APPENDIX A 



THE ESSAYS IN THEIR SYSTEMATIC CONNEXION i 



I PURPOSE here to supply what many readers appear to 

 have been at fault over — the clue to the parts played, 

 severally, by the essays of this volume, in setting forth the 

 system they illustrate. And I may well enough begin by 

 reiterating the statement with which I first preceded them 

 — that, disconnected as their topics seem, they are still all 

 united by a single metaphysical aim. This is the establish- 

 ment, chiefly upon Kant's foundations, of a new idealistic 

 philosophy, in extension and fulfilment of Kant's own, 

 though also taking impulse from the views of Aristotle and 

 of Leibnitz. This new idealism seeks to rehabilitate the 

 moral individual in his proper autonomy by seating him in 

 the eternal world ; that is, in the self-active, and therefore 

 absolutely real, or noumenal, order of being. It thus stands 

 opposed (i) to the current Monism, whether of Naturalism 

 (Spencer, Haeckel, etc.) or of Absolute Idealism (Hegel 

 and the Neo-Hegelians), and (2) to the older Monotheism, 

 with its dualism (the eternal Creator, the temporal creation) 

 of literal production out of nothing, by miracle. In con- 

 fronting these older systems, the new idealism seeks to revin- 

 dicate the Personal God, the Moral Immortality, and, above 

 all, the Moral Freedom, which together formed the chief 

 object of Kant's philosophical concern. But while Kant 



1 Reprinted, with slight changes and some additions, from Kant- 

 studien. Band viii, Heft 2-3. 



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