Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/43

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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

attention to the passage in Appendix D[1] where I have dealt with it briefly in replying to one of the points of my reviewer in the New York Tribune. I have now also inserted in the original Preface[2] a clause of preparatory reference to the subject. On account of the room required, any adequate treatment of this question must be left over to the systematic exposition of Personal Idealism which I still hope to accomplish.

The second line of objection charges me with failing to furnish proofs of propositions fundamental to my theory. This, too, I am sure, is based on misapprehension as to what the essential proofs are, — the proofs really required and actually offered. For instance, to designate one case of several, the far from hostile reviewer in the number of Nature for August 1, 1901, makes the mistake of supposing that my problem in Essay VII is the demonstration of human freedom, and that the proof offered is the indispensableness of freedom to moral responsibility. This quite misses the governing aim of that essay, which is to exhibit the capabilities of Personal Idealism for solving, by a transcending conception, the pseudo-antinomy set up by the monistic Absolutism of Hegel and his later followers, on the one hand, and the pluralistic Fortuitism of Peirce and James and most

  1. See p. 418, below.
  2. See p. xxiii, above.