This 'transcendental,' 'absolutist,' '_a priori_' philosophy, which stands so strange and menacing on the threshold of the nineteenth century, is after all only, as Kant sometimes called it, an essay to comprehend and see the true measures and dimensions of this much-quoted Experience. All knowledge rests _in_ (not _on_) the unity of Experience. All the several experiences rest in the totality of one experience,--ultimate, all-embracing, absolute, infinite, unconditioned; universal and yet individual, necessary and yet free,--eternal, and yet filling all the nooks of time,--ideal, and yet the mother of all reality,--unextended, and yet spread through the spaces of the universe. Call it, if you like, the experience of the race, but remember that that apparently more realistic and scientific phrase connotes neither more nor less (if rightly understood) than normal, ideal, universal, infinite, absolute experience. This is the Unconditioned, which is the basis and the builder of all conditions: the Absolute, which is the home and the parent of all relations. Experience is no doubt yours and mine, but it is also much more than either yours or mine. He who builds on and in Experience, builds on and in the Absolute, in _the_ System--a system which is not merely _his._ In his every utterance he claims to speak as the mouth-piece of the Absolute, the Unconditioned; his words expect and require assent, belief, acceptance;--they are candidates (not necessarily, or always successful) for the rank of universal and necessary truth: they are dogmatic assertions, and even in their humblest tones, none the less infected with the fervour of certainty. For, indeed, otherwise, it would be a shame and an insult to let them cross the lips. It is the aim of the Absolute _a priori_ philosophy to raise this certainty to truth: or, as one may rather say, to reduce this certainty to its kernel of truth. It seeks to determine the limits--not _of_ this absolute and basic experience (for it has no external limits)--but _in_ this experience: the anatomy and physiology of the Absolute,--the correlations and inclusions, the distinctions and syntheses in the unconditioned field. It examines the _foundation_ of all knowledge. But--if this be the phrase--we must be on our guard against a misapprehension of its terms. The foundations are also knowledge: they are _in_ all knowledge and experience, its synthetic link and its analytic distinctions. We must not shrink from paradoxes in expression. The house of knowledge, the world of experience, is as self-centred and self-sustaining, and even more so, than the planetary system. It is a totality in which each part hangs upon and helps to hold up the others, but which needs no external help, resting and yet moving, self-poised and free.