Category: Philosophy

The absolute can for Bowne be accepted only as personal, and this conclusion is based on the epistemological insights regarding the relation of personal reason and experience on the one hand and abstractive understanding on the other. Tracing the personal to the impersonal involves a ‘logical aberration’; ‘uncritically handled’, the law of sufficient reason leads us to seek to explain the explanation, losing us in the infinite regress. [2] Demanding causation, it ‘always shuts us up to barren tautology when impersonally taken’; it only repeats the problem. [3] In reality, the regress ends with intelligence; we cannot get behind it and understand it as ‘something welling up from impersonal depths behind it’:

[Block quotation:] When we look for something beneath intelligence, we merely leave the supreme and self-sufficient category of personality for the lower mechanical categories, which are possible only in and through intelligence. The law of the sufficient reason is a most excellent principle; but of itself it does not tell us what can be a sufficient reason. Reflection shows that only living intelligence can be a sufficient reason; and logic forbids us to ask a sufficient reason for a sufficient reason. [4]

Plainly, ‘intelligence’ is here personal intelligence, intelligence as inseparable from personality. The self ‘is not to be abstractly taken. It is the living self in the midst of its experiences, possessing, directing, controlling both itself and them’. [5] For Bowne as for all personalists, there is no impersonal reason at all: ‘Reason itself is a pure abstraction which is realized only in conscious spirits; and when we abstract from these all that constitutes them conscious persons there is nothing intelligible left’; impersonal reason can signify nothing but ‘a blind force which is not reason, but which is adjusted to the production of rational results. In this sense any machine has impersonal reason.’ [6]

The impersonalists’ conception of universal reason as the same in all, with the finite mind participating in it ‘as one of its phases or manifestations’, is dismissed as an ‘echo’ of scholastic realism. [7] The explanatory emptiness of the metaphysics of universalist abstractionism is revealed, and countered with the familiar speculative theist argument:

[Block quotation:] There is no system of things in general, or of unrelated general laws. There is only the actual system of reality; and the divine thought and activity which produce this actual system must be as manifold and special as the facts themselves. The simplicity of the class term does not remove the complexity and plurality of the individuals comprised under it; and for each of these special facts, there must be correspondingly special thoughts and acts [in the ‘divine thought and activity’]. [8]

Impersonal reason and abstraction yield the view of unity as ‘simplicity, or the opposite of complexity and variety’, which, as applied to the world-ground, reduces the divine being to ‘a rigid and lifeless stare’. This ‘brings thought to a standstill’ and ‘explains nothing’, it ‘contains no ground of differentiation and progress’. As we have seen, monism is accepted by Bowne, not in the sense of pantheism or materialism, but in the sense of the unity of the world-ground that it is imperative also for any proper theism to maintain. Interaction between independent things is impossible; its ultimate explanation is found only in a fundamental, unitary reality, which is the independent, infinite world-ground, the absolute. But such an absolute does not exclude freely posited, non-restrictive relations. The required  monism is a theistic monism, not one of bare simplicity and emptiness. It must not only coordinate the interaction of independent things and beings, it must also be able to explain and produce them: ‘the unity of the world-ground must contain some provision for manifoldness and complexity’. The only unity that can do this is that of the ‘free and conscious self’, the known and concrete unity of personal experience: ‘[F]ree intelligence by its originating activity can posit plurality distinct from its own unity, and by its self-consciousness can maintain its unity and identity over against the changing plurality. Here the one is manifold without being many. Here unity gives birth to plurality without destroying itself. Here the identical changes and yet abides.’ [9]

As with unity, so with unchangeability: this consists not in ‘an ontological rigidity of fixed monotony of being’, but – as Lotze had already said – in the ‘constancy and continuity of the law which rules its several states and changes’. As applied to God, it is ‘the divine nature which exists through all the divine acts as their law and source’. But this constancy and continuity ‘can be found only in personality’, in which it ‘does not consist in any rigid core of being, but rather in the extraordinary power of self-consciousness, whereby the being distinguishes itself from its states, and constitutes itself identical and abiding’. Changelessness can be understood only in terms of living experience; it is not ‘the rigidity of a logical category but the self-identity and self-equality of intelligence’. Like change too, it has to be interpreted ‘in the concrete…with reference to self-consciousness’. [10] And so also with omnipresence, eternity, omniscience, omnipotence. By taking categories and relations of thought abstractly, Bradley finds only contradictions, and his attempt at resolving them in the absolute fails as long as the absolute is impersonally understood as well. [11] The whole series of attributes of the world-ground is personalistically reinterpreted by Bowne, largely on the basis of the phenomenality of space and time as understood by personalism.

Bowne’s whole argument in favour of the personalistic conception of the absolute conjoins the now familiar criticism of the abuse of abstractive reason with this stronger insistence on and the new implications drawn from the phenomenality of space and time, which are central in his general metaphysics. It is this that in Bowne’s system provides the philosophical basis for the distinctive dynamism of personalism, in its view of the universe as well as of the absolute itself. All along, it is certainly, as Knudson held, with enthusiasm that Bowne makes use of and develops Lotze’s positions, and in the general analysis of experience he is also in line with other American idealists at the time, who did not, however, draw out and emphasize the distinctly personalistic implications.

With regard to the pan of the hen kai pan, Bowne of course denies that the infinite is ‘the quantitative all’. This too is an abstraction, ‘a mental product which represents nothing apart from our thought’. The infinity of the world-ground means simply that it is ‘the independent source of the finite and its limitation’. [12] The universe as a totality does not exist in space, but ‘only in the infinite consciousness and will’, in the absolute being who alone transcends space ‘in the sense of limitation’. The divine intelligence is the ‘place’ of the world, and from this spaceless place, space relations are established. For the finite being too, for whom experienced objects are spatially related and whose temporally structured experience is a mark of limitation, it is true that we do not act where we are, but are where we act – which fact is of course the experiential ground for the speculative conclusion regarding the analogous but unlimited reality in the absolute. Concrete presence is ‘a function of our dynamic relations’ and relative to the ‘dynamic range’ and power of the mind’s apprehending activity; it is not a question of filling an absolute, independent space. [13]

