er lecture numerous
instances of this from Hegel, Bradley, Royce, and others. We saw also
where the solution of such an intolerable state of things was sought
for by these authors. Whereas Kant had placed it outside of and
_before_ our experience, in the _dinge an sich_ which are the causes
of the latter, his monistic successors all look for it either _after_
experience, as its absolute completion, or else consider it to be even
now implicit within experience as its ideal signification. Kant and
his successors look, in short, in diametrically opposite directions.
Do not be misled by Kant's admission of theism into his system.
His God is the ordinary dualistic God of Christianity, to whom his
philosophy simply opens the door; he has nothing whatsoever in common
with the 'absolute spirit' set up by his successors. So far as this
absolute spirit is logically derived from Kant, it is not from his
God, but from entirely different elements of his philosophy. First
from his notion that an unconditioned totality of the conditions of
any experience must be assignable; and then from his other notion that
the presence of some witness, or ego of apperception, is the most
universal of all the conditions in question. The post-kantians make
of the witness-condition what is called a concrete universal, an
individualized all-witness or world-self, which shall imply in its
rational constitution each and all of the other conditions put
together, and therefore necessitate each and all of the conditioned
experiences.

Abridgments like this of other men's opinions are very unsatisfactory,
they always work injustice; but in this case those of you who are
familiar with the literature will see immediately what I have in mind;
and to the others, if there be any here, it will suffice to say that
what I am trying so pedantically to point out is only the fact that
monistic idealists after Kant have invariably sought relief from the
supposed contradictions of our world of sense by looking forward
toward an _ens rationis_ conceived as its integration or logical
completion, while he looked backward toward non-rational _dinge an
sich_ conceived as its cause. Pluralistic empiricists, on the other
hand, have remained in the world of sense, either naively and because
they overlooked the intellectualistic contradictions, or because, not
able to ignore them, they thought they could refute them by a superior
use of the same intellectualistic logic. Thus it