Idealism and our experience of nature
pp. 70-80
in: Leroy Rouner (ed), Philosophy, religion, and the coming world civilization, Berlin, Springer, 1966Abstract
When I arrived at Harvard in 1919, entering as a junior, I was already persuaded on two philosophical points: (1) the notion of mere matter, irreducible to mind in some broad sense, was absurd or meaningless; and (2) all minds are included in a universal or divine mind. My reasons for these views were my own, derived from reflection during my two years as orderly in a military hospital. I had no particular philosophical authority for the beliefs; they were conclusions of chains of reasoning starting from what seemed direct insights into the essence of all experience. Later, much later, I found that my reason for asserting the reducibility of the concept of matter was about the same as Croce's: the essentially aesthetic character of immediate experience. (Similar contentions are found in Rickert, Heidegger, Whitehead, and others.) I still find the argument valid. As for my reasons for believing in an all-inclusive deity, they were perhaps most like those of Royce, whose Problem of Christianity was the only technical philosophical work I recall having previously read.