Nor is experience ‘in the present as a separate point of time, but rather the present is in experience’; ‘The person who can grasp only a few things has a small present; one who can grasp many things has a larger present; and one who can grasp all things has an all-embracing present or a changeless now.’ The absoloute person possesses the whole of his experience in immediacy of consciousness, in a state of complete self-possession and self-realization, ‘so as to be under no law of development and possessing no unrealized potentialities’. This alone is what omnipresence in space and time, as well as the transcendence of space and time, could mean. Regarding the absolute as subject to some ‘necessary and successive development’ means ‘speculative disaster’. [14]

Bowne insists, like Boström, that this does not imply any ‘rigid monotony of being’ but that it is to be thought of as ‘the perfect fullness of life, without temporal ebb or flow’. Just as other idealists of personality had objected to this, finding the alleged difference from Aristotle hard to discern or insufficient, so later American personalists moved in the direction of a metaphysical temporalism and even relapsed to the Schellingian position of a ground in God, which implied the idea of a developmental absolute. In this they went much further than the normal personalist alternative of attempting, like Pringle-Pattison, to conceive of an absolute that included both timelessness and temporal experience. If for Boström the spatiotemporal world was exclusively a phenomenon in the finite being’s experience, it was for other personalists a phenomenon or an ‘appearance’ for the absolute too, as it were. And there are many formulations that point in the direction of this position in Bowne as well. It is of course necessary for Bowne to preserve the dynamism of the life of the absolute itself, to maintain the proper, distinctive conception of the personal absolute in contradistinction to the mechanical or logical mechanism of naturalisistic and absolute idealistic impersonalism which, as Bowne sought to show, explains nothing. Dynamic existence is for him part of the concept of personality, and since Bowne insists that since God’s transcendence of time ‘means essentially his absolute self-possession and lack of our human limitations which grow out of our dependence’, it is possible, Bowne thinks, to save God’s ‘relations of sympathy with the world of finite spirits’. God is not fixed transcendence but part of the ‘cosmic movement’. For Bowne, ‘a staticably immovable and intellectually monotonous being’ is something quite different from ‘a self-sufficient, self-possessing, all-embracing intelligence, which, as such, is superior to our finite temporal limitations’. [15]

Obviously, there is a difference between the supreme intelligence as ‘an abstract logical mechanism or function of categories’ and Bowne’s concept in that the former subordinates personality to a higher rational order; not even personality in the meagre form of a mere static conscious gaze is necessarily a ‘function’ of categories. And for Bowne as for other early personalists, there is no sharp separation of the divine will from the divine nature. Yet his insistence on the supreme intelligence itself as at the same time ‘a Living Will’, as ‘a synthesis at once of knowledge and power’, [16] does not in itself differ from those of the more explicitly or strictly atemporalist personalists; they used the same language.

It is rather due to the fact that his general reinterpretation of the attributes of the absolute presupposes temporality as a kind of phenomenon for the absolute itself as well as for the finite beings that Bowne really begins to move toward a more fully dynamic idea of the personality of the absolute. Knudson states that it is because God ‘is a Person’ that he can initiate change while remaining super-temporal and uninvolved. This, Knudson explains, ‘is the mystery of personality’, and indeed ‘its most distinctive characteristic’. Through the concept of personality it is possible to understand the causal initiation of change in a different sense than, for instance, the teleological pull of the strictly timeless consciousness of Aristotle’s God. But what is according to Bowne the relation of God to this change? The answer is that in contradistinction to Boström, the changing world is experienced as such not only by the finite beings, but also directly by God. Since the subordination of the forms of intuition and of the categories to individualistically and voluntaristically conceived personality, and their inclusion in the living experience of such personality, must hold not only for finite persons but for the absolute world-ground, both time and timelessness are part of the experienced world of God. In Knudson’s words, ‘[t]he cosmic order may very possibly have for him, as it has for us, the temporal and spatial form’. [17]

In the next chapter, we will have the opportunity to return to this aspect of what could perhaps be called the question of the degree of dynamism of the personality of Bowne’s absolute, as we look at Bowne’s view of the relation between the personal absolute and the finite persons. For now, it is sufficient to understand Bowne’s more general arguments for the primacy of personality even as the absolute.

If we suppose with abstractionist impersonal rationalism that ideas precede personality, we must, Bowne writes, ask where they exist. If in time and space, they would ‘dissolve away in the dialectic of spatial and temporal existence’; the position is impossible on Bowne’s view of the phenomenality of space and time. If in consciousness, it would be ‘contrary to the hypothesis, which is that they are preconditions of consciousness’. They thus retreat, as the only remaining alternative, ‘into some kind of metaphysical nth dimension, where we cannot follow them because they mean nothing’. Furthermore, if we suppose the relations between these abstract ideas to be purely logical, the intellect to be ‘merely a set of logical relations’, and ‘the universe…a logical implication of ideas’, all the contents of the universe would be ‘as eternal as the ideas’. There would be ‘no room for change, but all their implications would rigidly coexist’. All the contents of finite minds would, as ‘implications of eternal ideas’, be ‘equally eternal’. Here, of course, also the moral and theological problems of pantheism become evident: ‘as error and evil are a manifest part’ of these supposed contents of the finite mind, ‘it follows that they likewise are necessary and eternal. Hence we should have to admit an element of unreason and evil in the eternal ideas themselves’. ‘There is no escape from this result as long as we look upon the intellect as a logical mechanism of ideas’, Bowne explains: ‘Only a living, active, personal intelligence can escape this fatalism and suicidal outcome of the impersonal reason. A purely logical and contemplative intellect that merely gazed upon the relations of ideas, without choice and initiative and active self-direction, would be absolutely useless in explaining the order of life. [18] The earliest personalist arguments are here merely repeated:

[Block quotation:] The essentially impersonal can never by any logical process other than verbal hocus-pocus, which is not logical after all, be made the sufficient reason for a personal development. But our existence does not really abut on, or spring out of, an impersonal background; it rather depends on the living will and purpose of the Creator. And its successive phases, so far as we may use temporal language, are but the form under which the Supreme Person produces and maintains the personal finite spirit. [19]

The world ‘is not merely an idea, it is also a deed. It is not merely a presentation to us which ends in itself, it is also a revelation of the cosmic activity of the Supreme Will.’ It is ‘a thought expressed in act’. The universe is ‘the divine thought finding realization through the divine will’. Freedom and uniformity or necessity coexist in the absolute being in the same personal manner as in ourselves. [20] Similar formulations could be found in mediaeval theists; but in view of the modern understanding of self-consciousness and phenomenal experience characteristically added by modern personalism, they acquire a different meaning in Bowne.

