The public discussion at Berkeley, whose documents the Philosophical Union published shortly after the event, in pamphlet form, was, as a fact, immediately succeeded by several more private meetings, in which the leader of the original debate had ample opportunity to reply to his critics, and to expound further consequences of his theses. The proceedings of these meetings remained unprinted. More than a year has since passed. The Philosophical Union now desires to give the whole discussion a more permanent form, and in doing so kindly invites the present writer to put on record his replies to his critics, to extend and confirm, at his pleasure, his main argument, and to expound some further developments of his doctrine.

In accepting, once more, the hospitality of the Union, and in using it in the following pages, I feel it all the more my duty, as the guest thus invited to return to such pleasant company, not to mar a controversy, whose principal interest lies in the instructive contrast of the points of view adopted by the speakers, — not to mar this controversy, I say, through any idle effort to make, as it were, an end ​of my friendly opponents by limiting myself to a hand-to-hand contest with their theses. In particular (to refer here to one of these theses), the antithesis between Monistic Idealism and Ethical Individualism, upon which Professor Howison, in his important paper, has laid such stress, reveals, as a fact, a very deep and instructive antinomy of Reason; an antinomy which, as I believe, we must all recognise before we can hope to solve it or transcend it. In my own former paper, I made no mention of this antinomy, — not because I failed to recognise it, but because I conceived that I had there no space for it. Professor Howison has given it the first place in the discussion. To me it has always been a problem that, despite its vast importance, is secondary to the central problem of philosophy. On the other hand, I have profited greatly by Professor Howison’s brilliant vindication of Ethical Individualism, and I hope to show, before I am done, that I have thus profited. To be sure, I am still unable to alter either the thesis or the essential process of reasoning expounded in my original discussion. Both can be stated in countless ways. But in their essence, I must still hold each to be valid. Accordingly I also have still to maintain that every estimate of the place of the Individual in the universe must be made subject to the validity of some such argument for the Absolute, and subject to the supremacy, the unity, and the all-embracing sole reality of the Absolute as defined by this argument. But on the other hand, an argument concerning the grade of reality possessed by ethical individuals has its place in the ​development of an idealistic philosophy, and its place is in some ways well defined by Professor Howison’s paper. I shall accordingly seek, in what follows, reconciliation rather than refutation. I shall try to show, not that Professor Howison is wrong in the stress which he lays upon the ethical importance of his individuals, but that the Absolute, as I have ventured to define the conception, has room for ethical individuality without detriment to its true unity, or to the argument that I advanced for its reality. I shall also try to show that the very essence of ethical individuality brings it at last, despite the mentioned antinomy, into a deeper harmony with the concept of the Absolute that I venture to maintain; so that, as I shall try to explain, just because the ethical individual is sacred, therefore must his separate life be “hid,” in a deep and final sense, in the unity of the system to which he is freely subordinated. For his ethical life is, as such, a life of free subordination. He cannot be ethical and undertake to exist separately from God’s life. On the other hand, as I shall try to maintain, the unity of this system, i.e. of the Absolute, as defined in my thesis is not a dead unity, — a night that devours all, — but precisely the unity of many, where the many are; but the unity is still supreme, while the unity is supreme just because the many exist, over whom and in whom it is supreme.

Such phrases are obscure enough, apart from the argument that alone can give them meaning. I use them here only by way of indicating that I desire not to refute Professor Howison’s essential views, but to define individuality in a way that may tend to ​bring his views and mine into harmony. In much the same sense I desire to make use of the views of my other two critics. And still further, I wish to use this opportunity to give the whole conception of the Absolute which I am permitted to defend a more careful statement, a more minute examination, a fuller defence, and a more extended development than I have heretofore had the opportunity to do.

I regret only that the situation in which the present opportunity puts me is thus so necessarily that of restating and defending what appears as my own thesis; as if it were in any sense my own property, or a cause in the least dependent upon me for just this present defence. “What can I clearly see?” — this is the ceaseless question of the student of philosophy. In this sense, and in this only, he seeks, as such a student, for self-consciousness. But otherwise, ideally speaking, he ought as a philosopher to have no personal property in ideas, no private cause to defend, no pet thesis to maintain, no argument for whose fate he fears, no selfish concern whether he refutes or is refuted, no author’s fondness for his past productions, no advocate’s pride in maintaining his old notions. Naked of all private treasures, he ought to seek, each time anew, the priceless pearl of truth. This, in fact, is the model that Plato’s dialogues set before the thinker. However often one might win this pearl of truth, one’s frailty, and one’s fleeting moments, would ever again turn the possession of it into a mere memory of former insight; and so one must ever seek afresh. This is the thinker’s ideal. If fortune makes him a poor professor, telling over and over again his ​old tale in lectures; an anxious author, unready to deny his former books; a human disputant, eager not to be worsted in his dialectics, — well, these are the doings of fortune, and of his wretched earthly self. His only worth as philosopher lies, not, in the last analysis, in his consistency, or in his skill in defence, but purely in the transparency, if such they have, that permits the light occasionally to shine through his defects. In such a spirit I desire the following, which is in form a defence of my private thesis, to be estimated. However much I employ anew old material, the only worth of the task must lie in the present unity of the insight developed, whether in the author’s or in the reader’s mind.

This supplementary discussion will consist of five parts. In the first, I shall re-examine the general argument for the reality of the Absolute. In the second, following lines indicated in one of the supplementary and more private discussions of the Union at Berkeley, mentioned above, I shall endeavour to develope the relation of the notion of Will to the concept of the Absolute. In the third, I shall attack, in general terms, the logical and metaphysical problem of the nature of Individuality; or, to use the well-known scholastic phrase, I shall study the “Principle of Individuation,” in its general relations to the concept of Reality. In this division I shall dwell upon considerations which have grown upon me, in part, since the first publication of Professor Howison’s paper. In the fourth part, I shall apply both of the foregoing discussions, namely, that of the Will and that of the Principle of Individuation, to the problem ​of the definition of human, i.e. self-conscious, Individuality in its metaphysical implications, referring especially to the problem of Freedom, and, incidentally, to that of Immortality. Here I shall again make some use of material presented to the Union in 1895. In the fifth part, I shall bring together the views advanced in the foregoing parts, in such fashion as to indicate, before I close, some of my relations to the objections of my critics. ​

The conception of Reality is one which philosophical writers of all schools and tendencies must face and consider.^[1] In the present day, when popular philosophy is largely under the influence of more or less decidedly agnostic traditions, it is customary to make light of attempts to say anything positive about the Absolute; but it is all the more popular to say: “Oh, we modern men, discarding the fantasies of the past, rejecting a priori constructions, trusting solely to experience, — we seek, in our philosophy, for the Real.” “And the Real,” one continues, “is not something that metaphysical dreaming can make out. It is something forced upon us by the irresistible compulsion of experience. We know regarding it, not its ultimate structure, but its appearances in our individual experience. Ultimate truth is a dream of the philosophers.”

In the argument with which this debate opened, I attempted some dealing with just such relatively ​“agnostic” tendencies; and I tried to show that, whether they will it or not, the thinkers referred to cannot consistently deal with the Real, as experience shows it, without, in the end, coming face to face with the Absolute, so that every assertion of the compulsion which forces upon us finite Facts, must in the end imply, with an equal necessity, the unity of all facts in one Absolute Reality, whose nature we can in general determine, despite our ignorance of the details of its life. But in developing this argument, I was necessarily forced, by the lack of space, to ignore many of even the most familiar efforts to state the more ordinary type of Realism in such fashion as to avoid accepting my definition, or in fact any definition, of the Absolute. The questions that have been raised by my critics, however, as to the true scope, meaning, and outcome of my argument, can best be answered through a careful review of the essence of the argument itself. And this careful review, in its turn, can best be accomplished, less by a direct onslaught upon my idealistic friends than by a more minute comparison of my notion with those realistic arguments in conflict with which it was, in the first place, developed. I myself came into this field, originally, not to war with fellow-idealists, but to criticise the Realism of ordinary tradition. A contrast with the metaphysical views of our common opponents will therefore help us, who are engaged in this discussion, to comprehend better the scope and implications of our own theory.

