PREFACE
THESE lectures are intended to serve as a sequel
to the course delivered in the University of
Aberdeen some ten years previously. If at that time
I had foreseen that I should presently be favoured
with the opportunity to lecture on the
Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism I might well have entitled
the earlier lectures the Realm of Nature or Naturalism and Agnosticism.
There my endeavour was to establish
the priority of the idealistic, or—as it seems clearer to
to say—the spiritualistic standpoint; and here I have tried
to ascertain what we can know, or reasonably believe,
concerning the constitution of the world,
interpreted throughout and strictly in terms of Mind.
At the outset, this world immediately confronts us not as one Mind, nor even as the manifestation of one, but as an objective whole in which we discern many minds in mutual interaction. It is from this pluralistic standpoint that our experience has in fact developed, and it is here that we acquire the ideas that eventually lead us beyond it. For pluralism, though empirically warranted, we find defective and unsatisfactory: but
