as language could make it. Your readers will surely see that I have done so, if they will take the trouble to read my pages viii-xii, where they can hardly be so inattentive as to miss the words, “Instead of any monism, these essays put forward a Pluralism: they advocate an eternal or metaphysical world of many minds, all alike possessing personal initiative, real self-direction, instead of an all-predestinating single Mind that alone has real free-agency.”
II
THE SYSTEM NOT THE THEORY OF PREËXISTENCE
In the second place, the reviewer, in spite of his evidently wide reading in philosophy, has quite misapprehended the meaning of the phrase “the eternal reality of the individual.” His mistake in this connexion I can readily understand, for it is one common even among readers whose philosophical training ought to make it impossible. Unluckily, popular language employs “eternal” to denote the total compass of time, meaning by it “everlasting, both backward and forward.” We are fond of hitting this off in the phrase “from all eternity,” that is, “from a past date infinitely remote.” In this sense people, however wrongly, are in the habit of fancying even the being of God as essentially a temporal existence, only differenced from our transient life of the senses, hemmed in betwixt birth and death, by lasting from forever in the past to forever in the future. But not so does the philosopher understand “eternal.” To him the word must either mean something that “temporal” does not and cannot, or else it must be discarded from his vocabulary as superfluous. And inasmuch as the temporal and the eternal are even by common usage contrasted, he justly says that the word “eternal” must by him be taken to stand for what “temporal” does not and cannot stand for; namely,
