ct emotional appeals of any kind sound amateurish in the
business that concerns us. Impressionistic philosophizing, like
impressionistic watchmaking or land-surveying, is intolerable to
experts. Serious discussion of the alternative before us forces
me, therefore, to become more technical. The great _claim_ of the
philosophy of the absolute is that the absolute is no hypothesis, but
a presupposition implicated in all thinking, and needing only a little
effort of analysis to be seen as a logical necessity. I will therefore
take it in this more rigorous character and see whether its claim is
in effect so coercive.

It has seemed coercive to an enormous number of contemporaneous
thinkers. Professor Henry Jones thus describes the range and influence
of it upon the social and political life of the present time:[5] 'For
many years adherents of this way of thought have deeply interested the
british public by their writings. Almost more important than their
writings is the fact that they have occupied philosophical chairs in
almost every university in the kingdom. Even the professional critics
of idealism are for the most part idealists--after a fashion. And when
they are not, they are as a rule more occupied with the refutation of
idealism than with the construction of a better theory. It follows
from their position of academic authority, were it from nothing else,
that idealism exercises an influence not easily measured upon the
youth of the nation--upon those, that is, who from the educational
opportunities they enjoy may naturally be expected to become the
leaders of the nation's thought and practice.... Difficult as it is
to measure the forces ... it is hardly to be denied that the power
exercised by Bentham and the utilitarian school has, for better or
for worse, passed into the hands of the idealists.... "The Rhine has
flowed into the Thames" is the warning note rung out by Mr. Hobhouse.
Carlyle introduced it, bringing it as far as Chelsea. Then Jowett
and Thomas Hill Green, and William Wallace and Lewis Nettleship, and
Arnold Toynbee and David Eitchie--to mention only those teachers whose
voices now are silent--guided the waters into those upper reaches
known locally as the Isis. John and Edward Caird brought them up the
Clyde, Hutchison Stirling up the Firth of Forth. They have passed up
the Mersey and up the Severn and Dee and Don. They pollute the bay of
St. Andrews and swell the waters of the Cam, and have somehow c