On the other hand, here as everywhere in philosophy, refutation is never our whole business. Even ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/180 ​so to develope Idealism that it may include the truth both of ordinary Realism and of the ethical interpretation of reality.

One sees, hears, touches, — in general, one experiences, — “the real world.” One thinks of the “real,” is subject to the laws of the real, is in fact constantly in a compulsory bondage to this reality. This is the “fact,” the “simple fact,” upon which, again and again, popular forms of Realism base themselves. If you ask: But what means this word “reality,” as applied to characterise what one sees, hears, touches, thinks about, and finds oneself compelled to submit to? the answer comes: “Reality connotes independence of the experience and thought and will of the being who deals as we do with the real.” Thus, that I know, feel, and am bound by, the presence of reality, is a fact in me, a modification of my experience, of my thought, and of my will. But that the real is, this is something independent of me, and this fact is there whether I know it or not, whether I think so or not, whether I want it or not. What thus compels me, is beyond me and independent of me. What is my object, needs, as such, not at all the plastic and submissive presence of me as subject.^[2] As subject, I am, to be ​sure, in relation to an object; the real that I experience or think, then and there stands in relation to me. But this relation is non-essential to the reality of either the subject or the object. The object is real, in so far as it needs me not, but is independent; just as I too am real, in so far as I should still be I, even if I knew not just this object that I at any one moment know. Knowing subject and known reality, the object, are related, to use Sigwart’s expression just cited in the foot-note, somewhat as are horse and rider. The rider is, in his own being, independent of the horse; although, while he rides, he exists in this relation to the horse, which, on its part, is then subject to the rider’s compulsion.

What I know, then, when I touch, see, think, is that there is somewhat that is independent of me, and that compels me to know, at each moment, thus or thus, or to modify my will in this way or in that. This is the general presupposition of Realism. And in considering it, a realist usually first points out that this is the universal presupposition of the natural human consciousness. Whoever questions this presupposition, thus has, as they say, the “burden of proof” upon his hands. “Consciousness” seems to “bear witness” to the presupposition that one thus constantly knows an independently real object-world to be present. The questioner, the sceptic, — yes, as the realists insist, the idealist, — must first show how he dares, as a being who knows only through ​the light of consciousness, to doubt the “testimony of consciousness.” Is not every such doubt doomed from the start to contradiction? What can guide the doubt concerning the “testimony of consciousness” except consciousness itself? Who can cross-question or refute this “witness” without appealing to the very witness in person?

But whether one calls it doubting or not, it seems certain that we have a right, as students devoted to reflection upon first principles, to ask, a little more precisely, what the “testimony” in question means, to what sort of independence it bears witness, and in what sense the testimony is supposed to be presented in or through consciousness. To ask such questions is to begin the course of reflection which leads to Idealism. In my original paper I treated these questions in a fashion necessarily very summary. Let us here examine some of them a little more closely, for the sake of later comprehending more clearly the implications of our own position. For, I repeat, the presuppositions of ordinary Realism have a close relation to those which Professor Howison opposes to my thesis.

There is, in everybody’s consciousness, the evidence of somewhat whose existence is independent of this consciousness itself. Here is the thesis. If we examine consciousness to find of what nature this evidence is, we meet with a well-known difference of opinion. Some thinkers teach, as Reid no doubt in the main meant to teach, that this evidence for the independent reality is simply “immediate.” That is, this evidence, in its direct character as mere feeling. ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/184 ​activity is held in check, by the presence of our external experiences, which come and go whether or no we wish them to do so, we secondarily, and by a process of mediate reasoning, conclude from this our own relative impotence the existence of causes which limit us, and which are therefore independent of us, although their power is expressed in those of our experiences which are beyond our own control.

These and other realistic interpretations of the facts of experience have in common the recognition of one very important character of our present consciousness, namely, its essentially fragmentary, its immediately unstable character, in so far as it is regarded with reference to its meaning. That our consciousness, as it comes, means more than it presents, and somehow implies a beyond for which it insistently seeks, — this indeed is a central characteristic of our experience, and one upon which all insight and all philosophy depend. The anxiety of ordinary thought to interpret this reference in terms of an “independently real” world, which shall “transcend” all consciousness whatever, is due to manifold motives, and in part to relatively unphilosophical motives, whose origin I take to be largely social.^[3] But no idealist can doubt the presence in consciousness of those primary tendencies upon which realists of all types have laid such stress. The question is as to the interpretation of such motives. In what sense is it that our consciousness is always pointing beyond itself? ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/186 ​bilities of experience I may conceive as independent of my present visual experience, as valid even if I died, still more if I closed my eyes or slept. To this independent validity of the possibilities of experience I may be referring, when I talk of something which is independent of my present experience. In talking of the way in which consciousness can refer “beyond itself,” we must not ignore, then, the cases where this reference beyond self is to possible contents of consciousness not here realised, but regarded as permanently reahsable. This sort of reference is, as before shown, by no means free from obscurity; but it seems to be a reference often made, and we must take it into account when a realist lays stress upon the tendency of consciousness to look for something independent of its own contents. This independent something may be the independent validity of a “permanent possibility of experience,” in the sense of Kant’s “mögliche Erfahrung,” and of Mill’s famous chapter.

But this reference to the permanent possibilities of experience does not exhaust the sorts of reference to independent reality which we often find in consciousness. At any moment I may think of the past or of future experiences. When I think of them, I refer to what transcends the moment. Yet I do not refer to what transcends all experience, but I refer to what, in its supposed truth, is indeed conceived as independent of the contents of this my momentary memory or expectation. Hope as I will, regret as I will, my past deeds, my future destiny (say, my future experience of growing old), have aspects which are viewed ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/188 ​grasps or falsely reports, finds mysterious or regards as clear and certain, — as really independent realities as if they were “things in themselves.” Only, in the case of these types of objects, however hard the individual object may be to know with assurance, the type of object itself seems in one respect knowable enough. For it is no "thing in itself." It is explicitly an object in so far as it either is or may be the content or the existence of some experience. The problem therefore arises: “Can other types of objects than these be defined or accepted?” The ordinary realist says. Yes. For the idealist, all depends upon confining his real objects to the objects of the foregoing types, in so far as, after criticism, these types can all be reduced to his own sort of rational unity, and the relative independence of their objects can be explained accordingly.

But let the realist now continue his parable. Other sorts of “independent” objects there are and must be, he declares. Why? First, to follow one type of Realism, because we “immediately know” that there are such transcendent objects independent of all consciousness. But, so one replies, how can consciousness immediately know what is by hypothesis immediately determined as not present to consciousness, namely, precisely the independent aspect of the object, or the fact that if the consciousness were not, the object would still be as it is? “I see immediately in front of me that there is something behind my back.” “I feel immediately that if I did not feel, there would still be something there to feel.” No; immediate knowledge is of what is felt, not of what is not felt. ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/190 ​Therefore, that which explains the data of consciousness must lie beyond all consciousness, and so must be a transcendent object.

But this answer is itself capable of taking various forms. Its most common form lays stress upon the conception of Causality, and calls for a causal explanation of the conscious data. Our consciousness, so one asserts, does not cause its own data, except in the case of our acts of spontaneity (if there be such acts). In general, the data of sense come to us with a certain Zwang, a compulsion, over which our will is powerless. This compulsion, which binds our experience, is, then, not explained by anything within the limits of this experience itself. But explanation is needed. Something must cause the data to be what they are. Shall this something be another state of consciousness? Or shall it be a fact of a real and transcendent world, independent of all consciousness? The first of these two answers, one says, would only postpone the problem. Consciousness nowhere shows us enough self-explained facts to form a basis for the causal explanation of the other facts. Consciousness is full of data that come in a compulsory fashion; but consciousness nowhere presents to us as a part of its own content anything adequate to furnish us the source of the compulsion. Consciousness, as such, is dependent. The transcendent objects alone can be causally independent — the sources from which our data proceed.

