Ebook Personal Idealism

This volume originated in the conversations and discussions of a group of friends drawn together primarily by their membership in the Oxford Philosophical Society. The Society was started in the spring of 1898, and among some of the most regular attendants at its meetings a certain sympathy of view soon declared itself. In the course of two years the trend of opinion had grown so definite as to suggest to me the project of a volume of essays. Among those who seemed likely to contribute I circulated a programme which made it the object of our volume "to represent a tendency in contemporary thinking, to signalise one phase or aspect in the development of Oxford idealism." That tendency was summed up in a phrase which I thought I was originating at the time I wrote the programme, though it seems to have occurred independently to others. It is the phrase we have chosen for our title, "Personal Idealism." For me our volume fulfils the purpose with which it was projected so far as it develops and defends the principle of personality.

Personality, one would have supposed, ought never to have needed special advocacy in this self-assertive country of ours. And yet by some of the leading thinkers of our day it has been neglected; while by others it has been bitterly attacked.