Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/445

384 sought to give these common objects of religion and philosophy a lasting foundation upon the practical as contrasted with the theoretical reason, these essays aim at restoring them to a theoretical basis. The purpose is, to exhibit the theoretical nature and functions of the moral consciousness itself, thus closing the chasm left by Kant between his noumenal world of morality and his phenomenal world of science. And whereas the idealistic systems that succeeded Kant all took refuge in an immanential and consequently monistic view of God’s relation to man and Nature, thus wrecking all autonomy and thence personality itself, the essays seek to restore the ruin by a return, on important points, to Kant’s view; namely, that God, relatively to all other minds, is transcendent — is a distinct centre of consciousness, not included in any of theirs, and not including them; that every mind, relatively to any other, is transcendent; and that the principle of moral autonomy thus involves a strict Pluralism, as the right account of the world of absolute reality, which is the world of minds. Hence (at this juncture passing beyond Kant) they conclude that the only causal principle operative in this noumenal world, linking God with the other minds, and all minds with each other, in an organic Real Logic of being and of purpose, must be Efficient Cause to a place of derivation and subordination, making it hold only from minds to phenomena, and, in a secondary sense, from one phenomenon to another, or from one group of phenomena to another. Thus an immanential relation still obtains between the system of minds and the system of Nature, quite as in the transcendental idealism of Kant. But Subjective Idealism is hereby overcome, and Social Idealism, which finds objectivity in an a priori consensus of all minds, takes its place.
 * which, consequently, henceforth reduces

In Essay I, this result, so far as concerns man and Nature, is worked out by a critique (1) of Empirical Evolutionism