PREFACE xxiii 



which readers would be likely to connect the pres- 

 ent one, — the system of Leibnitz. The scheme 

 certainly does approach to the Leibnitian monad- 

 ology more closely than to any other form of ideal- 

 ism that has preceded it. But while it so largely 

 agrees with Leibnitz, it also departs from him seri- 

 ously, — if indeed one can always be sure of what 

 Leibnitz really means by his persistently metaphori- 

 cal expressions. 



Upon three very important counts, at any rate, the 

 present scheme aims to avoid what seems to be the 

 shortcoming of the monadology : — 



(i) It dislodges the self-enclosed isolation of the 

 individual, and finds a social consciousness, a tacit 

 reference to others and a more or less developed 

 recognition of them, to be inwrought in the very 

 self-defining thought whereby each exists ; it accord- 

 ingly replaces the theory of Preestablished Harmony 

 by that of Spontaneous Harmony, and moreover pro- 

 vides for a world of efficient-causal communication 

 between the individuals other than God — the real 

 world of physical science — by its further develop- 

 ment of the Kantian doctrine of Space as contrasted 

 with the nature of Time, pushing the distinction 

 between these two Sense-Forms to its foundations 

 in the double aspect of self-consciousness itself, and 

 reaching the proof, missing in Kant's own research, 

 that the Sense-Forms must be two, and only two. 