Other hardly less favourite ways of stating this insistence upon explanation demand either logical or teleological explanations of the conscious data, in such ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/192 ​

Into the manifold motives expressed in these various efforts to explain the data of consciousness by the existence of transcendent objects, we cannot here further look. Our business is not with what makes such arguments so plausible as they are, but with the general question of their validity. It is enough here to observe, in passing, that the true motives, and the popular plausibility, of all such arguments can be understood only when you consider the essentially social basis upon which, in the last analysis, the usual realistic explanations of the data of consciousness rest. These explanations are, namely, appeals, in one form or another, to conceptions more or less essential to the stability and to the definiteness of human social intercourse. They are, accordingly, efforts to interpret ultimate realities in forms suggested by the special canons and categories of human social intercommunication. This essentially conventional basis of the popular Realism of those who “explain” the data of consciousness by transcendent objects, renders the arguments of such Realism as psychologically interesting, in their history and in their various formulations, as they are inadequate to the task of formulating any ultimate philosophical theory of reality. But we have here to do with their validity, and not with their natural history.

Their validity, however, can be easily tested, and in a way that applies equally to all their various forms. One has data, ɑ, b, c, etc. One says: “There is known to us some principle of explanation which declares that wherever any fact, p, of the type to which ɑ, b, c, etc., belong, is presented, there must ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/194 ​that the relation expresses? For instance, let the relation R be the causal relation. You know, by hypothesis, what causation means. Surely this implies that in your experience you have already met, or could meet, with cases of what you would recognise as causal relation; and that wherever a causal relation exists, it is like in its nature to what you experience, or get presented to your intelligence, when you know particular instances of causation. The causal relation, if thus clear to you, is ipso facto clear to you as something that could be instanced, presented, and comprehended in a possible experience. So too with any other relation whose nature is now clear to you. Now, if this be true, how can p, which is a fact of experience, be viewed as standing in a certain relation R (which also is, by hypothesis, a fact of a possible experience) to something, x, whose very nature is that it is no fact of any possible experience, being a reality that is utterly transcendent? This is as if you should say: “I know quantities, ɑ, b, c, etc.; and I know a relation R, viz., that of equality. Hereupon, however, I declare that a, or b, or c, stands in this known relation R, viz., in the relation of equality, to a certain x which is expressly defined as something which is no quantity at all.” This would be absurd. It is precisely as absurd to say: Contents of experience stand in a known and clear relation, that itself is, as such, an object of possible experience, to something that is to be expressly defined as no object of any possible experience whatever. If the relation is, as such, an object of a possible experience, then its terms are so too. ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/196 ​transcendent sort of causation, that, as a relation existent outside of experience, links us to the transcendent objects which cause experience in us.” Hereupon, however, one asks, at the present stage: What, then, leads you to believe in the existence of that transcendent sort of causation? The realist hereupon may reply: “Why, some of the data of consciousness are such as demand, as their sufficient cause, the existence of just such transcendent causality. For our idea of this transcendent causality is an idea that in itself needs a cause. And of this idea the transcendent causality is the only sufficient cause.” I answer, at once: The infinite regress is under way. You are no whit forwarder. You have not begun to show how the transcendent explains anything. For you explain the data by a transcendent x only because the relation of causality is said to be sure and to imply x. Asked, however, to explain your assurance of this transcendent causality, you say that there surely must be some transcendent cause for our experienced assurance of causality. And thus you may continue as long as you please.

The first argument of our realist, when closely viewed, thus involves either an infinite regress, or else an appeal to conceptions which our former account of reality as being “the content of actual and of pos​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/198 ​forced, as has been seen in the foregoing, to appeal to “possible experience.” He asserts that beyond the confines of what anybody does experience there are an indefinite number of “possibilities of experience.” Now these possibilities of experience are either genuine facts when and while they are not experienced, or else they are mere illusions, just in so far as they are called mere possibilities, and are not the contents of anybody's actual experience. To admit the latter of these alternatives would be to deprive the opponent of Realism of all that makes his doctrine popularly plausible, or even rational. For it is admitted by the opponent of Realism, that our concrete experience implies much which does not now get presented to it. And the supposed “possibilities of experience” are intended to supply the place of what is thus implied. If they are illusions, then this place is not supplied. On the other hand, the first of the alternatives mentioned admits that the possibilities of experience have some sort of being when nobody experiences them. And such being, outside of any concrete experience, is precisely what the realistic hypothesis demands. In vain, so the realist now urges, does the opponent endeavour by the phrase “possible experience” to cloak the fact that a possibility of experience, when it is real but unexperienced, as much exists wholly beyond the range of experience as if it were frankly reduced to a “thing in itself,” of the sort that the realist himself defines.

It will be unnecessary here to analyse at any length the cogency of this argument. In my original paper, ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/200 ​so far as you tell what you mean. Whatever you assert as existent beyond our experience, without telling what you mean by the assertion, that, by hypothesis, you have not really and rationally asserted. For a meaningless assertion is no assertion at all. You want to say that beyond our experience there is something transcendent, whose nature is never experienced, whose contents always remain outside of the world of experience. But you can never tell what you mean by this beyond, precisely in so far as it remains a beyond. Telling what you mean is transforming your beyond into something within the world of experience. Therefore I reject your beyond altogether. Experience is all. Yet I admit that much experience remains to us indeed only a ‘possibility.’” “Yes,” retorts the realist, “but in your last word you have admitted the very essence of my whole contention. For within the range of what individuals do experience you admit that we cannot remain. You admit the possibilities of experience as somehow genuine. You cannot do without them. Yet, as soon as you admit them, you admit an element transcending concrete experience. You admit something whose presence you cannot escape, but whose nature you find it as hard to define as I find it hard to tell precisely what I mean by that transcendent something which my theory frankly admits, and glories in, but which your theory grudgingly recognises, even in trying to conceal the fact of the recognition. Your possibilities are either mere illusions, or else facts. If facts are not experienced, they are beyond experience. And such beyond is all that I ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/202 ​idea of the whole world, as whole. No matter how we came by this idea, the question inevitably arises: Is there any whole world of fact at all, or is this fragment of experience before us all the fact that there is? Or, again, we have the general idea of experience, as such. The question arises: Is this experience before us the only experience? Or is there, as a matter of fact, other experience than this which is now presented? All such questions involve the general considerations upon which I laid stress in my chapter on “The Possibility of Error” (The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Chap. XI). Such questions have a definite answer, or they have no definite answer; and this is true, whatever our present state of knowledge. In other words, such questions, in themselves considered, can either be truly answered in one way, and in one way only, or they would admit, however much we knew, of no definite answer whatever. But in the latter case, the impossibility of giving any answer to them would become manifest to us, upon a large knowledge of truth, by virtue of facts that would then get presented to our insight, and that would then make obvious to us that there is something meaningless about the questions. Such facts could only get presented, however, to one who actually knew a larger whole of experience than is presented to us. And thus we can at least say, that already, at the present time, there is “possible experience” which, if presented, would throw light upon the meaninglessness of our questions concerning actual experience beyond our own. A fortiori, if our questions admit of definite answer, there is now ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/204 ​which ours is a fragment. The intimacy of the relation of our fragmentary experience to this total experience is indicated by the way in which our experience implies that total.

