188 PHILOSOPHY 



as that is, directly and only, with our self and its logically necessary 

 complement, the other selves; and so the natural order, in its two 

 discriminated but complemental portions, the inner and the outer, 

 is founded in that moral order which is given in the fundamental act of 

 our intelligence. It is this resting of Space upon our veritable Objects, 

 the Other Subjects, that imparts to it its externalizing quality, so 

 that things in it are referred to the testing of all minds, not to ours 

 only, and are reckoned external because measured by that which is 

 alone indeed other than we. 



In this way we may burst the restricting limit which so much of 

 philosophy, and so much more of ordinary opinion, has drawn about 

 our mental powers in view of this contrast Time and Space, espe- 

 cially with reference to the One and the Many, and to the persuasion 

 that plural distinctions, at any rate, cannot belong in the region of 

 absolute reality. Ordinary opinion either inclines to support a philo- 

 sophy that is skeptical of either Unity or Plurality being pertinent 

 beyond Time and Space, and thus to hold by agnosticism, or, if it 

 affects affirmative metaphysics, tends to prefer monism to pluralism, 

 when the number-category is carried up into immutable regions: to 

 represent the absolutely real as One, somehow seems less contradict- 

 ory of the "fitness of things" than to represent it as Many; more- 

 over, carrying the Many into that supreme region, by implying the 

 belonging there of mortals such as we, seems shocking to customary 

 piety, and full of extravagant presumption. Still, nothing short of 

 this can really satisfy our deep demand for a moral order, a personal 

 responsibility, nay, an adequate logical fulfillment of our conception of 

 a self as an intelligence ; while the clarification which a rational plural- 

 ism supplies for such ingrained puzzles in the theory of knowledge as 

 that of the source and finality of the contrast Time and Space, to 

 mention no others, should afford a strong corroborative evidence in 

 its behalf. And, as already said, this view enables us to pass the 

 limit which Time and Space are so often supposed to put, hopelessly, 

 upon our concepts of the ideal grade, the springs of all our aspira- 

 tion. To these, then, we may now pass. 



We reach them through the doorways of the Necessary vs. the 

 Contingent, the Unconditioned vs. the Conditioned, the Infinite vs. the 

 Finite, the Absolute vs. the Relative; and we recognize them as our 

 profoundest foundation-concepts, alone deserving, as Kant so per- 

 tinently said, the name of IDEAS, the Soul, the World, and God. 

 Associated with them are what we may call our three Forms of the 

 Ideal, - - the True, the Beautiful, the Good. These Ideas and their 

 affiliated ideals have the highest directive and settling function in 

 the organization of philosophy; they determine its schools and its 

 history, by forming the centre of all its controlling problems; they 



