Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/45

xlii sarian rationalism of Hegel’s school, and of a pluralism rationally organised by the self-definition of each mind in it, as transcending the irrational pluralism — confessed to repose at bottom on chance and unintelligibility — which is all that is attainable on the “radical empiricism” of Professor James and his associates. The freedom that consists in self-definition, I next proceed to show, implies the supertemporal (that is, the “eternal”) coexistence of all minds, each a centre of origination for the definite connexions of the parts of its experience, — provided it involves experience in its self-definition, as we human beings do. Thus far, I am only dealing with the conception of such a world of genuine free-agents, spontaneously harmonised by a generic rationality, and showing what it could do for the opening of the “no thoroughfares” come upon in the course of our past philosophical struggles, provided the reality of it could only be made out. The graver question, whether any such veritably self-defining being really exists, whether there is a real world of free-agents, and whether we belong in it, has not, to this point, been reached; it only comes up later in the essay, in the context of defending the conception of Personal Idealism, the supposed world of coeternal free-agents, against the accusations of atheism and of polytheism. There, at length, the bare conception of true freedom, as involving the coeternity of all minds with each other