Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/16

Rh our personal participation in the various forms and stages of Selfhood that are present in Nature is indicated. No facts upon which Materialism has ever based its arguments need be either overlooked or belittled by such a view. Death, for my theory, no longer appears as a “sundering of soul and body.” Dualism in the interpretation of the relations of the Self and its environment is wholly laid aside. And yet, as I undertake to show, no spiritual possession of the true Self is endangered, no aspect of its ethical dignity is belittled, no sense in which it is near to God is called in question by this very doctrine of the temporal origin, and of the social, physical, and divine relations of the Self. The reconciliation of our natural knowledge about the Self with our Idealism and with our fundamental religious interests, is indicated, in these discussions, in a fashion that I believe to be, to a considerable extent, new. If my views have any coherence, the importance of the subject ought to insure for them a serious hearing. They are, again, not the conventional views about the Human Self.

As to the problem of Immortality, it is one that I long deliberately declined, as a student of philosophy, to discuss in any formal way, because, for years after I published, in my Religious Aspect of Philosophy, my first statement of that general idealistic view of Being which I have ever since maintained, I was not clear as to how the general doctrine ought to apply to the case of the finite Individual. The problem of Individuality, as I have since more clearly seen, and, in the first series of these lectures, have explained at length, is the most central and important one in the idealistic Theory of Being.