[Here I enter upon the discussion of the subject proper, beginning, as above indicated, with the Fundamental Conceptions. Having followed these through the contrasts Whole and Part, Subject and Object, Reality and Appearance (or Noumenon and Phenomenon), and developed the bearing of these on the procedure of thought from the dualism of natural realism to materialism and thence to idealism, with the issue now coming on, in this last, between monism and pluralism, I strike into the contrast Cause and Effect, and, noting its unfolding into the more comprehensive form of Ground and Consequence, go on thence as follows:] * * * * * It is plain that the contrast Ground and Consequence will enable us to state the new issue with closer precision and pertinence than Reality and Appearance, Noumenon and Phenomenon, can supply; while, at the same time, Ground and Consequence exhibits Cause and Effect as presenting a contrast that only fulfills what Noumenon and Phenomenon foretold and strove towards; in fact, what was more remotely, but not less surely, also indicated by Whole and Part, Knowing and Being, Subject and Object. For in penetrating to the coherent meaning of these conceptions, the philosophic movement, as we saw, advanced steadily to the fuller and fuller translating of each of them into the reality that unifies _by explanation_, instead of pretending to explain by merely unifying; and this, of course, will now be put forward explicitly, in the clarified category of Cause and Effect, transfigured from a physical into a purely logical relation. What idealism now says, in terms of this, is that the Cause (or, as we now read it, the Ground) of all that exists is the Subject; is Mind, the intelligently Self-conscious; and that all things else, the mere objects, material things, are its Consequence, its Outcome,--in that sense its Effect. And what the new pluralistic idealism says, is that the _assemblage of individual minds_--intelligence being essentially personal and individual, and never merely universal and collective--is the true total Cause of all, and that every mind thus belongs to the order of First Causes; nevertheless, that part, and the most significant part, of the nature of every mind, essential to its personality and its reason, is _its recognition of other minds in the very act of its own self-definition_. That is to say, a mind by its spontaneous nature as intelligence, by its intrinsic rational or logical genius, puts itself as member of a _system_ of minds; all minds are put by each other as Ends--completely standard and sacred Objects, as much parts of the system of true Causes as each is, in its capacity of Subject; and we have a noumenal Reality that is properly to be described as the eternal Federal Republic of Spirits.