Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 edition. Excerpt: ... of his system enables us, better than anything else, to see the results to which this line of thought conducts us. The radical error both of Hegelianism and of the allied English doctrine I take to be the identification of the human and the divine selfconsciousness, or, to put it more broadly, the unification of consciousness in a single Self. The exposure of this may be said to have been, in a manner, the thesis of these lectures. This identification or unification depends throughout, it has been argued, upon the tendency to take a mere form for a real being--to take an identity of type for a unity of existence. Each of us is a Self: that is to say, in the technical language of recent philosophy, we exist for ourselves or are objects to ourselves. We are not mere objects existing only for others, but, as it were, subject and object in one. Selfhood may also be said to imply that, in one aspect of my existence, I am universal, seeing that I distinguish my individual existence from that of other beings, while embracing both within a common world. Irrespective of metaphysical theory every Self is universal in this sense, and by all means let this characteristic be embodied in the definition of the Self. If a mere individual, as we are often told, would be a being without consciousness of its own limitations--a being, therefore, which could not know itself as an individual--then no Self is a mere individual. We may even safely say that the mere individual is a fiction of philosophic thought. There could be no interaction between individuals, unless they were all embraced within one Reality; still less could there be any knowledge by one individual of others, if they did not all form parts of one system of things. But it is a great step...
