Abstract

The tension between the physical space-time world and the metaphysical ‘intelligible’ world is as old as philosophy, and must always present a point of challenge and decision for every philosophical system. It is true that extreme positivism, on the one hand, and extreme idealism, on the other, avoid the tension and the challenge by ignoring one of its terms, but the mind is not long satisfied with either of these positions: as Browning’s Bishop Bloughram argues, the ‘other’ comes back to demand its place no matter how energetically we try to exclude it.