Note 24 — Lecture V. Infidelity in France in the Eighteenth Century, and Unbelief in England Subsequent to 1760.

As the term Ideology has lately been employed in a novel theological sense, (e.g. Essays and Reviews, Ess. iv.), and as it is employed in these lectures in its ordinary sense, as known in metaphysical science, it may prevent ambiguity to state briefly the history of the term.

The word Ideology, as denoting the term to express metaphysical science, seems to have arisen in the French school of De Tracy at the close of the last century. Cfr. Krug's Philos. Lexicon, sub voc.

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As early as Plato's time metaphysics was the science of ἰδέαι, i.e. of forms; but the word ἰδέα implied the objective form in the thing, not the subjective conception in the mind. It was Descartes who first appropriated the word Idea in the subjective sense of notion. This arose from the circumstance that in his philosophy he sought for the idea in the mind, instead of the essence in the thing contemplated, as had been the case in mediæval philosophy. In the following century Locke's inquiries, together with Berkeley's speculations, caused metaphysics to become the science of ideas. The representative theory of perception which was held, increased, if it did not cause, the confusion: all knowledge was restricted to ideas. The subsequent attempts of Condillac and others to carry forward the analysis of the formation of our ideas still farther, caused metaphysics to be restricted to them alone. This apparently was the reason why De Tracy gave the name of Ideology to the science of metaphysics in the Elémens d'Idéologie.1066

It was the sceptical notion of the unreality of the objects as distinct from the ideas, partly the offshoot of a sensational philosophy, like that of De Tracy, partly of the spiritual philosophy of Germany, which farther caused the term Ideological to slide into the sense of ideal; a meaning of the term which the employment of it in English in recent theological controversy seems likely to make common.