Thus the second argument of our realist is of actual service to the idealistic cause. The realist asserts that when one says: “A given experience is possible, but not here presented,” one inevitably holds that there is fact, both beyond the range of the fragmentary experience that is here and now present, and beyond the range of the bare assertion of the possibility itself. The realist is right. On the other hand, the half-idealist of our first statement of the case is right in maintaining that as soon as you define the beyond, and tell what you mean by it, you cannot make its nature incongruous with the conception “content of experience,” present or possible. The solution of the antinomy lies in asserting that the beyond is itself content of an actual experience, the experience to which the beyond is presented being in such intimate relation to the experience which asserts the possibility, that both must be viewed as aspects of one whole, fragments of one organisation. The realist, in so far as he is opposed to the half-idealist, is merely a thoroughgoing idealist who does not know his own mind. He rejects bare possibilities, in favour of something beyond them which is their ground. He is right. Only, this beyond is the Concrete Whole of an Absolute Experience, wherein the thoughts of all the possibilities of experience get their right interpretation, their just confirmation, or their refutation, — in a word, their fulfilment. ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/206 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/207 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/208 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/209 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/210 ​or experience which another man has in mind when he refers to the Battle of Marathon. Thus many think of the same battle, but the contents of experience in many minds are not the same, and need not even be very similar. In vain,” so our realist may add, “does an idealist attempt, in such cases, to take refuge afresh in scepticism, and merely to doubt whether we all are really referring to the same Battle of Marathon at all. For, as said, scepticism of this sort must find in the end its limit. One is unable to reason through the whole of even one sentence — one is unable to state even the most extreme of scepticism — with any coherence, without assuming that many successive thoughts can refer to the same object. And one is unable to carry out the least act of social intercourse without assuming that A and B, the persons concerned, see, touch, pass from one to another, or otherwise deal with, the same object. Experience, as such, is indeed a world of Heraclitean flux. But the conditions which make many moments of experience, many thoughts, or many people, refer to the same content or moment of experience, or to the same fact in any sense, are not themselves, as conditions of the sameness of reference, contents of anybody’s experience, or part of the flow of its ceaseless stream. These conditions, then, presupposed in all rationality, are ipso facto transcendent. In brief, then: The sameness of the objects of experience, in so far as these objects can be thought of at various times, can be referred to by various subjects, can be objects for many points of view, demands that at least the relations whereby this same reference is secured, if not the facts themselves ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/212 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/213 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/214 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/215 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/216 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/217 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/218 ​

In the foregoing discussion, as well as in my original paper, a theory of the Absolute has been defined whose essence can now be briefly restated thus: Our experience, as it comes, is essentially fragmentary. This fragmentariness is not an accidental defect of an experience such as is ours. It is an essential defect of all finite experience. In other words, you cannot suppose our experience, as it is, to be, or to contain, the whole of what we refer to when we speak of the real, unless you are willing to fall prey to a logical contradiction.

A sceptic might indeed be supposed to say: “What I now and here immediately experience may be the whole of reality.” But such a sceptic, if he tries to state this view coherently, finds the hypothesis in question simply contradictory. For what he means may be, first, the well-known assertion: “I can mean to refer, in genuine truth, to no object except what is now present to me as the object here meant. Hence I can never really think, much less verify the thought, of an object beyond, i.e. not now present to me.” But hereupon we at once reply to the sceptic, that in raising his question he already ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/220 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/221 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/222 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/223 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/224 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/225 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/226 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/227 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/228 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/229 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/230 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/231 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/232 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/233 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/234 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/235 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/236 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/237 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/238 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/239 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/240 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/241 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/242 ​mediately conceived necessity. Precisely because we mean the Absolute Whole to be above mere mediation, we in our finite thoughts have to use expressions of mediation which involve, and in fact explicitly state on occasion, their own insufficiency, their inadequacy to their objects. Still otherwise put, our whole argument for the Absolute implies that just because every thought of an object involves a beyond, as well as its own inclusion in the unity of the experience which embodies the beyond, therefore every thought is a moment in a world of fact which, in its wholeness, transcends mere thinking. Or, again, thought in itself is a mere abstraction from and yet in the whole of experience. But all this means that there must be, above every must, that which includes, indeed, the necessity expressed by the must, but transcends such necessity. There must be what is beyond every must. The must is our comment. The is expresses the ultimate fact.

Wrong therefore, in so far, was that older metaphysics which defined God as the "absolutely necessary being." Fact includes necessity, since necessity in its very relative and finite forms is part of the world of fact. But fact in its wholeness is above necessity, and the last word about the world would be, not "it must be," but "it is." Now the older definition for the Absolute Will, as the "cause of the world," generally ended by making this cause, or Will, at once external to the world of facts which it produced, and, by itself, such as to have a necessary constitution; as, for instance, a necessary efficaciousness, frequently called Omnipotence. Our own theory ​depends, on the contrary, upon recognising fact as supreme, and merely asking: What constitution of fact in its wholeness has to be asserted if you are to avoid contradictions?

The basis of our whole theory is the bare brute fact of experience which you have always with you, namely, the fact: Something is real. Our question is: What is this reality? or, again, What is the ultimately real? As we saw in our earlier section, scepticism tries to reply: "The contents of this experience, as present contents, are alone real." We found this reply self-contradictory. Why? Because the question, "What is here real?" inevitably involves ideas that transcend the present data. Hereupon our half-idealist asserted: "Real beyond the present are possibilities of experience." But hereupon the half-idealist fell prey to the realist, who pointed out that, just in so far as the possible experiences transcended the data, they were ipso facto his transcendent "things in themselves," wholly beyond experience. The realist, however, could himself give no consistent account of these facts as "things in themselves," because his conception of transcendence was itself a mere abstraction. The only way of consistently defining the situation proved to be the assertion: "The ultimate reality is here, as everywhere, the whole of experience, viewed as Whole."

This Whole, as such, now proves to have a definable constitution. For it is, first, that to which every finite thought refers in so far as, rightly or wrongly, in truth or in error, it raises any question as to the reality implied in any experience, however ​fragmentary. The Whole of Reality is, as such, the "Same Object," whoever in the finite world thinks of it, or, for that matter, of anything. There is no other object but this. This at once implies a certain well-known constitution, both for the finite world of thought in its relation to objects and for the world of experience viewed in its character as a whole of immediate fact. This constitution, expressed in terms of pure thought, is defined by the thesis that all possible ideas, since they refer, consciously or unconsciously, to the same object, form a System, and a single system; and that the Absolute, in so far as it is Absolute Thought, has this system of ideas present to it. In other words, all possible thoughts, taken together, form what the mathematicians call a single Group. The concept of the Group, in modern mathematics, precisely corresponds, in particular instances, to the idealist's conception of the Total System of possible thoughts. A Group is a system of ideal objects such that, by a definite constructive process, you can proceed from any member of the Group to any other, while this process, if exhaustively carried out, defines all possible objects that fall within the Group. Thus the members of the Group form, as it were, an ideal body; as, for instance, in case of the numbers, a definite Group of them, defined by a given constructive process of the nature indicated, would be called a Zahlkörper, or Body of Numbers, in the terminology of certain mathematicians. Well, just so, for the idealist, all the logically possible ideas form such a Group, a system of interrelated members, all referring to the one Ultimate Object, viz., the Whole of ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/246 ​does present, an organised, significant, purposeful or teleological, worthy, perfect whole of fact; and that, however much of ill, or imperfection, the finite world seems to contain when fragmentarily viewed. So far, we define, then, the Absolute Thought and Experience in their organic relationships, as, on the one hand, we must assert them to be, and, on the other hand, as, according to our thesis, they themselves are. Of the two, the Experience names the factor which at once, when viewed as whole, includes the thought-aspect of the world, while, so long as you view the thought-aspect abstractly, the Experience appears precisely as the aspect whereby the Thought gets fulfilled. The best expression, so far, might be: “The Absolute experiences that its system of Thought is fulfilled in and through the constitution of the data of its Experience,” — an assertion which makes explicit the self-conscious moment in our whole theory of the Absolute.

