PREFACE ix 



material Substance a single conscious Subject, or 

 Universal Mind, through which, and in which, and 

 for which, all things subsist — all things, including 

 the so-called other minds. In the long history of 

 idealistic thinking, even in the Western world from 

 Plato to the present day, there is but one very emi- 

 nent mind, the justly celebrated Leibnitz, who dis- 

 tinctly and systematically breaks with the monistic 

 tradition. In recent times, particularly, through the 

 influence of Hegel and his later school, idealistic 

 thought, under the usurped name of Absolute Ideal- 

 ism, has shared the field with its rival Evolutionism 

 in advancing the doctrine of the One. The only 

 important difference — no doubt a great one — is 

 this : where evolutionism says the One Unknowable 

 (if it refrains from saying Matter), this idealism says 

 the One Mind, or the One Absolute Experience, all- 

 embracing, all-sustaining, all-determining. 



To the ordinary mind of our Occidental world, 

 alive with the spirit of Western civilisation, acting 

 instinctively from the principle of individual respon- 

 sibility, and of philosophy and its history as unexpert 

 as Milton's Moloch was of wiles, it would doubtless 

 come as a surprise to learn that the main drift of 

 philosophic thought in the Western world for the past 

 century had been increasingly toward the Oriental 

 view of things, and that amid Western civilisation 

 individualism v/as not a philosophic matter-of-course. 



