178 PHILOSOPHY 



belonging to the spot where, more than five-and-thirty years ago, it 

 was my happy fortune to take some part with Dr. Harris and his 

 companions, that I begin the task assigned me. The undertaking 

 seems less hopeless when I can here recall the names and the con- 

 genial labors of Harris, of Davidson, of Brockmeyer, of Snider, of 

 Watters, of Jones, - - half of them now gone from life. They " builded 

 better than they knew; " and, humbly as they may themselves have 

 estimated their ingenuous efforts to gain acquaintance with the great- 

 est thoughts, history will not fail to take note of what they did, as 

 marking one of the turning-points in the culture of our nation. The 

 publication of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, granting all 

 the subtractions claimed by its critics on the score of defects (of 

 which its conductors were perhaps only too sensible) , was an influence 

 that told in all our circles of philosophical study, and thence in the 

 whole of our social as well as our academic life. 



[Here I enter upon the discussion of the subject proper, beginning, 

 as above indicated, with the Fundamental Conceptions. Having 

 followed these through the contrasts Whole and Part, Subject and 

 Object, Reality and Appearance (or Noumenon and Phenomenon), 

 and developed the bearing of these on the procedure of thought from 

 the dualism of natural realism to materialism and thence to idealism, 

 with the issue now coming on, in this last, between monism and 

 pluralism, I strike into the contrast Cause and Effect, and, noting 

 its unfolding into the more comprehensive form of Ground and Con- 

 sequence, go on thence as follows: ] 



It is plain that the contrast Ground and Consequence will enable 

 us to state the new issue with closer precision and pertinence than 

 Reality and Appearance, Noumenon and Phenomenon, can supply; 

 while, at the same time, Ground and Consequence exhibits Cause and 

 Effect as presenting a contrast that only fulfills what Noumenon and 

 Phenomenon foretold and strove towards; in fact, what was more 

 remotely, but not less surely, also indicated by Whole and Part, 

 Knowing and Being, Subject and Object. For in penetrating to the 

 coherent meaning of these conceptions, the philosophic movement, 

 as we saw, advanced steadily to the fuller and fuller translating of 

 each of them into the reality that unifies by explanation, instead of 

 pretending to explain by merely unifying; and this, of course, will 

 now be put forward explicitly, in the clarified category of Cause and 

 Effect, transfigured from a physical into a purely logical relation. 

 What idealism now says, in terms of this, is that the Cause (or, as 

 we now read it, the Ground) of all that exists is the Subject; is 

 Mind, the intelligently Self-conscious; and that all things else, the 

 mere objects, material things, are its Consequence, its Outcome, 



