PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xxxill 



seem, for most of my reviewers. Of course, the 

 theory of Personal Idealism, in common with every 

 other that detects the fallacy latent in the Natural 

 Dualism of uncritical common-sense, has to face the 

 wonder-waking question. What in truth does objec- 

 tivity then mean, since " existence," /^r j-^ and apart 

 from being apprehended by intelligence, is not really 

 thinkable? — what is it for a judgment, whether per- 

 ceptive or reflective, to be " objective " ? Thus an 

 essential part of the theory is its new doctrine of 

 the nature of objectiveness. This it finds in the 

 essentially social character of that self-defining con- 

 sciousness in which it fixes the real existence of 

 each personal being : each is by its own self-certitude 

 self-correlated with others, so that its reahty carries 

 theirs; and this society of primarily objective beings 

 imparts a secondary objective character to all the 

 judgments that are organic in each and thence in- 

 dicative of community to all. It is this sociality of 

 the primordial logic of self-consciousness, this intrin- 

 sic reference to other minds, that my reviewers, — ■ 

 and perhaps other readers, — preoccupied with the 

 other assertion essential to Personal Ideahsm, — the 

 necessary j-^-^-recognition of every person, — have 

 quite commonly overlooked ; just as Descartes over- 

 looked it, in seizing upon the great " first certainty " 

 with which he broke out the pathway of modern 

 philosophy; just as all his successors prior to Kant, 



