they are: (1) The definition and comparison of what I have called the Four Historical Concepts of Being. I believe this aspect of these lectures to be, in many respects, a novelty in discussion. (2) The form here given to the criticism of Realism in the Third Lecture. (3) The use made of the parallelism between the realistic and the mystical concepts of Being in the Fourth and Fifth Lectures. (4) The transition, in the Sixth and Seventh Lectures, from the concept of the Real as the Valid to that concrete conception of Being which, to my mind, constitutes Idealism. (5) The statement of the finite contrast and the final unity of the External and Internal Meaning of Ideas. (6) The concept of Individuality which is expounded in the Seventh and in the later lectures, and the reconciliation of the One and the Many proposed here and in my Supplementary Essay.
This Supplementary Essay itself, which my publisher has very self-sacrificingly allowed me to add to the present volume, contains my defence against the objections which Mr. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality seems to render so serious as obstacles in the way of any such account as mine of our concrete relations to the Absolute. My defence is itself but a very poor expression of the very deep and positive obligations which I owe to Mr. Bradley’s book, — a book without which much of what appears in my Lectures themselves could never have received anything like the present form. As a part of this defence, I have been led into a discussion of the concept of the quantitative Infinite; and in this portion of my investigation my obligations are indeed numerous, and are, in part, recognized in the notes to the
