Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/36

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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
xxxiii

seem, for most of my reviewers. Of course, the theory of Personal Idealism, in common with every other that detects the fallacy latent in the Natural Dualism of uncritical common-sense, has to face the wonder-waking question. What in truth does objectivity then mean, since “existence,” per se and apart from being apprehended by intelligence, is not really thinkable? — what is it for a judgment, whether perceptive or reflective, to be “objective”? Thus an essential part of the theory is its new doctrine of the nature of objectiveness. This it finds in the essentially social character of that self-defining consciousness in which it fixes the real existence of each personal being: each is by its own self-certitude self-correlated with others, so that its reality carries theirs; and this society of primarily objective beings imparts a secondary objective character to all the judgments that are organic in each and thence indicative of community to all. It is this sociality of the primordial logic of self-consciousness, this intrinsic reference to other minds, that my reviewers, — and perhaps other readers, — preoccupied with the other assertion essential to Personal Idealism, — the necessary self-recognition of every person, — have quite commonly overlooked; just as Descartes overlooked it, in seizing upon the great “first certainty” with which he broke out the pathway of modern philosophy; just as all his successors prior to Kant,