The idealistic current of thought has been flowing since the time of Plato and before; and while it has been diverted from time to time and even partially dammed up, it has persisted and found its way into our own period. Those who decide philosophical questions on the strength of what they take the Zeitgeist to be have been sure for a long time that philosophical idealism in its variegated forms is at best a narrow trickle about to disappear in (...) the mud of scientific naturalism or the fine grained sand of Anglo-American analysis. Some view any idealistic utterance as a mere seepage, an oddity; others, in a self-ascribed posture of contemporary “maturity,” ignore even the presence of the seepage, perhaps fearing that it might be a spring. (shrink)

There is increasing evidence that a clear battleline is forming again between reductive materialism and general idealistic philosophy. In the days of Royce and Bowne in this country and Bradley and Bosanquet in Britain, the stimuli to a revived materialism came from the theory of evolution and from the natural sciences generally. And there was some growing analytic aversion to Hegel’s system. Idealists today have clearly shown that their views are not easily annulled by facile citations to modern scientific activity. (...) One need only call to mind the solid work of Errol Harris, whose brilliant Nature, Mind and Modern Science of 1954 has just been translated by Philip Mueller as Nature, l’esprit et science moderne. In a recent article dealing with the changing relations of nature, man, and modern science, Harris points out that current biology in conjunction with holistic physics has produced an organismic conception of nature which incorporates man and his activities “as a dialectical scale of forms in which human mentality is a late stage.” Nature is then not something to be exploited but to be viewed as an ecological system, a matrix of human life. (shrink)