ding, or the
ideas of pure reason, it seemed to be unnecessary to suppose the
existence of any object distinct from the mind itself. For if it be the
mind which furnishes the form of Space, and gives us the idea of
Substance, of Cause, of Being, the mind alone might suffice to account
for the whole sum of human knowledge. Fichte was followed by Schelling,
and Schelling by Hegel, each differing from his predecessor, but all
concurring in the attempt _to identify "Seyn," or absolute Being, with
Thought_, and to represent everything in the universe as a mere mode or
manifestation of one Infinite Essence. The _identity_ of Existence and
Thought is the fundamental principle of Hegel's doctrine. With him,
Being and the Idea of being, are the same; and Being and Thought are
combined in the "Absolute," which is at once ideal and real (l'etre and
l'idee). With him, the idea of God is that of _a logical process of
thought_, "ever unfolding itself, but never unfolded,"--a dialectic
movement rather than a Divine Being, which realizes itself, and reaches
a state of self-consciousness in man. God, nature, and man, are but one
process of thought, considered in different aspects; all finite
personalities are only so many thoughts of one eternal mind; God is in
man, and man is in God, and the progress of humanity, in all its stages,
is a Divine development.

This bare outline of these systems must suffice for our present purpose,
and we now proceed to offer a few remarks on the doctrine of Ideal as
distinguished from Material Pantheism.

1. The whole system of "Idealism," as propounded in the German schools,
is utterly baseless, and contradicts the intuitive, the universal
convictions of the human mind. For what is Idealism? Reduced to its
utmost simplicity, and expressed in the briefest formula, it amounts, in
substance, to this: _that the whole universe is to us a mere process of
thought_, and that nothing exists, or, at least, can be known by us,
beyond _the ideas of our own minds_. And what is the ground on which it
rests? It rests entirely on the assumption, that, since we can know
nothing otherwise than through the exercise of our mental faculties,
these faculties must be the sole sources of all our knowledge, and
altogether independent of any external object. According to this theory,
the mind is not informed or instructed by the universe, but the universe
is created by the mind; the objective is developed from the subjective;