But if into this conception of the Absolute the new moment which we have called the Will is to be introduced, there must be some motive present to our thought besides the motives involved in our first deduction of the Absolute. The new motive has been furnished in the foregoing account by a very simple reflection upon what the Absolute, as defined, not merely must be, but, for our definition, and for itself, also immediately is. As defined, it is not merely perfect, significant, and the rest, but it is a Whole; its contents form one Moment. Its unity is the unity of a single Instant. It is that which, as such, neither requires nor permits a beyond. ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/248 ​data and the completeness of the system of ideas. This new aspect may be defined as an aspect of Arrest, of fulfilment by free limitation. That fulfilment could not otherwise be obtained, is our comment. The fact is, that fulfilment is thus attained, namely, by what we have to express as the choice, or attentive selection, of the present world of fact from the indefinite (or infinite) series of abstractly possible worlds, which, by virtue of this choice, are not actually possible. We cannot express this situation better than by saying: “The world forms a Whole because it is as if the Absolute said (or, in our former terms, attentively observed) that, since the absolute system of ideas is once fulfilled in this world, ‘There shall be no world but this,’ i.e. no other case of fulfilment; and therefore other abstractly possible fulfilments remain not genuinely possible.” It is this aspect of the ultimate situation which defines the world as a Whole, and which, without introducing an external cause, or a mere force, does as it were colour the whole unity of the Absolute Consciousness with a new character, namely, the character of Will. As psychology already knows, the will, even in us, is no third “power of the mind.” It is an aspect of our consciousness, pervading every fact thereof, while especially connected with and embodied in certain of the facts of our inner lives. Just so we now say, not: “The Absolute first thinks, then experiences, then wills in such wise as to fashion its experience.” We rather say: “The unity of the Absolute Consciousness involves immediate data, fulfilment of ideas in these data, consciousness of the adequacy ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/250 ​ever I said that, my ideas being fulfilled in their essence by one case, I should gain no essential benefit, I should add no whit to the genuine perfection of my experience, by passing to new cases. If I now, by some deliberate act of attention, arrested myself, or found myself arrested, in this one act of conscious fulfilment of my system of ideas, I should be perfect as a knower and as a possessor, in a sense in which I should not be perfect if I continued to seek, in hopeless repetitions, for truth that lay always beyond. For such search would involve either an ignorance on my part that nothing novel was thus obtained, or a blind fate that drove me helplessly further. The ignorance I should escape, on the hypothesis that I knew my situation. The blind fate I should escape, if my ideals were all fulfilled. The fulfilment of the ideal of escaping from the blind fate would however involve precisely the presence in me of the will to arrest myself, or to be arrested, at this one world as a single whole of experience. In other words, the perfection of my consciousness, in the supposed case, would involve the element called my will. And my will would mean an attentive dwelling upon this world to the exclusion of the barely possible worlds, which would remain unreal for me merely because my attention left them unreal.

In a variety of terms there is, in such a case as the present, where one has gradually to eliminate various accidental associations, a certain advantage. We may, then, venture on still another name for the present aspect of the Absolute Consciousness. The theology of the past has frequently dealt with the ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/252 ​one that might be expressed as the actual Divine Love for this world. The same character has been defined by the term “Will” in the foregoing discussion. The presence of such a character, its value as the very element whereby the Absolute Experience attains wholeness and complete self-possession, and its further character as an element irreducible to the terms of mere thought and mere content of experience, — all these features may now well be suggested by calling this the Divine Love.

But, in the foregoing, one consideration has been introduced that has remained, as yet, undeveloped. I refer to what has been said concerning the relation of Will to Individuality. I have said that the object of Will is, as such, an individuated object. How much is implied in this consideration, cannot be understood until we have undertaken the extremely difficult task of examining the fundamental nature of the category of Individuality. To this I now proceed, in the Third Part of the present paper. ​

The question: What is an individual? and the related question: What principle is the source of Individuation, or of the presence and variety of individuals in the world, or in our knowledge? — these are matters of no small importance for logic, for psychology, and for metaphysics. All these three doctrines have to do with individuals, as possible objects of thought, as well as with those other logical objects called universals. The psychologist has to ask the question: How do we come by the knowledge of the individual objects? — whether primarily or by some secondary process, and whether solely through experience or by virtue of some reflective or intuitive insight. The metaphysician is above all concerned with the questions: What sort of individuals does the real world contain? and, How are they distinguished from one another and from the other types of reality which the universe contains, if there are such other types? The present division of this paper has something to say of all three aspects of our problem; and, as a fact, all three aspects are obviously closely related to one another.

As to the general interest of the problem, even outside of technical philosophy, there can be no ​doubt. When one reflects upon the social and ethical problems which have gathered about the word “individualism,” one is reminded that, after all, men bleed and die in this world for the sake of logic as well as for the sake of home and bread, and that the problems of the study are also the problems of human destiny. If one turns from practical life to the questions of theory, one is reminded that, in theology, God is conceived as an individual, and that each man is an individual, and that Christianity has always involved assertions about the individual as such. In natural science, moreover, a vast collection of problems, especially of biological problems, centre about the definition and the constitution of the individuals of the living world. One cannot hesitate, then, as to the significance of our question. It surely deserves a close study.

Strangely enough, however, this problem has been, in its general philosophical aspects, somewhat neglected, especially in the history of modern philosophy. Leibnitz is almost the only modern thinker who has given it a place correspondent to its dignity. The logical, psychological, and metaphysical problems of universality, of law and of truth and knowledge in their more universal aspects, have otherwise received a much more detailed study than has been given to the correlative problems of individuality. In part, however, this very neglect has been meant as a sort of indirect tribute to the significance of the individual. Individuality has been so little subjected to critical scrutiny, because the existence and importance of the individual have been tacitly assumed as ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/256 ​What is the principle that individuates the world? we are fain to conceal our uncertainty behind a mere repetition of the assertion that individuals are facts.

I cannot but think that the bare assertion of the actuality of individuals, without a prior and general consideration of the whole problem of the category of Individuality, is responsible for much of the difference that appears to exist between Professor Howison’s Ethical Individualism and the Idealistic Monism which he combats. The antinomy referred to at the outset of the present paper has appeared thus far as an antinomy between the claims of theory and the presuppositions of ethics. The theoretical need can only be met by the world where all facts are present in the unity of the Absolute Consciousness. To this Professor Howison replies, that the dignity of the ethical individual demands the real variety and separate existence of the citizens of the “City of God.” But the citizens of this City, if they exist, are not merely ethical but logical individuals, and the question. What is an individual? applies to them as well as to the humblest conceivable individual object. Suppose the answer to this question should involve the perfectly universal assertion, that on the one hand the theoretical view itself, in order to attain its completion in the apprehension of the universe as one Whole, is obliged to make use of the category of Individuality. Suppose that it should then appear that this category is essentially indefinable in purely theoretical terms, — that, in other words, as we have already said, the presence of individuality is essentially an expression of the divine Will. Then at ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/258 ​category dawns upon us. In other words, whereas, in the preceding Part of this paper, we discussed the category of Will until we were led to say that the Will individuates, so now we shall discuss the meaning of Individuality until we are led to the assertion that individuation implies Will, but Will in precisely the sense in which our theoretical study of the unity of the world led us to the assumption of that category. Thus the circle being completed, the harmony of theoretical and ethical considerations may be in general rendered explicable; and we shall then be prepared to proceed, in the Fourth Part of our paper, directly to the discussion of the Self-conscious Individual.

As said above, the customary way of dealing with the individual in logic has been to assume that the individual is the beginning of knowledge. But it is useless thus to try to escape from an essential difficulty by becoming dogmatic, and by declaring that individuals are the immediately known realities with which science begins. For in fact, on the contrary, the far-off goal of science is the knowledge of the individual. We do not really begin our science with the individual. We hope and strive some day to get into the presence of the individual truth. All universality is, in one sense, a mere scaffolding and means to this end. That this is true is precisely what this discussion will undertake to indicate before I am done. ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/260 ​what Thomas called materia signata, i.e. designated matter, matter quantitatively determined, or limited by particular spatial dimensions and boundaries, is, in corporeal substances, the principle of individuation. On the other hand, it is not at all true, as it is sometimes asserted, that, for St. Thomas, matter is the sole principle of individuation in all grades of being. The Thomistic doctrine of the individual, viewed in its wholeness, seems to run much as follows:

An individual (Summa Theol., P. 1, Q. XXX, Art. IV) possesses a certain characteristic modus existendi, in so far as an individual is something “per se subsistens distinctum ab aliis.” Individuals are also to be called, according to the well-known tradition, “first substances” or “hypostases” (Id., Q. XXIX, Art. I). The name “hypostasis,” however, is more properly applied to the rational individual, the person, or to beings “who have dominion over their acts,” or who act per se. The fact of such self-determination gives a peculiar dignity to their individuality; and individuals of this grade are properly called persons, or “hypostases in the proper sense.” Every person is an individual, since actions are “in singularibus” (loc. cit.). On the other hand, not every individual is a person.

