ss "I think them" must (potentially or
actually) accompany all our objects. Former skeptics had said as much,
but the "I" in question had remained for them identified with the
personal individual. Kant abstracted and depersonalized it, and made
it the most universal of all his categories, although for Kant himself
the Transcendental Ego had no theological implications.

It was reserved for his successors to convert Kant's notion of
Bewusstsein uberhaupt, or abstract consciousness, into an infinite
concrete self-consciousness which is the soul of the world, and in
which our sundry personal self-consciousnesses have their being. It
would lead me into technicalities to show you even briefly how this
transformation was in point of fact effected. Suffice it to say that
in the Hegelian school, which to-day so deeply influences both British
and American thinking, two principles have borne the brunt of the
operation.

The first of these principles is that the old logic of identity never
gives us more than a post-mortem dissection of disjecta membra, and
that the fullness of life can be construed to thought only by
recognizing that every object which our thought may propose to itself
involves the notion of some other object which seems at first to negate
the first one.

The second principle is that to be conscious of a negation is already
virtually to be beyond it. The mere asking of a question or expression
of a dissatisfaction proves that the answer or the satisfaction is
already imminent; the finite, realized as such, is already the infinite
in posse.

Applying these principles, we seem to get a propulsive force into our
logic which the ordinary logic of a bare, stark self-identity in each
thing never attains to. The objects of our thought now ACT within our
thought, act as objects act when given in experience. They change and
develop. They introduce something other than themselves along with
them; and this other, at first only ideal or potential, presently
proves itself also to be actual. It supersedes the thing at first
supposed, and both verifies and corrects it, in developing the fullness
of its meaning.

The program is excellent; the universe IS a place where things are
followed by other things that both correct and fulfill them; and a
logic which gave us something like this movement of fact would express
truth far better than the traditional school-logic, which never gets of
its own accord from anything t