Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Theories, 360, 361; Encyc. Britannica, art.:
Berkeley.
There is, however, an idealism which is not open to Hamilton’s
objections, and to which most recent philosophers give their
adhesion. It is the objective idealism of Lotze. It argues that we
know nothing of the extended world except through the forces which
impress our nervous organism. These forces take the form of
vibrations of air or ether, and we interpret them as sound, light,
or motion, according as they affect our nerves of hearing, sight,
or touch. But the only force which we immediately know is that of
our own wills, and we can either not understand matter at all or
we must understand it as the product of a will comparable to our
own. Things are simply “concreted laws of action,” or divine ideas
to which permanent reality has been given by divine will. What we
perceive in the normal exercise of our faculties has existence not
only for us but for all intelligent beings and for God himself: in
other words, our idealism is not subjective, but objective. We
have seen in the previous section that atoms cannot explain the
universe,—they presuppose both ideas and force. We now see that
this force presupposes will, and these ideas presuppose mind. But,
as it still may be claimed that this mind is not self-conscious
mind and that this will is not personal will, we pass in the next
section to consider Idealistic Pantheism, of which these claims
are characteristic. Materialistic Idealism, in truth, is but a
half-way house between Materialism and Pantheism, in which no
permanent lodging is to be found by the logical intelligence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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