Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/16

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PREFACE
xiii

Supplementary Essay. In particular, however, I have now to mention what there can only appear in a very inadequate fashion, viz. my special obligation to Mr. Charles Peirce, not only for the stimulus gained from his various published comments and discussions bearing upon the concept of the Infinite, but for the guidance and the suggestions due to some unpublished lectures of his which I had the good fortune to hear. I need not say that I do not intend, by this acknowledgment, to make him appear responsible for my particular opinions. My own present study of the concept of the Infinite may be justified by its effort to bring into connection a number of apparently unrelated tendencies of recent discussion, and to review the whole issue in the light of my own conception of what constitutes an Individual. The result, as I hope, may serve to justify some of the essential bases of my thesis as to the relations of God and Man.

I regret that Professor Ladd’s Theory of Reality appeared too late for me to take account of this important contribution to the problems of the present volume.

My thanks are due to my colleague, Professor Charles R. Lanman, for his translations of the passages from the Upanishads which appear in the lecture on Mysticism. I have also to thank my other colleagues, Professor Maxime Bôcher and Professor William F. Osgood, for kind suggestions as to the remarks concerning specifically mathematical topics in the Supplementary Essay and in the lectures on Validity. And my especial thanks also are owed to my wife, for invaluable aid in preparing my lectures for publication. That, after all, quite apart from the problematic issues discussed, plain errors doubt-