APPENDIX A
THE ESSAYS IN THEIR SYSTEMATIC CONNEXION[1]
I purpose here to supply what many readers appear to have been at fault over — the clue to the parts played, severally, by the essays of this volume, in setting forth the system they illustrate. And I may well enough begin by reiterating the statement with which I first preceded them — that, disconnected as their topics seem, they are still all united by a single metaphysical aim. This is the establishment, chiefly upon Kant’s foundations, of a new idealistic philosophy, in extension and fulfilment of Kant’s own, though also taking impulse from the views of Aristotle and of Leibnitz. This new idealism seeks to rehabilitate the moral individual in his proper autonomy by seating him in the eternal world; that is, in the self-active, and therefore absolutely real, or noumenal, order of being. It thus stands opposed (1) to the current Monism, whether of Naturalism (Spencer, Haeckel, etc.) or of Absolute Idealism (Hegel and the Neo-Hegelians), and (2) to the older Monotheism, with its dualism (the eternal Creator, the temporal creation) of literal production out of nothing, by miracle. In confronting these older systems, the new idealism seeks to revindicate the Personal God, the Moral Immortality, and, above all, the Moral Freedom, which together formed the chief object of Kant’s philosophical concern. But while Kant
- ↑ Reprinted, with slight changes and some additions, from Kant-studien. Band viii, Heft 2-3.
