ans by _a generalization of
the human cognitive consciousness_. According to Kant's analysis it
contains a manifold of sense which must be organized by categories in
obedience to the ideal of a rational universe. The whole enterprise,
with its problems given in perception, its instruments available in the
activities of the understanding, and its ideals revealed in the reason,
is an organic spiritual unity, manifesting itself in the
self-consciousness of the thinker. Now in absolute idealism this very
enterprise of knowledge, made universal and called the _absolute spirit_
or _mind_, is taken to be the ultimate reality. And here at length would
seem to be afforded the conception of a being to which the problematic
and the rational, the data and the principles, the natural and the
ideal, are alike indispensable. We are now to seek the real not in the
ideal itself, but in that spiritual unity in which appearance is the
incentive to truth, and natural imperfection the spring to goodness.
This may be translated into the language which Plato uses in the
"Symposium," when Diotima is revealing to Socrates the meaning of love.
The new reality will be not the loved one, but love itself.

"What then is Love? Is he mortal?"

"No."

"What then?"

"As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal,
but is a mean between them."

"What is he then, Diotima?"

"He is a great spirit, and like all that is spiritual he is
intermediate between the divine and the mortal."[359:3]

Reality is no longer the God who mingles not with men, but that power
which, as Diotima further says, "interprets and conveys to the gods the
prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and rewards of
the gods."

In speaking for such an idealism, Emerson says:

"Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our
being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and
cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into
that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of
life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry. . . . The mid-world is
best."[359:4]

The new reality is this highway of the spirit, the very course and
raceway of self-consciousness. It is traversed in the movement and
self-correction of thought, in the interest in ideals, or in the
submission of the will to the control of the moral law.

[Sidenote: Fichteanism, or the Abs