Interestingly, alongside the conceptions of the world-ground as impersonal reason, Bowne also turns against various typical forms of romantic philosophy. Most importantly, he explicitly rejects the imperfect theism of the later Schelling. In this explicitness at least he seems to be unique among the British and American personalists, and it connects him even more closely with the concerns of the post-Schellingian personalists in Europe: ‘The existence of the world in God means simply its continuous dependence on him. To find the world in God in any discriminable ontological form, such as Schelling’s “dark nature-ground”, would cancel his necessary unity. The experienced relation of active intelligence to its products is the only solution to this problem.’ [21]

Other romantic notions, some of which are quite irrationalistic, such as the idea of the world-ground as ‘pure will’ and as ‘unconscious intelligence’, Bowne dismisses, together with the notion of impersonal reason, as mere ‘empty phrases, obtained by unlawful abstraction’. These notions, it is important to understand, were normally derived directly from that side of the philosophy of the later Schelling which the personalists rejected. Schopenhauer’s pure will, without intellect or personality, is ‘nothing’: ‘Will itself, except as a function of a conscious and intelligent spirit, has no meaning’. Without ‘the conscious perception of ends and the conscious determination of the self according to those ends’, all that is left is ‘the conception of a blind and necessary force’. The same holds for the position of Eduard von Hartmann. All of these doctrines share a ‘notion of an impersonal spirit, which is the ground of all existence, and which comes to consciousness only in finite spirits’. It is all just ‘atheism under another name’; again, romantic pantheism turns out to be virtually or actually identical with naturalism: ‘What the atheist calls persistent force or the fundamental reality, is here called impersonal spirit; but the meaning is in both cases the same. Both alike understand by the terms that blind and necessary reality which underlies all phenomena, and which, in its necessary on-goings, brings to life and death.’ [22]

But even when it has established that the absolute must be active, metaphysics has only reached a most incomplete idea of God: an idea which, Bowne holds, pantheism, even atheism, might accept. Although Grubbe did not, or could not for chronological reasons consider the later romantic philosophical extravaganzas that Bowne took into account, both the argumentative progression and the substance of Bowne’s reasoning about the attributes of the absolute, gradually leading up to the full conception of its personality, are noticeably similar to what we find in him. Like Grubbe, Bowne first establishes the attributes ascertainable by the use of the ‘understanding’ and the ‘speculative intellect’ alone, which cannot  lead to ‘a properly religious conception, but only to the last term of metaphysical speculation’. This, Bowne echoes Jacobi, is where Aristotle ended; for him ‘God has a purely metaphysical function and significance’ and is not yet ‘the object of love and trust and worship’. In line with his discussion of Comte, Bowne shares the new personalist view that the human race originally had the full, religious conception, and that the metaphysical one is a later abstraction. The religious attributes, as Grubbe calls them, the attributes that ‘concern the divine character, or ethical nature’, cannot be deduced by pure speculation; we have to go beyond the understanding in accordance with what we saw in the previous chapter, appealing to experience and to faith in the ideal of the perfect being. Only in this way can we reach the full religious concept of the personal absolute. [23]

But having reached it, what Bowne calls ‘the antinomy of the theistic argument’ must still be addressed: the objection that personality is not attributable to the absolute and infinite. It seems as if ‘we are shut up on the one side to the belief in an intelligent, and hence personal, world-ground’ while at the same time ‘we are shut out on the other by the contradictory character of the conception’. We are shut up to the former since Bowne’s version of personalistic epistemology and metaphysics has already shown that the alternative conception, ‘the notion of impersonal existence’, is contradictory too. Conscious thought he had shown to be ‘the supreme condition of all existence’; he had shown that ‘[t]he universe of experience has no meaning or possibility apart from conscious intelligence as its abiding source or seat.’ The ‘speculative dogma that personality is second and not first’ had already been reversed, so that ‘living, personal intelligence’ had been established as ‘the only possible first’. It still seemed unclear however where these conclusions left us with regard to the conceptual contradictoriness of the theistic antinomy. In addition to his general conclusions regarding the nature of the world-ground, Bowne therefore also embarks on his own rendering of the Lotzean and other earlier personalist arguments specifically pertaining to this issue. As signifying ‘only self-knowledge’, ‘self-control’, and ‘self-direction’, personality, he first states, has ‘no implication of corporeality or dependent limitation’. Self-consciousness does not require finitude, the self does not need a not-self. Nor does God, as the developmental pantheists held, need the finite ‘in order to realize his own ethical potentialities and attain to a truly moral existence’. Pantheism ensues when the moral is thus made ‘subordinate to the metaphysical’ and ‘the proper absoluteness of God is denied’; it becomes ‘pronounced’ when ‘God apart from the world’ is conceived to be ‘as impossible as the world apart from God’. [24] Instead of making personality in God possible, the relativization of God rather cancels it. This is a considerably stricter theistic position than Pringle-Pattison’s. As for Illingworth, it is only the personalistic and theistic concept of the absolute with its partial transcendence that preserves the proper absoluteness of the absolute. [25] Pantheism is at once bogged down in relativism.

The objections against the personal conception are ‘largely verbal’, Bowne asserts, and many of them spring from a ‘literal anthropomorphism’. [26] But ‘Laying aside…all thought of corporeal form and limitation as being no factor of personality, we must really say that complete and perfect personality can be found only in the Infinite and Absolute Being’. Here Bowne’s formulations are not original at all or even more ‘exciting’, but merely restatements of Lotze’s. Only in this absolute being ‘can we find that complete and perfect selfhood and self-possession which are necessary to the fullness of personality’. We must beware lest we transfer onto the ‘Supreme Person’ the limitations, accidents and peculiarities of our ‘human personality’. The ‘notion of personality’ does not necessarily include them, but only ‘fullness of power, knowledge, and selfhood’ are ‘the essential factors of the conception’: [27]

[Block quotation:] A thought life so different from ours eludes any but the vaguest apprehension on our part. Its unchanging fullness yet without monotony, the structure of the absolute reason also which determines the eternal contents of the divine thought, the timeless and absolute self-possession – how mysterious all this is, how impenetrable to our profoundest reflection. We can see that these affirmations must be made, but we also see that in a sense they must always lie beyond us. Here we reach a point where the speculation of philosophy must give place to the worship and adoration of religion. [28]

This insistence on the radical difference harmonizes with the metaphysical considerations which led to the reaction among subsequent American personalists of calling for a termporalist conception of God and in that respect for a God more personal in the human sense – and to go so far as to abandon the whole concept of the absolute.

