FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 189 



prescribe its great subdivisions, breaking it up into Metaphysics, 

 ^Esthetics, and Ethics, and Metaphysics, again, into Psychology 

 Cosmology, and Ontology, --or Theology in the classic sense, which, 

 in the modern sense, becomes the Philosophy of Religion; they call 

 into existence, as essential preparatory and auxiliary disciplines, 

 Logic and the Theory of Knowledge, or Epistemology. They thus 

 provide the true distinctions between philosophy and the sciences of 

 experience, and present these sciences as the carrying out, upon 

 experiential details, of the methodological principles which philo- 

 sophy alone can supply; hence they lead us to view all the sciences 

 as in fact the applied branches, the completing organs of philosophy, 

 instead of its hostile competitors. 



As for the controlling questions which they start, these are such as 

 follow : Are the ideals but bare ideals, serving only to cast "a light 

 that never was, on land or sea?" -are the Ideas only bare ideas, 

 without any objective being of their own, without any footing in the 

 real, serving only to enhance the dull facts of experience with auroral 

 illusions? The philosophic thinker answers affirmatively, or with 

 complete skeptical dubiety, or with a convinced and uplifting nega- 

 tive, according to his less or greater penetration into the real meaning 

 of these deepest concepts, and depending on his view into the nature 

 and thought-effect of the Necessary and the Contingent, the Uncon- 

 ditioned and the Conditioned, the Infinite and the Finite, the Abso- 

 lute and the Relative. 



And what, now, are the accurate, the adequate meanings of the 

 three Ideas? - - what docs our profoundest thought intend by the 

 Soul, by the World, by God? We know how Kant construed them, 

 in consequence of the course by which he came critically (as he 

 supposed) upon them, --as respectively the paramount Subject of 

 experiences; the paramount Object of experiences, or the Causal 

 Unity of the possible series of sensible objects; and the complete 

 Totality of Conditions for experience and its objects, itself therefore 

 the Unconditioned. It is worth our notice, that especially by his con- 

 struing the idea of God in this way, thus rehabilitating the classical 

 and scholastic conception of God as the Sum of all Realities, he laid 

 the foundation for that very transfiguration of mysticism, that ideal- 

 istic monism, which he himself repudiated, but which his three noted 

 successors in their several ways so ardently accepted, and which has 

 since so pervaded the philosophic world. But suppose Kant's alleged 

 critical analysis of the three Ideas and their logical basis is in fact far 

 from critical, far from "exactly discriminative," -and I believe 

 there is the clearest warrant for declaring that it is, - - then the 

 assumed "undeniable critical basis" for idealistic monism will be 

 dislodged, and it will be open to us to interpret the Ideas with accu- 

 racy and consistency - - an interpretation which may prove to estab- 



