Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/35

signal conflict in advancing thought is to occur, its success will be all that could be expected, with the present statement of its case. Its author would not have the reader suppose, however, that the complete Idealism which maintains the mutually transcendent and still thoroughly knowable reality of God and souls is not, to his mind, supplied with a defence at least as organic as that which Idealistic Monism has here received. Nor would he have it assumed — as from the silence imposed on him by the limits of the volume it might perhaps be assumed — that he considers the account given by such Monism of the nature and the source of Personal Individuality, either conclusive, or sufficient, or correct, even when this account is expounded with the brilliant force given to it by Professor Royce. In his judgment, this intensely interesting problem requires an altogether different analysis, and has a profoundly different explanation, issuing directly in an idealistic Pluralism. He admits, of course, the pertinence of the claim that this analysis and explanation should be given. To be sure, the principles upon which he would found the defence of Personal Idealism, with its genuine Personal God, with its human Persons genuinely real because really free, have been plainly indicated in his article following; even the course of reasoning has there been outlined (sufficiently, he thinks, for its steps to be caught by those versed in philosophy),^[1] by which he would expose and rectify that error of Kant’s which he believes to be responsible for the Monistic Idealism that has indeed claimed, and with good credentials,

1. See pp. 123-127 below.