If one speaks of the rational individuals, or persons, one observes, then, that their individuality need not be dependent, in any sense, upon material conditions. Thus, according to Thomas (Q. III, Art. 11), a form such as that of God, self-subsistent and not “receivable in matter,” is individuated by the very ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/262 ​Coming downwards from God, the first case is that of the angels. They (Q. L, Art. II) are not “composites of matter and form.” “It is impossible,” says Thomas, “that a substantia intellectualis (such as is an angel) should have any kind of matter whatever.” The angels are therefore, according to the famous Thomistic doctrine, primarily individuated by their species, i.e. by their forms, since they too are (in so far like God) formæ subsistentes. “It is impossible that there should be two angels of one species, as it is impossible to say that there are several separated whitenesses, or several humanities” (Q. L, Art. IV). One must add, of course, that the individual angel is no mere abstraction, like whiteness or humanity, but has those other characters of the rational individual before enumerated. Within himself, namely, the angel has, as Thomas proceeds to expound, his self-consciousness, his freedom of will (a freedom now, to be sure, confirmed forever to good or to ill), and his measure of knowledge of the truth that is both above and below him. In his relation to God, the angel has his individual “mission.” In respect of other angelic individuals, the angel has his incommunicable and specific distinctio ab aliis. In all these ways his individuality is marked off, and herein lies the separate subsistence of his form.

If one passes to the case of the human soul, one meets with a new problem. The Thomistic doctrine of the soul was notoriously a subtle and complex one — a development of Aristotle’s doctrine, in a somewhat difficult sense. The soul itself is not a composite of form and matter. It is immaterial. Yet its ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/264 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/265 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/266 ​world of sense cannot, then, be the individual as God and the angels know individuality.

So much for St. Thomas’s doctrine of Individuation. It sums itself up in the assertion, that, whereas the higher forms of conscious and rational individuality are definable in various and relatively intelligible, although still more or less empirical terms, corporeal individuals are, for us, although not for God, nor for the angels, nor in themselves, undefinable and ultimate facts, known to us only in so far as a communicable form gets embodied in one spatially determined and sensuously observable matter, so that the resulting composite nature is “singular and incommunicable.”

There can be little doubt that this doctrine of individuality is at once skilful and vulnerable. It formed a favourite object for attack in later scholastic discussion. Most noteworthy is the doctrine that Duns Scotus opposed to Thomas concerning this topic. Duns Scotus is the second of the two principal scholastic students of our problem.

The chief discussion of individuality in Duns Scotus occurs in the Angelology of the second part of the Subtle Doctor’s commentary upon the Sententiæ, in the first half of the sixth volume of his works. Duns Scotus employs, throughout, a widely known and, so far, purely formal definition of indi​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/268 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/269 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/270 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/271 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/272 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/273 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/274 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/275 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/276 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/277 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/278 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/279 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/280 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/281 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/282 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/283 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/284 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/285 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/286 ​paper, even our empirical self-consciousness is no exception to this rule. The self, as the mere empirical this, borrows its individuality from the presupposed social individuality to which it is related. The empirical ego, in its phenomenal presence, is a social contrast-effect. I am this individual, in ordinary life, because of my determinate and conscious relation to other assumed individuals.

But the holder of the doctrine that experience does come to us wholly individuated is accustomed to insist still more elaborately upon space and time as principles of individuation; and fairness demands a little closer examination of this thesis, which nowadays may be said to hold the field in all the customary presentations of the problem of the individual. Accounts such as that of Wundt, in his Logik, — accounts of which very many examples might be found in modern literature, — declare the original of our idea of the individual to be the this in space and time, the here-and-now object. The object, thus individuated in space and time, as this empirically impenetrable thing, whose place cannot now be occupied by another thing, is supposed to be followed thenceforth by our consciousness, and identified by virtue of the continuity of its appear- ance as it changes its place, or as it is seen again from time to time; and thus, as one supposes, the concept of the individual gets differentiated. The uniqueness of the individual means, from this point of view, simply the experience that no other object can occupy the same place at the same time. Were our experience ideally continuous, we should follow this same object from place to place, and perceive ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/288 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/289 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/290 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/291 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/292 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/293 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/294 ​either brute fact or ideally definable result, i.e. combination of universal processes or types. And nevertheless, as now appears, the individual can be neither the one nor the other.

To define such a problem exactly is already far more than half the answer. My result, so far, is that individuality, although it is known by and in the unity of consciousness, is a category indefinable in purely theoretical terms. But, in so far, the cause of the individual is not at all a lost cause. As a fact, the world that we live in, as a moral world, although through and through knowable, is even more a practically significant than it is a theoretically definable world. And I may as well at once simply say, that, to my mind, the concept of the individual, in its primary and original sense, is distinctly an ethical concept, and that it is so whether you speak in terms of knowledge or in terms of being. Theoretically definable individuality there is, to be sure, in plenty, if by definition you merely mean the process of designating new individuals through an appeal to relationships to the presupposed individuality of other individuals. Such is the process which I just now exemplified. Individuality is like a ferment. Introduce the germ of it into your world of knowledge, and the universe soon swarms as with yeast, and individuality bubbles ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/296 ​himself already remarked, and as the scholastics often repeat, he “calls all men fathers and mothers,” — or, in other words, uses language not for the individual but for the types, which, in the midst of the shifting variety of his experience, he learns to recognise as the same types, persisting in the many presentations. The many presentations he cannot yet know as many individuals; for he has no such power to grasp single facts for their own sake. Such power comes only late.

The one that persists for the child through the many, — this, by virtue of its persistent contrast with unrecognisable confusions, he gradually learns to recognise as the one. But this one is the universal, the type, the idea. If you do not believe this, watch any young child calling flies “dogs,” or independently recognising pine cones as potatoes, or thoughtfully saying “piece of moon all torn” when he happens to observe a bright star, — and you will know what I mean by asserting that not only the first unconscious general ideas, but also the first explicitly conscious ideas, are of the universal, as such. In all such cases the background of the universe is not yet the individual, but the unrecognisably confused many, the relatively undifferentiated mass of changing contents, which the child does not make out, and does not know except as the background of the universals that he does know.

On the lines thus defined, the child might proceed, for all that I can see, indefinitely, without ever reaching the knowledge of true individuality, were he merely a theoretical thinker. But now observe him ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/298 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/299 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/300 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/301 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/302 ​

We turn from the world of our knowledge once more to the world of reality. The only observer who could actually and finally verify individuality would be a being who knew his ideal types to be realised in a single world of fact, because whatever he loved was his own, and because what was presented to him fulfilled his love; while his love, in order to be organised and not vaguely infinite, in order to be definite and not confusedly various, in order to be self-possessed and not powerlessly dependent upon chance facts, was an exclusive love, — a love that only one world, one Whole, could fulfil. Such a being would say: “There shall be but this one world.” And for him this world would be fact. The oneness would be the mere outcome and expression of his will. This would then be an individual world, that is, the sole instance of its universal idea or type. In this individual world, every finite fact, by virtue of its relations to the whole, would be in its own measure individual. And individuality, in such a world, would neither be absorbed in one indistinct whole, nor yet be opaque fact. For the exclusive love of the Absolute for this world would render the individuality of the fact secondarily intelligible, as being the fulfilment of the very exclusiveness of the love.

Turning back to the finite world itself, my last observation here as to the general metaphysics of ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/304 ​can, or, from God’s point of view, nobody else shall fulfil. This exclusive interest might, of course, be more or less met by Socrates the biological variation, — the unique temperament, unlike that of other sons of men. But in any truly moral sense it can only be met in case the ideal of Socrates, the meaning of his life in its wholeness, is such as no other moral process in the universe can fulfil. And this I take to be, in fact, the ultimate meaning of the individuality of Socrates. The meaning implies, of course, that Socrates the moral individual shall not cease from the world until his goal is fulfilled.

As to what has been called individualism in general, in the social and practical sense of the term, — as we referred to it in the first section of this Part of our paper, so now we observe that its eternal significance lies in the fact that since individuals are the objects, and, as moral individuals, the embodiments, of exclusive interests, such as cannot twice be realised, the last word of philosophy to the individual must be: Be loyal, indeed, to the universe, for therein God’s individuality is expressed; but be loyal, too, to the unique. Be unique, as your Father in Heaven is unique.

