ABSTRACT
So Bosanquet had written in 1915. With what diligence and with what results he carried out this programme in the later years of his life we know from his book on The Meeting of Extremes in Contemporary Philosophy-his last complete work. The "extremes" he had particularly in view were the neerealism which had its chief home and most "audacious" representatives in America and the neo-idealism which was represented chiefly by the school of Croce and Gentile in Italy. We have already seen in connection with his correspondence with James Ward1 how he had become convinced that the time was coming, if it had not already come, when, in opposition to the subjectivist drift of some professedly spiritual philosophies, it would be necessary to emphasize the place of nature as an objective system possessing rights of its own. Neo-idealist writers seemed in danger of forgetting what the older idealism, when in its right mind, had always insisted on, namely that it was as true to say that man could only come to a knowledge of himself through nature as that he could only come to a knowledge of nature through himself; in other words, that nature communicates itself to man at least as much as man communicates himself to it. we are thus prepared in this last phase of Bosanquet's philosophical development to find him in warm sympathy with some of the central features of realism as expounded by the best-informed of its representatives: its readiness to recognize man's kinship with the external universe, the significance of the idea of "the whole" for mind, and with this, in spite of attempts like Alexander's to interpret time as the stuff of things, the opening it left for the view of nature as a "mere mode of being of the universe subordinate to its ultimate totality."
