development of an idealistic philosophy, and its place is in some ways well defined by Professor Howison’s paper. I shall accordingly seek, in what follows, reconciliation rather than refutation. I shall try to show, not that Professor Howison is wrong in the stress which he lays upon the ethical importance of his individuals, but that the Absolute, as I have ventured to define the conception, has room for ethical individuality without detriment to its true unity, or to the argument that I advanced for its reality. I shall also try to show that the very essence of ethical individuality brings it at last, despite the mentioned antinomy, into a deeper harmony with the concept of the Absolute that I venture to maintain; so that, as I shall try to explain, just because the ethical individual is sacred, therefore must his separate life be “hid,” in a deep and final sense, in the unity of the system to which he is freely subordinated. For his ethical life is, as such, a life of free subordination. He cannot be ethical and undertake to exist separately from God’s life. On the other hand, as I shall try to maintain, the unity of this system, i.e. of the Absolute, as defined in my thesis is not a dead unity, — a night that devours all, — but precisely the unity of many, where the many are; but the unity is still supreme, while the unity is supreme just because the many exist, over whom and in whom it is supreme.
Such phrases are obscure enough, apart from the argument that alone can give them meaning. I use them here only by way of indicating that I desire not to refute Professor Howison’s essential views, but to define individuality in a way that may tend to
