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 is that John Mill pretends to refute the Achilles-tortoise fallacy.

The important point to notice here is the intellectualist logic.  Both sides treat it as authoritative, but they do so capriciously:  the absolutists smashing the world of sense by its means, the empiricists smashing the absolute—­for the absolute, they say, is the quintessence of all logical contradictions.  Neither side attains consistency.  The Hegelians have to invoke a higher logic to supersede the purely destructive efforts of their first logic.  The empiricists use their logic against the absolute, but refuse to use it against finite experience.  Each party uses it or drops it to suit the vision it has faith in, but neither impugns in principle its general theoretic authority.