this most radical of philosophies a prim and religious air: its purity was
alloyed with all sorts of conventions: so much so that we find British
Hegelians often deeply engaged in psychology, cosmology, or religion, as
if they took their idealism for a kind of physics, and wished merely to
reinterpret the facts of nature in an edifying way, without uprooting them
from their natural places. This has been made easier by giving idealism an
objective, non-psychological turn: events, and especially feelings and
ideas, will then be swallowed up in the essences which they display. Thus
Bradley maintained that two thoughts, no matter how remote from each other
in time or space, were identically the same, and not merely similar, if
only they contemplated the same idea. Mind itself ceased in this way to
mean a series of existing feelings and was identified with intelligence;
and intelligence in its turn was identified with the Idea or Logos which
might be the ultimate theme of intelligence. There could be only one mind,
so conceived, since there could be only one total system in the universe
visible to omniscience.

As to romantic scepticism, we may see by contrast what it would be, when
left to itself, if we consider those lucid Italians who have taken up
their idealism late and with open eyes. In Croce and Gentile the
transcendental attitude is kept pure: for them there is really no universe
save spirit creating its experience; and if we ask whence or on what
principle occasions arise for all this compulsory fiction, we are reminded
that this question, with any answer which spirit might invent for it,
belongs not to philosophy but to some special science like physiology,
itself, of course, only a particular product of creative thought. Thus the
more impetuously the inquisitive squirrel would rush from his cage, the
faster and faster he causes the cage to whirl about his ears. He has not
the remotest chance of reaching his imaginary bait--God, nature, or
truth; for to seek such things is to presuppose them, and to presuppose