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298 and must therefore, as the only alternative, be acknowledged to be contributions from the mind's pure self-activity.

But when we have reached this conclusive conviction that the roots of our experience and our experimental knowledge are parts of our own spontaneous life, we then readily come to see, further, that the system of our several elements of consciousness a priori is precisely what we must really understand by our unifying or enwholing self, — is exactly what we try to express when we say we have a soul, and that this soul possesses real knowledge; that is, a hold upon eternal things. The realm of the eternal, in short, then becomes for us just the realm of our self-active intelligence; and this it is which, if we can show its reality in detail, will prove to be the clue to our immortal being. So the critical question is, How can the real existence of such a priori consciousness, such genuinely self-active intelligence, be conclusively made out? I have already in a few sentences indicated the general line of this proof, as we inherit it from Kant; but there is now required some fuller account of it, made intelligible and convincing by clear particulars.

Any comprehensive answer to our question would carry us much farther into the fields of critical speculation than I could possibly go in the brief time at our disposal, and certainly much farther than I could