Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/11

viii World, the finite Individual, and the most fundamental relations that link them together. But these, as I suppose, are the essential problems of the Philosophy of Religion.

The philosophy here set forth is the result of a good many years of reflection. As to the most essential argument regarding the true relations between our finite ideas and the ultimate nature of things, I have never varied, in spirit, from the view maintained in Chapter XI of my first book, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. That chapter was entitled The Possibility of Error, and was intended to show that the very conditions which make finite error possible concerning objective truth, can be consistently expressed only by means of an idealistic theory of the Absolute, — a theory whose outlines I there sketched. The argument in question has since been restated, and set into relations with other matters, without fundamental alteration of its character, and in several forms; once in my Spirit of Modern Philosophy (in a shape intended for a popular audience, but with an extended discussion of the historic background of this argument); again, in the book called The Conception of God, where my own statement of the argument has the