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Rh further advantages of Professor Howison’s kindly exposition and keen criticism; and still again, in the paper called The Implications of Self-Consciousness, published in the Studies of Good and Evil. In the present lectures this argument assumes a decidedly new form, not because I am in the least disposed to abandon the validity of the former statements, but because, in the present setting, the whole matter appears in new relations to other philosophical problems, and becomes, as I hope, deepened in its significance by these relations. The new statement, indicated already in the opening Lecture, is especially developed in Lecture VII, and is defended against objections in Lecture VIII.

While this central matter regarding the definition of Truth, and of our relation to truth, has not essentially changed its place in my mind, I have been doing what I could, since my first book was written, to come to clearness as to the relations of Idealism to the special problems of human life and destiny. In my first book the conception of the Absolute was defined in such wise as led me then to prefer, quite deliberately, the use of the term Thought as the best name for the final unity of the Absolute. While this term was there so defined as to make Thought inclusive of Will and of Experience, these latter terms were not emphasized prominently enough, and the aspects of the Absolute Life which they denote have since become more central in my own interests. The present is a deliberate effort to bring into synthesis, more fully than I have ever done before, the relations of Knowledge and of Will in our conception of God. The centre of the present discussion is, for this very reason,