Page:Egotism in German Philosophy (1916).djvu/34

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visioned objects, operated within this single life, diversifying its field of view, and testifying to its secret endowment.

Nevertheless, the later idealists, ungrateful to Locke for their first principle, were ungrateful also to Leibniz for their ultimate conception, anticipated by him in all its completeness. There were reasons, of course, for this ingratitude. Leibniz, like the transcendentalists, had supposed that the objects of sense, as experience reveals them, were begotten out of the latent nature of the soul; but he had also conceived that there were many souls, as many as atoms in the physical world, and that the images arising in each were signs of the presence and actual condition of its companions. Thus perception, while yielding directly only an idea, as in a dream, was indirectly symbolic of an outer reality, like a dream significant and capable of interpretation. And being an undaunted rationalist, Leibniz assumed that the soothsayer capable of reading this dream was reason, and that whatever reason conceived to be right and necessary actually must be true in the great outer world.

It was at this point that Kant deviated into his radical subjectification of knowledge. His mind had been more open than that of Leibniz to the influences of English psychology, it had stewed longer in its