[Lecturer's Summary.]

Idealism, as it has been stated in Lecture X, asserts the existence of an Universal Mind or World-Logos, but seems incapable at first of explaining any fact of experience, or of solving the concrete problems of life. In view of this defect of what one may call abstract Idealism, the present lecture undertakes to assume, at first, the Realistic attitude towards the world, and to re-examine the fundamental questions of philosophy from this point of view. This change of point of view will in the end prove instructive, and will lead to a return to Idealism in a fashion whereby that doctrine will be enriched, and rendered more concrete.

Assuming then the postulates of Realism, let us try to give them a simple and unitied statement, and then to analyze their results. The world for Realism exists as an outer world known by the observer, and shown to him in the facts of experience. Upon these facts his thinking is to base itself. He is to describe the world of experience. His feelings, his "Appreciate comments" on the world are not to reveal to him truth; only his "Descriptions" are to be objective. All that he assumes of the outer world is that it is describable. As such, however, it turns out to be a world of a "well-knit" order; for only the "well-knit" is describable. Hence the world of Realism has "laws" in it; and these laws themselves turn out, when freed from our mere appreciative comments and additions, to be, in the last analysis laws, of "matter and motion." The describability of phenomena in space and time is thus assumed. Yet when one analyzes in what describality consists, and then asks whether space and time and matter and motion themselves are or can be ultimately describable, one finds that in the last resort they are essentially indescribable, being merely "appreciable." A further study of the meaning of this outcome leads to the result that the Realistic world must be once more interpreted in Idealistic terms, as a world that possesses essentially and necessarily two aspects, one which makes it relatively describable, while the other, and deeper aspect finds it to be essentially appreciable, and so the embodiment of "Ideals." or of "Purposes," which however are not to be considered as "effective in time," but as constituting the eternal "significance" of the world of the Self.

In conclusion, this view, which holds that the world of mechanism is itself essentially "teleological." is applied to the case of the relation between body and mind, and to the problem of human "Freedom." The latter is solved in the sense of Kant's famous doctrine of the "two-fold" human nature, "empirical" and "transcendental," "fatal" and "free."