Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/202

184 seemed to swallow up the individual selves, those unique centres of unique meanings. Such objections are most forcibly urged in Seth's Hegelianism and Personality, and they mark the transition from absolute idealism to personal idealism in the work of Schiller, Sturt, Gibson, and others.

Personal idealism in so far as it concerns itself with ethical problems generally emphasizes three things: (1) the uniqueness and impermeability of moral experience, (2) the relation of moral experience to a self expressing itself therein, (3) the interpretation of that self as a system of meanings. Starting with the uniqueness of the individual moral experience, personal idealism seeks to define moral worth in terms of an aim at perfection moulding and 'informing' each of these several purposive systems. It introduces the notion of a dynamic, or functional, or creative self, and contrasts it as the purposive core with the wider empirical self and its teleologically indifferent accretions. Thus might a portrait painter disregard certain malformations of the skin as interfering with, rather than contributing to the characteristic. What with Kant was epistemology and with Hegel metaphysics now openly and avowedly becomes psychology, but a psychology that operates from the standpoint of the agent and employs the teleological method. Self is not regarded as so much content of consciousness to be explained as a complex of ideas; it is defined as a complex of meanings all of which reflect the creative activity of a personality. Seth and Boyce Gibson among others have contrasted this type of psychology with presentational psychology. Into the merits of that question it is not my purpose to enter, but I wish to point to what seems to me to be one weakness in personal idealism. No doubt that it avoids excessive simplification. It represents a wholesome reaction against monism and its suave blanketing of a lot of squirming differences. It insists on the functional complexity of moral experience. Whether it handles that complexity successfully, however, admits of grave doubt. If simplification is relative to the needs of a science, complexity is it no less. Personal idealism must therefore either give itself as an extreme and scientifically barren individualism or it must offer some theory of the general