This, however, was not a return to Jacobi, but rather to that side of the later Schelling which the speculative theists rejected. With this move, the continuity in the development of personalism was broken, and we stand before a personalism of a distinctly neoteric, twentieth-century variety. For Bowne, enough of the characteristics of human personality were preserved in the divine for the personal absolute still to be a viable concept. In this as in other respects, Bowne seems to belong securely in what I regard as the original, European tradition of personalism.

—

Introduction

Personal “Reason” and Impersonal “Understanding”

Since my purpose is to demonstrate that it is the pre-Lotzean, European personalistic tradition that Bowne takes over and develops further, I will focus less on the original contributions of Bowne than on the features that establish his personalism as belonging to the older philosophical and theological current. With the American personalism of Bowne, we come to the work on which the definitions of personalism that I have looked at in Chapter 1 were for the most part based. The purpose of this section on American personalism and those in the following chapters is to show by reference to and by a more detailed treatment of Bowne’s work itself – and drawing also on Knudson, one of the most faithful followers of Bowne, to the extent that his formulations bring out better than Bowne’s own the similarities with early European personalism – that these definitions indeed do describe the same personalist movement as the one we have now, in one aspect, studied in its earlier European development.

It is in the preface to Personalism that Bowne makes the historical observation I mentioned in Chapter 1: Comte, he says, was right that explanation in terms of personality was historically primary, and also in his view of abstract metaphysics as merely ‘the ghost of earlier personal explanations’. ‘[T]he conceptions of impersonal metaphysics’ are now seen to be ‘only the abstract forms of the self-conscious life’, which ‘apart from that life…are empty and illusory’. Where Comte went wrong was in his failure to understand the meaning of the primordial personalism, the ‘personal beginning of all speculation’. It is this meaning, obscured throughout most of the history of philosophy, that Bowne sets out to explain. If we do not understand ‘the primacy of the personal world from the start’, we are led ultimately to naturalism and the ‘elimination of personality altogether’ through the notions of objective space and time, matter, force, ‘impersonal substances’ – all of which are ‘abstractions broken from the system of living experience’. Accepting them as reality is to transcend experience through the ‘crude metaphysics’ of common sense. Bowne’s position, as that of all earlier personalists, is that the experiential element in common sense must be retained, but that if it is not combined with critical idealism it will soon lead to the mistaken view of reality represented by realistic empiricism, given the common proneness to the fallacies of abstraction. Experience must be ‘accepted as trustworthy as far as it goes’. Science studies the laws of experiential phenomena in space and time and legitimately introduces a limited range of hypothetical inferential interpretation within its own sphere. Comte was right in his restriction of science to ‘the investigation and registration of the orders of coexistence and sequence in experience’. But spatiotemporal, phenomenal experience as a whole must be transcended for its ultimate explanation, and this can be properly done only through the interpretation of philosophy. This implies ‘a personal interpretation of experience’, the first step to which ‘consists in the insight that we are in a personal world from the start, and that the first, last, and only duty of philosophy is to interpret this world of personal life and relations. Any other view can only lead to the misleading abstractions and aberrations with which the history of thought abounds.’ [1]

If we do not understand the ‘concrete process’ of knowing as ‘necessarily individual’, the result will be a ‘confounding of all distinctions’ which may lead to the conclusion that ‘the subject of the universal experience is the same as the subject of the particular experience – a dark saying, to which unfortunately no key has been furnished’. [2]

The first experiential fact is for Bowne ‘the validity of our personal knowledge’, which includes ‘our mutual understanding of one another’. [3] A doctrine which overlooks this fact, a doctrine which fails, as Kant’s does, to consider the given ‘plurality of persons’, relying only on the process of knowledge in abstraction from it, ‘must end in solipsism’:

[Block quotation:] [I]f we make the world of things subjective presentations because the knowledge of them arises through our mental construction, we must do the same thing with the world of persons, for the knowledge of them has an equally subjective character. Kant passes from the “me” to “us” without telling us how he makes the transition. He really begins with “us” – not merely with the individual self, but with the whole collection of individual human beings – and gets an experience valid for us all in exceedingly obscure ways. But what Kant did not do the critic must do, and we must inquire into the relation of these many minds to one another ina system of phenomenal knowledge. [4]

Pringle-Pattison and others before him had reached their personalistic conclusions after having begun with the analysis of the impersonalist idealists’ absolute, universal ‘Self’, operative in all the finite and supposedly merely phenomenal ones, and of the problematic trajectory through which Kant’s transcendental ego was developed into this conception. They had then pointed to its problems in the face of the experiential givenness and reality of finite persons. But some had also tended to start directly from the epistemological significance of the concrete plurality of the latter. Although he too gives an account of the development of absolute idealism, [5] this is the method preferred by Bowne:

[Block quotation:] [T]he basal certainties in knowledge are not the ontological existence of material and mechanical things, but rather the coexistence of persons, the community of intelligence and the system of common experience. And these are not given as speculative deductions, but as unshakable practical certainties. We cannot live intellectually at all without recognizing other persons than ourselves, and without assuming that the laws of intelligence are valid for all alike, and that all have the same general objects in experience…These are the deepest facts and presuppositions, and they involve some profound mysteries; but they cannot be questioned without immediate practical absurdity. [6]

But again, it is not that the self is dependent on other finite selves for its identity, as in Hegel’s process of Anerkennung. The experienced ‘living, conscious, active’ empirical self is not a phenomenon, but the most concrete reality. It is the transcendental ego, understood as separate from this self, that is a mere ‘fiction’. Kant’s phenomenalism is an abstract deduction contrary to experience. It is not needed to refute the claims of the rational psychologists, nor is it proved by their paralogisms. Things may be regarded as phenomenal, but it is impossible to understand the self as phenomenal in the same sense: the certainty of self-existence, of the self ‘as the subject of the mental life and knowing and experienceing itself as living, and as one and the same throughout its changing experiences, is the surest item of knowledge we possess’. [7]

In his brief summary of his own position cited in Chapter 1, Bowne stressed not least his combination of a certain kind of realism with idealism – the non-Hegelian combination which, as we have seen, in more or less developed forms was definitional of the development of personalism from a very early stage. In Bowne’s works, this synthesis or interplay of  transcendentalism and empiricism, activity and passivity of the mind, creativity and receptivity, mediation and immediacy, are explained at length.