The circle of our inquiry is, in a very general sense, complete. We have seen that a theoretical view of the world implies the wholeness, the completion, of the unity of the Absolute Consciousness ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/306 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/307 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/308 ​

The concluding considerations in the foregoing Part of our discussion have been meant to be only suggestions. We now come directly to the serious problem: What is the nature of a self-conscious individual? As has already been indicated in the considerations just cited, my reply will in the end lay stress upon three theses: (1) The Absolute is a self-conscious individual, and the only ultimately real individual, because the only ultimately and absolutely whole individual. As such the Absolute is unique, embodies one Will, and realises this will in the unity of its one life. (2) On the other hand, every finite moral individual is precisely as real and as self-conscious as the moral order requires him to be. As such, every finite, moral, and self-conscious individual is unique, and, in his own measure, free, since there is an aspect of his nature such that nothing in all the universe of the Absolute except his own choice determines him, in this one aspect of his nature, to be whatever he is, and since no other finite individual could take his place, share his self-consciousness, or accomplish his ideal. He is unique, first, in that the object, namely, the Moral Goal, which he sets before himself, and with reference to which he is this self​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/310 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/311 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/312 ​osophical problem: What, in my real essence, am I, this person? In the proper union of psychology with philosophy lies the solution of this problem. Having studied finite individuality in ourselves, we shall proceed to the question of the relation of our individuality to the Absolute, by briefly considering in what sense our Absolute is a self-conscious individual, and what is our relation to such absolute individuality. A reference to the problem of Immortality will close this Part of our paper.

First, then, for the empirical aspect of finite self-consciousness. I talk of myself, of my moral worth, of my choice, of my freedom, of my moral personality. What fact in the universe do I refer to when I thus talk of myself? Is not the self of my inner self-consciousness a mere collection of accidental experiences and processes, — a mere heap of feelings, of associations, of beliefs? Is there anything really permanent or eternal about me? Am I not a mere child of circumstance, an offspring of my ancestors, a result of an evolutionary process, a chaos of bodily products? What concrete facts do I think when I think of myself? Is it not a mass of internal sensations, of fleeting thoughts, of halting memories, that I refer to when I speak of myself? And, now, how can this chance product of ancestry and of circumstance, this creature of yesterday and to-day, ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/314 ​creature of circumstance, this evanescent shadow, be also the embodiment and revealer of eternal truth? Let us try to indicate the answer to this question.

As a matter of natural history, my idea of myself is of course a growth.^[4] No infant begins by being self-conscious. One has to learn to be self-conscious. My ordinary self-consciousness (or, as the psychologists technically call it, my empirical self-consciousness) is a product of experience, slowly woven together according to the laws of the association of ideas. If you ask what inner experiences form a basis for the formation of my idea of myself, the answer is, first of all, my experiences of my own internal bodily sensations, in particular of my “visceral” and my “muscular” sensations, including many masses of skin and joint sensations. These vary, but their routine remains on the whole relatively uniform, while my experiences of what I see or hear or externally touch vary endlessly. So far, the self is a relatively stable group of what are called the sensations of the common sensibility. To these get early joined my experiences of my emotions, and my feelings of voluntary control. ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/316 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/317 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/318 ​fixity, connectedness in inner selfhood. By my ideal I learn to know myself. The contrast of ego and non-ego grows, however, still more and more complex as all the foregoing motives join in endlessly varied interweaving, in that long drama of social warfare and of social harmony, of friendship and of enmity, of private interest and of public spirit, which passes before us as mind daily meets mind in the expression of feeling and of opinion, in the play of love and of hate, throughout our long, and, by nature, far too flickering existence. Everywhere it is the social non-ego by the light of which the social ego is seen, too often with a luridly confused irrationality, — in happy lives, however, with a gradually attained relative fixity and clearness.

But what motive, above all, tends, in this chaos of empirical self-consciousness, towards an ideal unity, fixity, and clearness in my insight into what, after all, I am for my own consciousness? I have already pointed out that this unifying motive is, above all, the presence of an ideal of what, amidst all the confusion of my life, I mean to be. I repeat, by my ideal I learn to know myself as one self, with one contrast that runs through all the endlessly varying contrasts of ego and non-ego. Surely no teacher needs to be reminded that one common name for all these motives that tend towards unity of selfhood and of character in a growing mind is: Whatever tends to give one’s life the unity of a conscious plan. A sane self-consciousness involves a more or less clearly defined ideal of conduct, such as can be central in all the processes that tend to bring the special ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/320 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/321 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/322 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/323 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/324 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/325 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/326 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/327 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/328 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/329 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/330 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/331 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/332 ​largely — yes, mainly — illusory, our very existence as Selves is the embodiment of the Divine freedom. So that, once more, the individual can say to God: “Were I not free, you would not be free.”

On the other hand, in order to prove the individual free, you have indeed first to prove that God is free as well as rational. For then, when the uniqueness of the individual’s attention to his constituent ideal, to the plan that makes up the very essence of his Selfhood, appears amongst the facts of God’s world as that without which this Ego could neither be nor be conceived, the already demonstrated Divine freedom may be applied to this unique case of the universal principle.

The proof of the foregoing theses, as I have said, can here only be indicated. The essential considerations, however, may be reduced briefly to these: We have seen how our empirical self-consciousness gets formed; namely, as what we have called a social contrast-effect, which arises within the circle of our actual and empirical consciousness. We are primarily conscious of the self as a very varying, unstable, and ill-defined mass of contents — thoughts, wishes, interests, memories, desires, sensations — which we find different from, and opposed to, or contrasted with, a largely ideal world of contents which we conceive as the minds, wishes, interests, ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/334 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/335 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/336 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/337 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/338 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/339 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/340 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/341 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/342 ​of space; but I am still free to fill each part of that space by whatever individual bodies I please, independently of the filling of the rest of the space. If one conceives that the universal laws, such as the law of gravitation, are to predetermine the movement of whatever individual collection of material masses happens to be found in the material world, still there is in the unity of that law nothing that predetermines what bodies shall exist at all, or what system of bodies, as a collection of individuals, shall fulfil the law. The bodies, when once existent, must conform, by hypothesis, to the law — must exemplify it. But the individual whole which is to exemplify the law may be composed of members that, as to their mere existence, are separate individuals, equally and mutually contingent, so that neither the law nor the other individual bodies predetermine that any one individual body amongst those that are to conform to the law must exist. Here are cases where a system of ideas may be conceived as fulfilled by and in a contingent whole whose parts are also contingent, both with respect to one another, and with respect to the system of ideas that, taken singly and together, they are to fulfil in an individual case. Why might not our world of facts be of this sort, — an individual whole of mutually contingent parts, conforming to law in whole and in part, embodying universals, fulfilling ideas, yet with freedom not only for the whole but also for the parts? Why might not the Absolute Will be a complex of many wills in one unity of consciousness, and so its object be an Individual consisting of individuals, all expressive of ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/344 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/345 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/346 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/347 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/348 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/349 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/350 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/351 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/352 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/353 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/354 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/355 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/356 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/357 ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/358 ​

But now as to one remaining aspect of the moral individual’s place in the order of the universe. As we empirically know this individual, he is found subject, as to the sequence of his experience, to countless caprices of fortune, amongst which the most generally noteworthy is the seemingly quite arbitrary physical accident of death. For while death, as we see it, is a fact of considerable cosmological importance, it is of almost no discoverable and essential moral significance. Hence, from the point of view of the moral Ego, it has to be called an arbitrary chance. Necessary and intelligible enough as a natural phenomenon, and so, when cosmologically viewed, as rational an event as is any other phenomenon of nature, death stubbornly refuses to have any constant relation to that ideal which gives the whole meaning to the life of an individual Ego; it simply seems, either abruptly or, in case of its slow approach, gradually, to interrupt the entire process that was to fulfil that ideal. But when the process is interrupted, the Ego of which we have been speaking vanishes from manifestation in so much of concrete experience as is within our direct human ken. The question arises: Is this seeming interruption the true temporal end of the Ego? If so, of course the individual Ego remains with its ideal unfulfilled, with its possibilities unrealised. For in this life the finite Ego is only a seeker of its goal, as a knight of his quest. Yet, by ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/360 ​man’s own experience, and is God’s only in so far as it is this man’s experience. This attainment of the ideal of one’s life is a concrete, a conscious attainment. It does not occur in our earthly experience.

