(school of Spencer) and (2) of Pantheistic Idealism (Hegel and his later followers, English and American). The basis for this critique is secured by reaffirming Kant’s doctrine of a priori knowledge, and proving it afresh in face of the modern attempt to explain it away by acquired association, natural selection, and heredity. It results that the individual mind, being thus a system of the very conditions prerequisite to an evolving process, cannot be the product of such process, whether this be regarded as the effect of the omnipresent “energy” of an “Unknowable” or as the expression of the omnipresent “meaning” of an “Inclusive Self-consciousness.” On the contrary, it is now seen to be itself at the basis and origin of things, a member of the world of self-causes.
In the course of Essay II, this critique of Monistic Idealism is carried out with greater fulness, especially in exposing the fallacy of the frequent claim that modern science trends resistlessly to this type of monism.
In Essay III, idealism of the thoroughly plural and individual type — Personal Idealism — is reached, as the result of the dialectical self-dissolution of pessimism (Schopenhauer, Hartmann), materialism (Dühring), and agnosticism (Lange). In this self-supplanting of Lange’s view, the Kantian restriction of knowledge to the field of phenomena gets at length dissolved. The basis for moral autonomy is definitively established by this self-sublation of scepticism passing to its extreme; the freedom of the rational individual is assured in this settlement of the noumenal reality of his knowledge. The transcendent metaphysics of the essays, in opposition to the merely transcendental prevalent since Kant, is thus rested upon critical foundations, and Critical Idealism attains its proper fulfilment.
In Essay IV, we discover the essentially creative character of Art, the field par excellence of the triumphs of non-divine intelligences, and thus come, as if by a new and unexpected
