Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/12

ix material Substance a single conscious Subject, or Universal Mind, through which, and in which, and for which, all things subsist — all things, including the so-called other minds. In the long history of idealistic thinking, even in the Western world from Plato to the present day, there is but one very eminent mind, the justly celebrated Leibnitz, who distinctly and systematically breaks with the monistic tradition. In recent times, particularly, through the influence of Hegel and his later school, idealistic thought, under the usurped name of Absolute Idealism, has shared the field with its rival Evolutionism in advancing the doctrine of the One. The only important difference — no doubt a great one — is this: where evolutionism says the One Unknowable (if it refrains from saying Matter), this idealism says the One Mind, or the One Absolute Experience, all-embracing, all-sustaining, all-determining.

To the ordinary mind of our Occidental world, alive with the spirit of Western civilisation, acting instinctively from the principle of individual responsibility, and of philosophy and its history as unexpert as Milton’s Moloch was of wiles, it would doubtless come as a surprise to learn that the main drift of philosophic thought in the Western world for the past century had been increasingly toward the Oriental view of things, and that amid Western civilisation individualism was not a philosophic matter-of-course.