middle ages was not the idea of reality as a progressive self-revelation of an inner principle working through nature and human life, but the formal principles of classification which it seemed to offer for a material of thought and action given from another source. Modern Idealism. Modern like ancient idealism came into being as a correction of the view that threatened to resolve the world of matter and mind alike into the changing manifestations of some single non-spiritual force or substance. While, however, ancient philosophy may be said to have been unilinear, modern philosophy had a twofold origin, and till the time of Kant may be said to have pursued two independent courses. All philosophy is the search for reality and rational certainty as opposed to mere formalism on the one hand, to authority and dogmatism on the other. In this sense modern philosophy had a common root in revolt against medievalism. In England this revolt sought for the certainty and clearness that reason requires In the assurance of an outer world given to immediate sense experience; on the continent of Europe, in the assurance of an inner world given immediately in thought. Though starting from apparently opposite poles and following widely different courses the two movements led more or less directly to the same results. It is easy to understand how English empiricism issued at once in the trenchant naturalism of Hobbes. It is less comprehensible how the Cartesian philosophy from the starting-point of thought allied itself with a similar point of view. This can be understood only by a study of the details of Descartes' philosophy (see CARTESIANISM). Suffice it to say that in spite of its spiritualistic starting-point its general result was to give a stimulus to the prevailing scientific tendency as represented by Galileo, Kepler and Harvey to the principle of mechanical explanations of the phenomena of the universe. True it was precisely against this that Descartes' immediate successors struggled. But the time-spirit was too strong for them. Determinism had other forms besides that of a crude materialism, and the direction that Malebranche succeeded in giving to speculation led only to the more complete denial of freedom and individuality in the all-devouring pantheism of Spinoza. Berkeley.