Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/462

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APPENDIX B
401

necessary recognition of others in the very primal intelligent act whereby he defines himself and gives intelligible meaning to his saying I. The spontaneous logical form of this first certainty for each, is thus primordially social. By this the system reveals the fact that Kant’s “categorical imperative,” in its final and fully significant form, So act as to regard humanity, whether thine own or that of another, as an End withal, and never merely as a means, is in reality the very first principle of knowledge. Hence the moral principle gets the desired warrant from intelligence which past systems have all failed to give it. The interrupting Kantian gap between morality and intelligence is closed; morality itself becomes intellectual — at once itself objective, inclusive of others equally real with the self, and conferring objectivity, that is, universally intelligible value, upon the individual intelligence. The sources of objective moral judgment in the world of time and circumstance are also thus laid open to the experience of each mind, in the power to consult the public judgment and to verify or correct the private judgment by it.

(3) Fulfilled freedom, however, as the experimental realisation of a moral life, founded in autonomous judgment, depends upon the Immortality of the Individual, in the sense of the everlastingness of his process of experience. On no other terms, as Kant has well shown, can the moral person fulfil his task to win the realisation of his divine ideal, the reduction of his transitional life under the dominance of his eternal choice of the image of God — the image of perfect Holiness, Justice, and Love. Now the new idealism, the organic Rational Pluralism, furnishes the only clear proofs of individual immortality, in the sense of an everlasting personal continuance in a world of perceptions organised by the presence of eternal ideals, supplying power for their eventual victory. But lack of space forbids me from here rehearsing these proofs. I must refer the