It might perhaps look as if Bowne’s stress on the active contributions of the mind is stronger than that of earlier European personalists, and that in this respect he is more of a Kantian and less of a Platonist than they. But this is not necessarily the case. The new partial insights of Kant in this field were assimilated by all nineteenth-century personalists – and modified in a manner similar to that of Bowne. For Bowne too reinserts Kantian mental activity into a broader idealistic and partly Platonic framework. The notion of the active mind can be found to some extent already in the Plotinian and the Augustinian tradition. Knudson argues – somewhat sweepingly – that the Platonic and Kantian traditions are essentially the same in their insistence on the reality of the self, the independence of reason, and the creative activity of thought; it is only the method of argument that differs. Plato’s reason is ‘not concerned with the data of sense, nor even general notions abstracted from them, but with an independent realm of ideas’; both traditions vindicate the claims of reason, the higher interests of man. What is important for the personalist in the doctrine of the creative activity of the self is primarily its metaphysical implications: the reality of the self, its identity, unity and permanence, holding together the experiential complexity and flow. [8]

Experience goes beyond sense experience to include ‘the data of self-consciousness’, ‘the inner experience of the conscious self’. In the inner world, there is immediacy of experience. Although for Kant the categories derived concrete meaning from experience, he neglected or misunderstood inner, personal experience. For Bowne the latter becomes the key to the interpretation of the categories, and since in contradistinction to outer perception it is immediate, the categories become categories of reality. While remaining preconditions of experience, their true meaning can be realized only in ‘living self-experience’. [9] Providing elaborate analyses of the categories thus understood, he concludes, with regard to the category of identity, that it ‘is given as the self-equality of intelligence throughout experience’ and that ‘any other conception destroys itself’. The category of unity similarly

[Block quotation:] may be purely formal, as when we call a thing one; but when we come to real unity only experience can tell us whether it be possible and what form it must take on. There can be no real unity in anything existing in space and time, for in that case everything would be dispersed in infinite divisibility. We find the problem solved only in the unity of a conscious self, which is the only concrete unity that escapes the infinite dispersion of space and time. [10]

The category of causality cannot be thought ‘abstractly and impersonally’, for we then ‘find ourselves lost in the infinite regress, and if we escape it we have no means of telling whether there is anything corresponding to our ideas or not’. In general, ‘[i]t is absolutely necessary to find in experience something that will insure that our ideas have some corresponding concrete existence; or else we are simply shuffling verbal counters’. The meaning of causality can only be found in ‘the self-conscious causality of free intelligence’. [11]

The problem of change and identity eludes us or vanishes in contradiction when we transfer it to ‘the impersonal world of space and time and abstract principles’; it has to be referred to the experiential world of the self-conscious subject, the ‘fixed point’ which is the ‘origin of ordinates in this field’. [12] And so with the problem of unity and plurality. In concrete, conscious experience, the unity of the self is inseparable from plurality, although it does not produce or explain it: the plurality is an aspect of the unity: not of ‘an abstract unity without distinction or difference’, but of ‘a living, conscious unity, which is one in its manifoldness and manifold in its oneness’. This is contradictory only for formal, discursive thought; ‘taken concretely it is the fact of consciousness’. [13]

All of this illustrates what Bowne in his brief Selbstdarstellung termed ‘transcendental empiricism’. It is the doctrine that

[Block quotation:] all thought about reality must be rooted in experience and that apart from experience we never can be sure whether our conceptions represent any actual fact or not. The categories themselves are not something which precede the mind and found its possibility. They are rather modes of mental operation. They are the forms which the mind gives to its experience, but the mind is not to be understood through them. Rather they are to be understood through the mind’s living experience of itself. [14]

Through this transcendental empiricism, the extra-mental universe of common-sense realism, the unknowables of agnosticism, the ‘transfigured realism’ which defines reality ‘apart from intelligence and ends by presenting us with a set of barren and worthless abstractions as the truly real, while the whole system of living experience is excluded from reality altogether’, and the ‘static universe which eludes knowledge’, are all refuted. [15]

Although there is no immediacy in outer perception, as naturalism asserts, there is yet in it a given ‘other’. It is a phenomenon, but not of an unknowable noumenon. It is a real appearance, an appearance of reality through which we have real knowledge of it. [16] Fichte had rejected Kant’s thing in itself as unaffirmable; Bowne, with all personalists, asserted that it was not only affirmable but knowable, albeit not in any simple, non-idealist manner. That which shall explain the given experiential world must to some extent be knowable through its causal relations to it, whereas that which is ‘truly extra-mental’, which is ‘beyond thought and independent of it and in no way amenable to it’, is according to Bowne ‘an impossible conception’. [17]

Kantianism had failed to refute the scepticism engendered by Cartesian radical dualism (just as, it might be added, this Cartesian dualism had thus itself obviously failed to refute the scepticism engenderd by late mediaeval radical, nominalistic voluntarism [18]), and epistemological monism, both of the absolute idealist and the neorealist variety, had succeeded it. Personalism, in its resistance to the polarized yet interconnected and interdependent extremisms of modernity, returns, in a limited sense, to a pre-Cartesian position. For Bowne, epistemological monism not only makes knowledge impossible. It also destroys ‘the independence and distinctive worth of personality’: ‘If personality is to maintain its integrity, it must be kept “a handbreadh off”, both from the Absolute and from things; and this means an epistemological dualism, no matter what one’s theory of things or of the Absolute may be.’ But the dualism of personalism is different from the Cartesian; it steers a ‘middle course between agnostic dualism and an impossible identification of thought and thing’. [19] Rejecting Cartesian dualism as well as the monistic reactions against it, personalism’s positive alternative, while drawing on premodern traditions, is still a modern synthesis. The experienced phenomenal order mediates a real content knowable by our categories, but the precondition of this is that behind it is ‘a Supreme Intelligence which manifests his thought through it and thus founds that objective unity of the system of experience which is presupposed in all our knowing’. [20] The necessary dualism on which personalism insists against absolute idealism is explained and made possible by the parallelism of a ‘theistic monism’, where God is the source of the thing-series as well as the thought-series. Things are knowable since minds are created in the image of the underlying intelligence. [21] The ‘theistic suggestion’ that the phenomenal world of things originates in and expresses thought brings it ‘within the thought sphere’. The Berkeleyan streak in Bowne’s personalism appears: things are ‘independent of our existence’ but not of ‘all thinking’: it is as in this sense situated ‘within the thought sphere’ that they are knowable. Significantly, after having excluded a priori reasons for the unknowability of things, Bowne continues, in the same sentence, by saying that this solution ‘assimilates the problem of knowledge to that of mutual understanding among persons’. [22]

