412 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



as language could make it. Your readers will surely see 

 that I have done so, if they will take the trouble to read 

 my pages viii-xii, where they can hardly be so inattentive 

 as to miss the words, " Instead of any monism, these 

 essays put forward a Pluralism : they advocate an eternal 

 or metaph3^sical world of many minds, all alike possessing 

 personal initiative, real self-direction, instead of an all- 

 predestinating single Mind that alone has real free-agency." 



II 



THE SYSTEM NOT THE THEORY OF PREEXISTENCE 



In the second place, the reviewer, in spite of his evi- 

 dently wide reading in philosophy, has quite misappre- 

 hended the meaning of the phrase " the eternal reaUty of 

 the individual.'' His mistake in this connexion I can 

 readily understand, for it is one common even among 

 readers whose philosophical training ought to make it 

 impossible. Unluckily, popular language employs " eter- 

 nal " to denote the total compass of time, meaning by it 

 "everlasting, both backward and forward." We are fond 

 of hitting this off in the phrase " from all eternity," that is, 

 " from a past date infinitely remote." In this sense people, 

 however wrongly, are in the habit of fancying even the 

 being of God as essentially a temporal existence, only dif- 

 ferenced from our transient life of the senses, hemmed in 

 betwixt birth and death, by lasting from forever in the 

 past to forever in the future. But not so does the philoso- 

 pher understand " eternal." To him the word must either 

 mean something that " temporal " does not and cannot, or 

 else it must be discarded from his vocabulary as super- 

 fluous. And inasmuch as the temporal and the eternal 

 are even by common usage contrasted, he justly says that 

 the word "eternal" must by him be taken to stand for 

 what " temporal " does not and cannot stand for ; namely, 



