Just what, then, does Personal Idealism as a philosophical theory mean? I can best reply, I suspect, by anticipating another question, which can hardly fail to be asked: Why should the word “personal” come into the title of the theory at all? Is not idealism the doctrine that mind is the only primary or absolute reality?—and so is it not always the assertion that personality is the central source of things? Why, then, isn’t the prefix superfluous? The answer is, that the actual history of philosophic thought, even after philosophy attains to the view that rational consciousness is the First Principle, exhibits a singular arrest of the movement toward putting complete personality at the centre of things. Historic idealism is, in fact, far from being personal; rather, it is well-nigh overwhelmingly impersonal.
Philosophy, it is often said, is the search after unity. As a statement of one philosophic aim, this is true enough; and certain it is that in this search after unity philosophy has almost always lost sight of its other interests, some of which are at least as great. The prevailing tendency in the history of thought, if we leave rigidly agnostic philosophers out of the account, has been to some form of monism; and idealistic philosophy, despite its diligent hostility to materialism, has usually been at one with its foe in absorption with the One-and-All. The only vital difference it introduces is to substitute for the one
