Page:The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (1892).djvu/259

Rh ideas of people as these at any moment agree to express themselves. Even so, then, just as this lecture is at this instant a fact because our minds agree in making it so, and just as the price of the stock, or the credit of the great firm, is an often irresistible fact, to which the individual dealer must yield in so far as his own financial might isn’t equal to altering it, even so the moon yonder is likewise for us all an outer fact, because we are forced to agree in regarding it as outer. But our agreement itself is a fact of the deeper life of our common selfhood.

Such common ideas being, then, the idealist's true world, his problem it is to determine whether there is any deeper and impersonally human necessity which guarantees that our ideas shall thus in any wise agree. This necessity must be sought, if at all, in our own hidden nature. Constructive idealists have always sought it in that common band of rationality which, as they conceive, so links us all together that we are organically related parts or moments of one deeper self. This self, which shall express itself in you, in me, in everybody, is to link your experience to mine in such fashion that we shall see related outer worlds. Because this self in you constructs a show-space in three dimensions, and does a similar thing for me, therefore we alike look out into the depths of space, where the same stars seem to glitter for us all. Unity, fixity, assurance, we get, if we get such prizes at all, only by virtue of that rational and spiritual unity that is beneath our lives. Can the philosopher find the true heart and essence of this our common selfhood? If he can, then idealism becomes a system. We are, then, all in one world of truth. The outer world is indeed show, but no illusion; and our life has an organic fixity, a lawful completeness about it, such as every philosophy longs for.

But now, unfortunately, when idealists set about deducing this unity and consistency of the spiritual world from some deep inner principle, their reflection always leaves us