Yet such is the unmistakable fact. With this everyday Occidental’s instinctive preference for personal initiative, responsibility, and credit, I confess myself in strong sympathy; and though from my acquaintance with the facts I cannot share in his surprise, I am glad of an opportunity to protest with him against this all-engulfing monism, fatal to our moral freedom even when taking on the plausible form of monistic idealism. Idealistic monism, though indeed a real philosophic advance as compared with other monism, is in the last resort irreconcilable with personality. By its unmitigated and immitigable determinism, with its one sole Real Agent, it directly annuls moral agency and personal freedom in all the conscious beings other than its so-called God. Accordingly, it leaves this professed God himself without genuine personality; for his consciousness is void of that recognition and reverence of the personal initiative of other minds which is at once the sign and the test of the true person.
The aim throughout the following papers, on the contrary, is to present, and in one way or another enforce, an idealistic system that shall be thoroughly personal in the sense just implied. Instead of any monism, these essays put forward a Pluralism: they advocate an eternal or metaphysical world of many minds, all alike possessing personal initiative, real self-direction, instead of an all-predestinating single
