United States or Cocos Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He was not the aggressive German, so dear to the English journalist, nor the domestic German, so dear to the English wit. If one classed him at all it would be as the countryman of Hegel and Kant, as the idealist, inclined to be dreamy, whose Imperialism was the Imperialism of the air. Not that his life had been inactive. He had fought like blazes against Denmark, Austria, France.
And he plays this part of his so modestly, with so much hesitation, so much doubt of his thought and of himself! He is no preacher, like Emerson and Carlyle, with whom, as poet and idealist, he has so much in common; there is little resemblance between him and the men who speak, as it were, from a height to the crowd beneath, sure always of themselves and what they have to say.
The American is idealist and imaginative beyond the Englishman. The American national character is, indeed, a finer thing than the European generally supposes. The latter sees only occasional facets and angles, offshoots and outgrowths, some of them not desirable but even grotesque in themselves, while those elements which unify and harmonise the whole are likely to escape him.
To the idealist returning to his own country, New York was not a citadel guarding the entrance to a Nation, but a gateway opening to the Continent of Opportunity.
But all this does not prove that we have a right simply to fall back upon "common sense," and refuse to listen to the idealist. The deliverances of unreflective common sense are vague in the extreme; and though it may seem to assure us that there is a world of things non-mental, its account of that world is confused and incoherent.
John Stuart Mill, who was certainly and perhaps more than anything a careful logician, commences an exposition of the idealist thesis to which he was so much attached, by carelessly saying: "It goes without saying that objects are known to us through the intermediary of our senses.... The senses are equivalent to our sensations;" and on those propositions he rears his whole system, "It goes without saying ..." is a trifle thoughtless.
Essentially an idealist, his character was the result of a veneering of insufficient culture on a groundwork of raw impulse. People and objects appeared to him less through forms of thought than through colours of the emotions; and he saw them out of relation because he saw them under different conditions from those that hold sway over this planet.
He had wrought, in his silent, lonely detachment, better even than he knew. His charities, shorn of the degrading elements of many similar ones, were carried on without a hitch. Dr. McPherson, under his crust of hardness, was an idealist and almost a sentimentalist; but above all he was a man to inspire respect and command obedience.
"I mightn't have thought so much of this a month ago, but I have come to love the Senator almost as a son, and to think that he could be like the rest of that bunch is awful." "You are too much of an idealist, Mr. Haines," said the girl. "And you? What do you think of it?" he demanded. The girl's glance wavered. "Don't idealize me too much, either, Mr. Haines. I didn't think it was much.
My sensations are subjective, they are referred to my mind, and it is assumed that they can have no existence except in my mind; the qualities of things are regarded as objective, that is, it is commonly believed that they exist independently of my perception of them. Of course, when a man becomes an idealist, he cannot keep just this distinction.
Word Of The Day