states are known to itself, as having
a merely problematic existence resting upon analogy or other process of
indirect inference. This theory is sometimes known as idealism. But it
falls short of idealism as above defined in that it recognizes only one
side of the antithesis of subject and object, and so falls short of the
doctrine which takes its stand on the complete correlativity of the two
factors in experience. It is for this reason that it is sometimes known
as subjective or incomplete idealism. Finally the theory defined is
opposed to all forms of realism, whether in the older form which sought
to reduce mind to a function of matter, or in any of the newer forms
which seek for the ultimate essence of both mind and matter in some
unknown force or energy which, while in itself it is neither, yet
contains the potentiality of both. It is true that in some modern
developments of idealism the ultimate reality is conceived of in an
impersonal way, but it is usually added that this ultimate or absolute
being is not something lower but higher than self-conscious personality,
including it as a more fully developed form may be said to include a
more elementary.
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