Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/38

Rh cism, and a student of the more modern physical conceptions of his day, — at once a mystic, a realist, and a partisan of nature. For Spinoza too, it is our type of finite consciousness that makes our daily world of fact, or, as he prefers to say, of imagination, seem chaotic; and the way to truth still is to be found through, an inner and reflective purification of experience. A widely different interpretation is given to the same fundamental conception, by Kant. But in Kant’s case also, remote from his interests as is anything savoring of mysticism, the end of philosophical insight is again the vindication of a higher form of consciousness. For Kant, however, this is the consciousness of the Moral Reason, which recognizes no facts as worthy of its form of assurance, except the facts implied by the Good Will, and by the Law of the good will. All these ways then of asserting the primacy of the World as Idea over the World as Fact, agree in dealing with the problem of Reality from the side of the means through which we are supposed to be able to attain reality, that is, from the side of the Ideas.

But if this is to be the general nature of our own inquiry also, then everything for us will depend upon the fundamental questions, already stated, viz. first: What is an Idea? and second: How can an Idea be related to Reality? In the treatment of both these questions, however, various methods and theories at once come into sight. And, to begin with one of the favorite issues, namely the fundamental definition of the