Bowne’s personalist epistemology is a late product of the development that started with the late eighteenth-century distinction between Vernunft and Verstand. [23] Reason in a broad sense, as the whole field of conviction and insight, is distinguished from reason in a narrow sense, as the faculty of inference through argument; and the misuse of ‘the understanding’, which Bowne uses in a largely Coleridgean sense, is criticized. When the understanding oversteps the limits of its proper sphere and moves into metaphysics, claiming to provide in its geometrically and numerically expressed concepts and laws ‘veritable transcripts of reality’, it errs, sometimes falling into ‘the pernicious errors of materialism and atheism’. It cannot account for ‘the essential dynamism’ of the metaphysical system; and the science based on it has ‘neither the call nor the power to penetrate’ into the realm of ‘true efficient causality’. [24]

In the chapter in Personalism entitled ‘The Failure of Impersonalism’, Bowne compresses and restates the detailed arguments in his Theory of Thought and Knowledge and his Metaphysics regarding the untenability of the two forms of impersonalism against which all personalism turns: that of naturalism and that of absolute idealism. They both have the same principal epistemological point of departure:

[Block quotation:] Uncritical minds always attempt to explain the explanation, thus unwittingly committing themselves to the infinite regress. Accordingly when they come to living intelligence as the explanation of the world, they fancy that they must go behind even this. We have the categories of being, cause, identity, change, the absolute, and the like; and intelligence at best is only a specification or particular case of these more general principles. These principles, then, lie behind all personal or other existence, as its presupposition and source, and constitute a set of true first principles, from which all definite and concrete reality is derived by some sort of logical process or implication. [25]

In typical personalist fashion, Bowne points to the consequences of this view, which had been amply demonstrated in the actual historical development in Germany. ‘[I]dealistic impersonalism’ is in ‘its origin…antipodal to naturalism, but in the outcome the two often coincide’. Bowne mentions that D. F. Strauss said that the difference between Hegelianism and materialism ‘was only one of words’; this, Bowne adds, ‘was certainly true of Hegelianism of the left wing’. [26] The monism of neorealism, which reduces thoughts to things (or aggregates of sense-qualities), is parallel to that of absolute idealism, which reduces things to thoughts; and just as rationalistic materialism has historically developed into rationalistic absolute idealism, so the latter has led back to naturalism. [27] Impersonalism ‘is a failure whether in the low form of materialistic mechanism or in the abstract form of idealistic notions…personality is the real and only principle of philosophy which will enable us to take any rational step whatever’. [28] Bowne analyses the confusion of logic and ontology, the progression from abstraction to deduction, in terms identical with those of Jacobi and the earlier personalists. [29]

The onesided theoretical approach to metaphysics overlooks the importance of will and active causality, reducing things to objects of knowledge, to ideas; and since the mind too is such an object, it is likewise reduced to an idea or collection of ideas; next ‘the personal implication’ is eliminated from these ideas, and mind is regarded as ‘a function of impersonal ideas’. The purely epistemological interest ‘seeks to make ideas all-embracing’, making us ‘unwilling to admit anything that cannot be conceptually grasped’. We are left with ‘a tissue of abstractions’. [30] In absolute idealism, everything is generated within thought itself, thought is made all-inclusive. [31] But ‘[t]he impersonal idea is a pure fiction. All actual ideas are owned, or belong to some one, and mean nothing as floating free.’ Impersonalistic idealism assumes that the categories can be conceived in themselves, that they are ‘in a measure the preconditions of concrete existence’, so that ‘we might almost suppose that a personal being is compounded of being plus unity plus identity plus causality, etc.’ [32]

The problem can be solved only if raised to the personal plane, where ‘we take the terms in the meaning they have in living experience’. Abstractly conceived, the categories are easily made contradictory and worthless – as, we add, was evident in Bradley. But philosophy is concerned only with the forms the categories ‘take on’ in concrete, ‘living experience’. There, they turn out to be compatible. [33] In sum, personality

[Block quotation:] can never be construed as a product or compound; it can only be experienced as a fact. It must be possible because it is given as actual…When we have lived and described the personal life we have done all that is possible in sane and sober speculation. If we try to do more we only fall a prey to abstractions. This self-conscious existence is the truly ultimate fact. [34]

We should note this presence of the language of life in Bowne, who lived in the era of the life-philosophy of which Jacobi and the later Schelling were distant pioneers. Beyond the understanding, self-knowledge rests on ‘our living self-consciousness’. We conceive, but we also live: ‘This living indeed cannot be realized without the conception, but the conception is formal and empty without the living. In this sense intelligence must accept itself as a datum, and yet not as something given from without, but as the self-recognition of itself by itself.’ [35] Life proceeds on ‘a vast deal of informal and instinctive inference’. ‘If one were called upon to formally justify his confidence in another, he would not succeed. The formal statements would seem cold and equivocal alongside of the confidence of friendship.’ Logic cannot fully reproduce this intuitive immediacy. This is especially true with regard to the ‘highest and deepest things’: ‘Here the whole man enters into the argument, and not simply the understanding as an isolated faculty.’ Moral action must supplement passive contemplation. And the matter of arguments which ‘root in life itself’ often ‘elude definite and adequate statement’, there is ‘an unformulated activity of the mind which is the real gist of the reasoning’. Because of this primacy of the person and the life of the person, the relation of character and belief familiar from Jacobi, Fichte and Schelling must still be taken into account: ‘Since the belief expresses the life, it must vary with it’; this explains ‘the peculiar moral quality that attaches to certain beliefs. It would be quite absurd to hold one responsible for belief, if it were always the passionless conclusion of a syllogism. But some beliefs express the believer himself, what he loves, what he stands for, what he desires to be. Such beliefs have personal and moral quality.’ A man’s beliefs depend upon what he is rather than upon logic; arguments are often ‘little more than pretexts, or excuses, for a foregone conclusion’; the ‘living movement of conviction’ is determined by the underlying ‘vital process’. It is through this personal life that we reach insight not only into reality in general, but also, and inseparably, into the nature of God; humanity’s faith in divine righteousness is discovered through ‘open field’ study of ‘the entire movement and manifestation of humanity’, ‘the historical drama of humanity’; and feeling the force, the meaning, and the profundity of ‘the ethical demand for an ethical Creator’ is possible only through ‘living participation in the moral effort and struggle of humanity’. [36] As we saw in the discussion of Lavely’s article on personalism in the last chapter, with Brightman, it became possible to find a personalist version of the ‘dialectical movement toward wholeness’ in philosophy; it is easy to see the need, for the pusposes of the philosophical assimilation and elaboration of the historical experience gained in the way Bowne describes, for an adequate form of dialectical reason. Of course, to some extent, such reason is in reality already operative in the personalists’ account of the limits of the ‘understanding’ and what lies beyond them.

