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CONCLUSION.

IF any justification be needed of this prolonged criticism of Hegel, it must be found in the considerations which I adduced at the outset. The truth of the Hegelian system, or of some essentially similar scheme, is presupposed in the doctrine of English Neo-Kantians or NeoHegelians as to the universal Self and its relation to the world. There may be no mention of Hegel in their writings, and the doctrine itself may be explicitly derived by them from a development and criticism of the Kantian philosophy; but the nerve of such development and criticism is supplied by Hegel's professed exhibition of existence as the process of such a Self. Hegel also exemplifies on a great scale the same mode of reasoning which was animadverted upon in the first lecture as the fallacy of Neo-Kantianism; and a study

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of his system enables us, better than anything else, to see the results to which this line of thought conducts us.

The radical error both of Hegelianism and. of the allied English doctrine I take to be the identification of the human and the divine selfconsciousness, or, to put it more broadly, the unification of consciousness in a single Self. The exposure of this may be said to have been, in a manner, the thesis of these lectures. This identification or unification depends throughout, it has been argued, upon the tendency to take a mere form for a real being-to take an identity of type for a unity of existence. Each of us is a Self: that is to say, in the technical language of recent philosophy, we exist for ourselves or are objects to ourselves. We are not mere objects existing only for others, but, as it were, subject and object in one. Selfhood may also be said to imply that, in one aspect of my existence, I am universal, seeing that I distinguish my individual existence from that of other beings, while embracing both within a common world. Irrespective of metaphysical theory every Self is universal in this sense, and by all means let this characteristic be embodied in the definition of the Self. If a mere individual,

as we are often told, would be a being without consciousness of its own limitations-a being, therefore, which could not know itself as an individual-then no Self is a mere individual. We may even safely say that the mere individual is a fiction of philosophic thought. There could be no interaction between individuals, unless they were all embraced within one Reality ; still less could there be any knowledge by one individual of others, if they did not all form parts of one system of things. But it is a great step further to say that this universal attitude of the Self, as such, is due to the fact that it is one universal Self that thinks in all so-called thinkers. This is, to say the least, an extremely unfortunate way of stating the necessities of the case. For though selfhood, as was seen in the earlier lectures, involves a duality in unity, and is describable as subject-object, it is none the less true that each Self is a unique existence, which is perfectly impervious, if I may so speak, to other selves-impervious in a fashion of which the impenetrability of matter is a faint analogue. The self, accordingly, resists invasion; in its character of self it refuses to admit another self within itself, and thus be made, as it were, a mere retainer of something

else. The unity of things (which is not denied) cannot be properly expressed by making it depend upon a unity of the Self in all thinkers; for the very characteristic of a self is this exclusiveness. So far from being a principle of union in the sense desired, the self is in truth the very apex of separation and differentiation. It is none the less true, of course, that only through selfhood am I able to recognise the unity of the world and my own union with the source of all, and this is the incentive to the metaphysical use of the idea of a universal Self which I am criticising. But though the self is thus, in knowledge, a principle of unification, it is, in existence or metaphysically, a principle of isolation. And the unification which proceeds in the one case is, to the end, without prejudice to the exclusive self-assertion in the other. There is no deliverance of consciousness which is more unequivocal than that which testifies to this independence and exclusiveness. I have a centre of my own—a will of my own-which no one shares with me or can share a centre which I maintain even in my dealings with God Himself. For it is eminently false to say that I put off, or can put off, my personality here. The religious consciousness lends no counte

nance whatever to the representation of the human soul as a mere mode or efflux of the divine. On the contrary, only in a person, in a relatively independent or self-centred being is religious approach to God possible. Religion is the self-surrender of the human will to the divine. Our wills are ours to make them Thine." But this is a self-surrender, a surrender which only self, only will, can make.

The doctrine of the universal Self is reached by a process of reasoning which I have already compared to the procedure of Scholastic Realism in dealing with individuals and "universals." Realism also treated the individual as merely the vehicle of a universal form. It took the species as a real existence apart from its individuals; more real than they, and prior to them, for they are regarded as in effect its creatures. The individual man stands in this secondary and dependent relation to the species "humanitas," and that universal inheres in turn in a higher genus, till we reach the ultimate abstraction of a universal Being or substance of which all existing things are accidents. For the ultimate goal of Realism is a thorough - going Pantheism. Any student of the Scholastic period may see that only inconsistent reserva