Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/30

Rh always remain for me one of the world’s great minds. He has left us in his Logic, I am persuaded, a permanent inheritance, which despite his metaphysical abuses of it, and despite its sundry slips and gaps, only awaits the labours of some sufficiently powerful successor to become a complete system of our experiential ascent out of inadequate to adequate categories. May we not hope that this service may yet be performed for us by the Master of Balliol, or by our own National Commissioner of Education?

In the various essays, the new pluralistic theory of ultimate reality is presented now in one of its factors, now in another; in none of them, however, is any exposition of it as a systematic whole undertaken. Proofs of this or that part of it are attempted in each paper, and, in the course of the volume, of all its ten propositions above laid down, but no establishment of the system as such; this must wait for another place and occasion. The fullest discussions of important phases in the theory are contained in the first essay and the last; and for this reason these were given the two most prominent places in the book. The intervening essays are placed nearly in the order of their original production, though the central theme of the theory, which may very properly be called The eternal reality of the individual, undoubtedly comes out with increasing articulateness