Knudson dwells the consequences of the intellectualism of the Greeks, which did not allow a full understanding of the significance of the will and the emotions for knowledge. Even Plato’s Good was intellectualistically conceived. This intellectualism was taken over by mediaeval thought. Against the impersonal reason of the tradition of natural theology stood only outer, religious authority. Natural theology relied merely on the perceptual and logical facultiles. [37] Truth was either factually or logically established, or asserted by authority. Practical reason, will, and emotion had no standing within philosophy and philosophical theology. Yet in the ‘proofs’ of God and immortality, valuational elements were smuggled in – as a residue, it might be added, of the pre- and early-scholastic tradition. [38] With the rise of modern rationalism and empiricism, however, such elements were increasingly separated from the perceptual and logical faculties, so that, for instance, teleology was rejected.

Knudson significantly focuses exclusively on Kant’s reaction against this development, and thus misses Jacobi’s analysis of the emergence of the worldview of enlightenment rationalism and its distinctly modern kind of impersonal pantheism. Only with Kant there appeared for Knudson in the course of modernity a position which not only harmonizes with religion but ‘also with that type of philosophy which sees in personality something deeper, broader, and more divine than the perceptual or logical faculty’. The ‘deepest truth of reality’ is ‘derived from our ethical and spiritual nature, from that practical and vital experience that lies back of all purely intellectual processes’; ‘life is deeper than logic’. Yet Knudson is of course perfectly clear about the respects in which Kant’s position is insufficient and mistaken from the personalist point of view. Personalism goes beyond Kant in its understanding of the cognitive function of the volitional and emotional aspects of our nature, their warrant for affirmations about ultimate reality. Kant’s distinction between faith and knowledge is too sharp. Knowledge is not confined to phenomena, and theoretical reason itself implies faith: it demands for its satisfaction to pass beyond the phenomenal, it cannot dispense with the metaphysical categories, or eliminate value. Since mechanical causality is always incomplete, for reality to become a coherent whole, knowledge must rise to free, non-mechanical causality, guided by purpose. Theoretical and practical reason thus cannot be separated in the Kantian fashion; practical reason is theoretically necessary. [39] It should be added that Fichte too had transcended the Kantian distinction, but only in the context of his general modern constructivist development of idealism; personalism’s fusion of theoretical and practical reason was in some respects, and mutatis mutandis, rather a renewal and variation of the Platonic and Augustinian traditions.

The many sides of the life of the mind are developed into separate aspects of Bowne’s epistemology. Their postulates and assumptions are not speculative constructions or logical deductions but expressions, implicit in life, of our ‘practical and ideal interests and necessities’, representing ‘the conditions of our fullest life’. [40] Faith is implicit or immanent in reason. It is not a question of outside validation of knowledge, as in pragmatism. The faith of reason, Knudson explains, is an ultimate, underived, undeduced, ‘axiomatic act’, an autonomously valid, self-certified, immediate practical assumption and presupposition. In addition to the intellect it ‘embraces also the aesthetic, the moral, and the religious faculty, and affirms the autonomous validity of each’. [41] These are independent yet co-ordinate forms of mental activity:

[Block quotation:] [T]he interests of truth, goodness, beauty and God belong together. To cast discredit on one is to weaken faith in all. Hence personalism insists on the trustworthiness of both the theoretical and the practical reason…Both, when thought through, involve faith in the ideal, and faith in one form of the ideal is as valid as faith in any other form…The conflict between intellectualism and voluntarism…turns out to be a conflict between two types of faith or value; and the solution of the conflict lies in the recognition of the validity of both. [42]

The cognitive, moral, and religious ideal tendencies, interests, and postulates, arising from our total nature and experience, are logically clarified and harmonized by philosophy. [43] The various ‘faculties’ are expressions of ‘a deeper underlying reason’, deeper than the formal understanding. Ultimately, it is ‘that deepest of all rational unities, the personal spirit. Personality with its fundamental needs and interests is the fountain-head of all that passes under the name of reason, whether it be theoretical or practical’. [44]

Religion is part of experience, and thus ‘must receive its recognition and interpretation as belonging to reality’; it is ‘[t]his fact preëminently’ that ‘leads to a personal conception of existence’. [45] Religion is ‘a function of the entire man’: Purely metaphysical arguments do not give ‘the full religious conception of God’, the actual grounds being not only intellectual but ‘emotional, aesthetic, and ethical’; ‘The needs of the intellect, the demands and forebodings of conscience, the cravings of the affections, the impulses of the aesthetic nature, and the ideals of the will, – all enter into the problem, apart from words of revelation, or any direct influence of God on the soul.’ The idea of God is not demonstrable by anything, yet it is implicit in everything. [46] But religion is more than ideas of theoretical and even practical reason, it is a path that demands ‘practical realization of [the] divine presence’: beliefs ‘must be lived to acquire any real substance or controlling character’; we must ‘build them into life and organize our lives around them’; ‘If we ignore them practically we may soon accost them skeptically; and they vanish like a fading gleam.’ [47] Typically, along with the onesided rationalism which leads to naturalism, irrational fideism is also rejected. Religious impulse or instinct is not enough. Conscience is emphasized, and the role assigned by personalism to the understanding and to logic and metaphysics is certainly important too. [48]

