Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/245

 IN THE MATTER OF PERSONAL IDEALISM. 231 necessary connexion between the idea of every mind and the idea of God, no mind can define itself except in terms of God. The argument to the actual reality of God is then completed by re- sorting to each mind's certainty of its own actual existence through dialectic verification : to attempt to posit the contrary, only ends in positing the self again. From this the actual existence of God follows, because the actual existence of the self must carry the existence of whatever the idea of the self synthetically involves. I can hardly imagine how my reviewer can have read pp. 356-359 of my book, and still say that I make no attempt to prove the actual existence of God as the ideal Type of all the really possible spirits ; nor how he can still set it down that I assume the ideal Type to be one of the series of really possible beings, " and consequently that a being exists who realises the Type ". II. But enough of these misapprehensions. I must now turn to sundry difficulties that Mr. McTaggart finds with some of the cardinal conceptions in the theory which my book illustrates, or else with my method of advocating them. (1) He complains that after going closely with Kant to a certain point, I then suddenly separate myself, "abruptly," as he says. By this he appears to mean my rejection of Kant's restriction of all our cognition to phenomena and denial of our power to know noumena. He implies that I nowhere give any reasons for reject- ing Kant's criticisms on the Paralogism of Pure Reason, but go on to maintain that Pure Reason can know that the self exists, and exists eternally, simply ignoring these celebrated criticisms. It is a fact, of course, that I have not felt it needful to reply in detail to the various branches of Kant's agnostic doctrine, and especially not to his assault upon the possibility of proving theo- retically the freedom and the immortality of the self. I have chosen to rely, rather, on a general refutation of the agnostic motif, which I have supplied in my first essay ; and I have relied more especially on the self-refutation of Kantian agnosticism by its own inner dialectical dissolution, which I have traced out in the fourth part of my third essay. These very essential parts of my general argumentation, my reviewer appears to have quite overlooked. No reader who omits them will properly understand the argumen- tative procedure on which I rest my case in the seven essays taken together. Besides, I have throughout assumed readers will see that Kant's agnostic restrictions are anticipated, provided for, and rendered in- applicable by the plain implications of the fact of a priori cognition itself, when that is once clearly established and clearly understood; and this fact I have explicitly argued out, in two different places in my volume in the first essay, and again in the sixth. Then,