ment get vindicated at once and together. To think objectively, to know, is tacitly to refer the “necessity” of one’s judgment to the universal society of minds as a standard, is to discern oneself as typical of a kind, and thus attain the certitude that the judgment is truly universal, because spontaneous in the nature of each as involving the nature of all.
Why this view of what constitutes objectivity, inwoven as it is in the very tissue of Personal Idealism, and reiterated time and again in my pages, in all sorts of contexts, should have escaped the notice of so many readers, is, I confess, a genuine puzzle to me. Over and over, it turns up in these essays that a person means a being who thus recognises others and relates himself to them, and that the Personal System, while rigorously idealistic, making all existence root in the existence of minds, is still always a Social Idealism, so that the objective judgment is always the judgment that carries the weight of the social logic, and the final test of any and every truth, though never so often discovered in the private chamber of the single spirit, is that it conforms to this principle of universal social recognition. And yet, also over and over, the new theory has been dealt with as if it were only a fresh form of isolated subjectivism.
On careful reflexion, I incline to think this must be owing, in part, to defective exposition of my own;