The faith that is immanent in reason is also free; the presence of faith and volition at the basis of reason is itself evinced by the possibility and reality of doubt and error. ‘Our faculties are made for truth, but this alone does not secure truth’, and the laws of thought ‘do not of themselves secure obedience’. [49] The facts of doubt and error disprove the unity of thought and thing. It is here that Bowne makes his contribution of explaining the theoretical and not merely practical significance of freedom. [50] Error is accountable for only by freedom. Necessitarian systems can make no distinction between true and false and between rational and irrational beliefs, since both must be equally ineluctable effects, regardless of whether they are produced by a spiritual or a material mechanism. ‘Any system which makes error necessary and cosmic destroys itself’. [51] Determinism leads to scepticism and irrationalism. Since for necessitarianism truth and error have the same source, it is mere accident that the one is called true and the other false. [52] ‘[T]he actual is all’. If they are both necessary, there is no means of or rational standard for distinguishing between them. And even if there were such a standard, we would not be able to use it without freedom. [53] Without freedom, argument and persuasion are absurd. Thus only on the plane of freedom do truth and error acquire significance; only to free agents, persons, is rationality possible. [54] Freedom is not opposed to reason, or to a ‘modest’ science of phenomena, but only to ‘some absolute “Science”, that is, that speculative theory which ignores the indications of experience and the practical aim and foundation of concrete science, and seeks to bind all things together in a scheme of necessity’; this is ‘only inconsistent and illiterate dogmatism, a pseudo-science and an enemy of humanity’. Necessitarian speculation, arising out of abstractive rationalism of the idealist or materialist variety, only begs the question, telling us nothing about what will happen but only that what happens is necessary. [55]

Rejecting necessitarianism, Bowne, as we will by now expect, at the same time rejects ‘the opposite abyss of lawless caprice’. [56] Freedom is not ‘pure lawlessness’. [57] The mistaken idea that this is the only alternative has been a support of necessitarianism, but the mind must then ‘vacillate between the two extremes, being driven out from either as soon as it grasps its implications’. The solution is to carry ‘everything back to intelligence, while resolutely eschewing every attempt to comprehend intelligence as the result of its own categories, or to do anything with it but experience and use it’. [58] Freedom is the concretely experienced power of self-direction. It is not a matter of freedom from motives, but of choice among motives not wholly determined by the motives themselves. Of this ‘mystery of self-determination’, Bowne writes that it is ‘the central factor of personality, the condition of responsibility, and the basis of the moral life’. It canot be ‘mechanically analyzed’ or deduced as necessary; ‘The attempt to analyze it contradicts it’; ‘it can only be experienced’. Freedom presupposes for its meaningfulness ‘a basis of fixity or uniformity’. Yet their coexistence is not a compound of them as abstractly preexistent: as such, and thus as contradictory, freedom and uniformity or necessity simply do not exist. As in the case of unity and plurality, reality is immediately and concretely given under these dual aspects. We find this in the experience of our own thought: the laws of thought are given in the fixed nature of reason, but they are not necessarily obeyed. Only by our free act of accepting them do we become rational. [59]

Although Bowne’s special contribution was this exposition of the theoretical meaning of freedom, there was for him a definite parallel betwen theoretical and moral freedom. In Knudson’s words: ‘Rationality…implies the possibility of error as morality does the possibility of sin. But if error and sin are necessary, there is manifestly an end to faith in reason and conscience.’ [60]

By means of the consistent development of personalist thought, Jacobi’s form of ‘realism’ has in Bowne’s philosophy been retrieved and consolidated within a rational idealism. The essential elements of Jacobi’s criticisms and positive suggestions seem to be preserved at a higher philosophical level. We ‘conserve the sense of reality and validity in knowledge, and at the same time recognize the results of criticism. We remain where we began, in the world of personal experience, and with the strengthened conviction that this world can never be explained on any impersonal plane.’ This lays the foundation for the achievement of Jacobi’s objectives: saving ‘life and mind and morals and society’. [61]

—

Introduction

Some reviewers and other readers of my book The Worldview of Personalism: Origins and Early Development (2006) expressed the view that I should have added sections on Borden Parker Bowne to each of the three thematic chapters, ‘Personal “reason” and impersonal “understanding”‘, ‘The personal absolute’, and ‘Personal unity-in-diversity’, instead of just providing a summary of his philosophy in chapter 1, ‘The current view of personalism and its origins’.

The reason why I did not do so was that I found it was not needed for the historical argument I set forth in the book. According to my thesis, Bowne represents a relatively late form of personalism; and this thesis of course required that the emphasis be placed on the earlier development which it claims is the early development precisely of personalism.

For the purpose of this argument, for the purpuse of demonstrating the continuity of Bowne’s personalism with the personalism I traced from the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth, I found the summary, in combination with the presentation of other, more general accounts of American personalism (as well as of American accounts of personalism in general) to be quite sufficient.

Moreover, it was evident that if I included sections of Bowne in the thematic chapters, the book would have become not only too long (this was, in particular, the view expressed by the publisher), but also too repetitive. Bowne’s formulations of the themes of the earlier philosophers I deal with, while certainly contributing some developments of his own, also often use almost precisely the same Words.

But in fact, I did consider adding such sections, and wrote drafts of them. They were never fully developed in terms of my own comments and analyses in the way I would have liked to develop them had they been included; I left them at the stage where they are primarily mere compilations of some relevant formulations and passages from Bowne and one or two later American personalists of his school (the sections, following those called ‘British personal idealism’ in each of the mentioned chapters, would probably have been called ‘American personalism’). These are, however, tied together by a minimal narrative which does explain further and emphasize the mentioned continuity, and thus continues to make the various points of the book’s general historical argument.

It must be kept in mind that these drafts, like the book as a whole, only set forth this historical argument, a thesis in the history of philosophy. Various positions are described, explained and analysed only to the extent that it is necessary for this thesis. Although in the fifth chapter of the book, I indicate briefly and in general terms the lasting relevance of “early personalism”, I am not at all, in the book or in these as yet unpublished drafts, making the case for idealistic personalism in strict philosophical terms. (I do make that case elsewhere.)

The drafts, taken together, are too long to be reworked into an article or even a book chapter. But they are also too short to be reworked into a new and separate book. They could be published in a collection of articles and/or book chapters, but at the moment I do not plan to publish any such book. Awaiting a suitable occasion for such publication, I therefore now publish them here, beginning with the section belonging to the first thematic chapter, chapter 2, ‘Personal “reason” and impersonal “understanding”‘.

Hopefully, this could be of use to scholars who want further exemplification and corroboration of my thesis with regard to Bowne – although all who have read the book will, I think, easily see the redundance of the sections that these drafts could have been developed into.

The drafts, as they exist now, are written as direct continuations of the respective chapters in the book and thus make frequent reference to it. The book is also where the publication details for all cited works are found.

Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910) was the founder of American personalism, or the Boston school of personalism. This is an idealistic form of personalism, what is often called personal idealism.