essentials in the system, that surprises and in some measure discomposes me; and all the more when one finds his own lines of division for the discussion, and even his own topical titles, running through the book. It is because I hope to prevent misunderstandings on the part of the public, and to forestall a confusion of ideas in presence of an identical name used to cover very different conceptions, — dealt with, above all, by very different methods, — that I am prompted to comment on the Oxford volume, and to point out some of the more important divergences between its metaphysical view and that which I would call Personal Idealism.
That the book has great worth of matter, and will have much weight in the doctrinal controversy that is now upon us, follows of course from the known training and culture of its writers. In many regards, those who are in earnest about a polemic against the current anti-personal philosophies, monisms of one sort or another, may unquestionably rejoice in its uncompromising pluralism, and in its courageous, outspoken, and resourceful assault upon Naturalism and Absolutism alike. And if one were to decide upon the philosophical meaning of a movement solely by the general aim of it, in disregard of its method, there would be little or nothing in the programme set forth by the Oxford Eight to which any idealist could demur. “The reality of human freedom, the limitations of the evolutionary hypothesis, the validity of the moral valuation, and the justification of that working enthusiasm for ideals which Naturalism . . . must deride as a generous illusion” — this unquestionably sums up well a cause for which every idealist works; nor could anything much better express one object with which my own volume was prepared. But one doesn’t become an idealist simply by attachment to ideals, or by opposition to those aspects of Naturalism which assail the credit of ideals; otherwise, many an empiricist, many a positivist even, might be called an idealist, and such a persistent railer at idealism
