Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/39

xxxvi of resting this autonomy, with Kant, on subjective fealty alone, in the delusion that it is independent of knowledge, and that knowledge can be satisfied by a world of “phenomena” necessarily subject to it, while yet that world itself is only “necessary” in the sense of flowing spontaneously from the nature of each isolated self.

Now it is to the surmounting of this gravest of all dilemmas that the theory of Personal Idealism, as I intend it, is directly addressed. It proceeds by pointing out that the meaning of objectivity, while indeed to be sought in conscious and intelligent being alone, as taught by all idealism, must be found neither (1) in the self-consciousness of the solitary and disjunct self, which in disregarding necessary reference to others reduces morality to simple self-realisation and introversive self-respect, nor (2) in the all-inclusive self-consciousness of the One Absolute Mind, in which each “finite” self, as one essential mode thereof, participates in such degree and with such “task” as the One assigns to it by his eternal Will or predestinating and exclusively selecting “Love,” but (3) in an absolutely primordial altruism couched in the very logic of the fundamental act of self-definition by any mind, whereby its awareness of itself, demonstrated by Descartes to be the condition of any and all other knowledge whatever, — the condition necessary, no doubt, but