as come gradually to insist upon the importance of
the content of perception, rather than the relation of perception to a
self as its state. The terms _element_ and _experience_, which are
replacing the subjectivistic terms, are frankly realistic.[410:10]

[Sidenote: Realistic Tendency in Absolute Idealism. The Conception of
Experience.]

Sect. 206. There is a similar realistic trend in the development of
absolute idealism. The pure Hegelian philosophy was notably objective.
The principles of development in which it centres were conceived by
Hegel himself to manifest themselves most clearly in the progressions of
nature and history. Many of Hegel's followers have been led by moral and
religious interests to emphasize consciousness, and, upon
epistemological grounds, to lay great stress upon the necessity of the
union of the parts of experience within an enveloping self. But absolute
idealism has much at heart the overcoming of relativism, and the
absolute is defined in order to meet the demand for a being that shall
not have the cognitive deficiencies of an object of finite thought. So
it is quite possible for this philosophy, while maintaining its
traditions on the whole, to abandon the term _self_ to the finite
subject, and regard its absolute as a system of rational and universal
principles--self-sufficient because externally independent and
internally necessary. Hence the renewed study of categories as logical,
mathematical, or mechanical principles, and entirely apart from their
being the acts of a thinking self.

Furthermore, it has been recognized that the general demand of idealism
is met when reality is regarded as not outside of or other than
knowledge, whatever be true of the question of dependence. Thus the
conception of _experience_ is equally convenient here, in that it
signifies what is immediately present in knowledge, without affirming it
to _consist in_ being so presented.[411:11]

[Sidenote: Idealistic Tendencies in Realism. The Immanence Philosophy.]

Sect. 207. And at this point idealism is met by a latter-day realism.
The traditional modern realism springing from Descartes was dualistic.
It was supposed that reality in itself was essentially extra-mental, and
thus under the necessity of being either represented or misrepresented
in thought. But the one of these alternatives is dogmatic, in that
thought can never test the validity of its relation to that which is
perpetually outside of it; whil