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xxii other mind, has even with regard to Nature a spontaneous and constant reference to every other, and so to the Divine Mind. In this way, the mutual recognition of all minds which is essential to the very existence of each as a conscious individual, and which is the cognition that constitutes them ethically rational, becomes also the constitutive principle in the world of Nature. In fact, its entrance as a principle into the natural order is precisely what raises Nature out of being a mere private show for each mind into a universal experience, with an aspect common to all minds alike. It is this that lifts it out of resilient manifoldness and mere disjunction, and carries it into unity — the unity of a communal system of experience, in which the dissents of individuals are reduced and harmonised by the deeper principle in their being, out of which their total nature flows by the self-defining act of each. Such an essential reference from each to other and to all, and from all to God, operates, however, and can operate, by no process of efficient causation. The whole operation is ideal; and what is called final causality, the influence of an ideal, which is now generally acknowledged to be the only causation in the moral world, is thus brought to be also the true primary causation in the world of Nature.

So much for the divergence from Kant. There is but one other modern philosophical theory with