Page:The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (1911).djvu/9



HESE lectures are intended to serve as a sequel to the course delivered in the University of Aberdeen some ten years previously. If at that time I had foreseen that I should presently be favoured with the opportunity to lecture on the Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism I might well have entitled the earlier lectures the Realm of Nature or Naturalism and Agnosticism. There my endeavour was to establish the priority of the idealistic, or—as it seems clearer to to say—the spiritualistic standpoint; and here I have tried to ascertain what we can know, or reasonably believe, concerning the constitution of the world, interpreted throughout and strictly in terms of Mind.

At the outset, this world immediately confronts us not as one Mind, nor even as the manifestation of one, but as an objective whole in which we discern many minds in mutual interaction. It is from this pluralistic standpoint that our experience has in fact developed, and it is here that we acquire the ideas that eventually lead us beyond it. For pluralism, though empirically warranted, we find defective and unsatisfactory: but