Yet here one meets with a paradox. Perfection after my own kind, oneness with the ideal of my life, — this, we say, I must attain. I cannot attain it in this life. I must then have some other life. But what life? An endless one? An endless series of strivings toward the goal must be ahead of me? So the matter seems, if I observe merely the before-mentioned fact, that, from my present point of view, I cannot conceive of any series of deeds that would end in making me finally and utterly one with my individual goal. For, as a being who lives in time, it is of the essence of me to set my ideal beyond any once-reached point in time. I cannot conceive myself as conscious of my last moral act, as my last, any more than I can conceive the end of time. On the other hand, my goal is, from God’s point of view, attained. Viewed in my wholeness, as God eternally views my life, my experience appears, not merely as a temporal series, but as perfected. It is eternally done. As temporal being I may then, as it seems, say: “I shall attain my goal.” But, again, in time? Ah then, to be sure, there will come somewhere my last temporal moment. Thus I am in a strait between two. If I am to be perfected in my own kind, — as I must be, so surely as God is, — then there seemingly lies ahead of me the temporal fulfilment of my life, the last moment of my process towards my perfection. On the other hand, if there is ahead of me ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/362 ​entered in the heart of man to conceive. I also hasten to point out that the lesson of all this is, that our temporal categories are wholly inadequate to express the ultimate facts of an eternal life. To the restless questions of a human consciousness whose present temporal form is wholly inadequate to its moral ideals, philosophy must reply simply thus: When you want immortality, you want what rationally means simply that this moral individual, at home as he is in God’s world, does not remain fragmentarily expressed, as on earth he is expressed, in a life of broken chance. You want to know that somewhere he — this individual, he himself and not another — knows himself as fulfilled after his own kind; as possessed of a life that, in its wholeness, earthly and superhuman, is adequate to his ideal. Now, that this is the case is just what tradition has asserted in its doctrine of the final perfection of the just and of the unjust, each after his own freely chosen kind. Philosophy here supports tradition. This is a moral world. All moral battles get fought out. All quests are fulfilled. The goal — yes, your individual goal — is by you yourself attained in the eternal life. You yourself, and not merely another, consciously know in the eternal world the attainment of that goal. But how? Where? When? To this philosophy at once answers: The temporal as well as the spatial world is but a fragment of the complete experience; your fulfilment will never come in time; and how your eternal experience of your perfection is individually realised by you, is a question which cannot be answered, in so far as you remain on this shoal of time. ​

For obvious reasons, the foregoing discussion has been planned with constant reference to the criticisms of Professor Howison, contained in his contribution to the original discussion before the Philosophical Union. My difference with Professor Howison appears the most fundamental amongst those developed during that discussion; and yet, despite the plainness of speech in some of the foregoing incidental replies, I have everywhere borne in mind the hope of reconciliation expressed at the outset of this supplementary paper. Nor have I desired to make my criticisms merely destructive. Professor Howison appears, at the outset of his argument, as one who deliberately adopts idealistic principles. If, as I have said, his actual doctrine takes rather the form of an Ethical Realism, that is because, to his mind, the ethical relationships amongst individuals, while existing solely for the sake of the individual minds themselves, appear to him, as he expresses himself, to be irreducible to the contents in any one mind, or to any other element definable in terms of any single unity of consciousness. In consequence, ​if we take Professor Howison as he expresses himself, we find the constitution of the moral world, according to him, essentially resembling the constitution ascribed by realists to “things in themselves,” existent apart from the processes, the organisation, or the contents of any mind. On the other hand, from Professor Howison’s point of view, my own thesis inevitably reduces the constitution of the moral world to a collection of contents, presented merely as contents in the unity of the Absolute Experience. And Professor Howison not unjustly insists that such a thesis, if viewed as the whole of my doctrine, would deprive the moral world of elements essential to its genuine constitution. In reply, I have endeavoured to show that the development, and in fact the only consistent development, of my thesis introduces into the definition of the Absolute elements which render the definition of a moral world not only adequate and intelligible but inevitable; and that, too, without detriment to the absolute unity of this ultimately real Consciousness itself.

In view of the position that has thus been reached, I venture to return explicitly to the formal statement of the antinomy which was indicated in the Introduction of this supplementary paper, which was discussed substantially in its Second, Third, and Fourth Parts, ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/366 ​Omniscience naturally demands. In this development, the actual constitution of the empirical unity of consciousness, as we human beings know it, has everywhere been taken into account. That the Absolute is an Absolute Experience, I still deliberately maintain. That even in order to be such an experience, it must involve other elements besides experience, that is, besides the mere presentation of data, or of immediate contents, is what has been shown, and what was very obviously implied in the original discussion. In other words, along with immediacy, there must be mediation; and what kind of mediation, has now been defined, — not with any pretence to exhaustiveness, but with an effort to give to the abstract considerations of the original paper something of the concreteness which was from the outset regarded as necessary for the completion of the theory, even in the most tentative statement. I submit, however, that my conception of the Absolute must be judged by its developments, as well as in the light of its original deduction. For such developments were predicted from the outset of the argument.

As to the Antithesis, on the contrary, I assert that it embodies a natural, and, in advance of analysis, an inevitable illusion, just in so far as it uses the true conception of moral freedom as a proof of the false separation of the individuals. This is the illusion that the category of Individuality is definable in terms of the segmentation of contents, and therefore implies such segmentation, be these contents empirical or ideal. I assert that two individuals need not ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/368 ​in any respect mutually independent, or that they should be independent, in any respect, of the rest of the constitution of the Absolute Will, — this does not demand the segmentation of the interests I and I’ , as “things in themselves,” or as otherwise transcendent realities, from one another, or from the rest of the universe. Such freedom demands only, that in the individuation of the universe, as it is, the interests which are expressed in the other individual lives and facts of the world shall not, by virtue of the constitution of the world of ideas, absolutely predetermine how the interest I, as such, shall either formulate or express itself, and that the same relative independence shall hold of any other interest I’, such as gets expressed in the life of a free individual.

Herein, as asserted above, lies the essence of the solution of our antinomy. And I offer the solution, not merely as a polemic, but as a suggestion towards reconciliation. I see not why the ancient and to my mind rather superstitious objection to Idealism,^[5] which has received so skilful a formulation in Professor Howison’s discussion, should longer be regarded as any essential obstacle in the way of a rational philosophy.

My further answers to Professor Howison’s objections may now take a less irreconcilable tone than would otherwise be necessary. My argument is taxed with a certain “solipsistic” tendency. The ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/370 ​technical but actually ungrounded objections. The individual’s knowledge, such objectors insist, is something. that he carries perhaps in his head, perhaps as a mere organ of his immortal soul, perhaps as his reflection of the far-off Sun of divine insight. In any case, however, it is just his knowledge; and he is primarily a being with this life and this will, wholly incapable of including within either his life, or the knowledge that is so far a mere incident of such a life, either the knowledge or the life of anybody else. If he thinks that he does this, he is deluded into the vain fancy that he can absorb the whole universe into his head, can swallow all souls in his own capacious soul, or can live all lives while he lives his own! Professor Howison, as philosopher, is beyond the cruder forms of such polemic. He admits that our thesis need not mean that the world is absorbed into the narrow individual Ego as such. But he objects that, in that case, the individual, as such, is, in his turn, inevitably lost in the self-abnegating consciousness: “I am He.” But not thus are the alternatives exhausted. Knowledge is a form of self-consciousness. So also is self-conscious individuality. But the two, while in the closest and most organic relationship, are distinct, and secure their organic relationship by virtue of this very distinction. The finite knower, as such, is thinking of and conforming to the beyond, so long as he is finite knower. For herein lies his essence as knower. He lives in self-surrender, in seeking to understand what he possesses by discovering its relation to, its inclusion in, an ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/372 ​ledge, but is merely another aspect of it; that the world of the various forms of will, expressed in the contents of finite life, is a world of Moral Individuals, as free as the moral order admits and demands; and, finally, that each individual, while possessing his ethical freedom, and expressing it in his life, is as knower an organic part, as will a particular will-form, and so, as complete individual, a moment, of that total Unity of consciousness whose will, whose thought, and whose life constitute the world, — if, I say, one faces these considerations, together, and in their whole meaning, the paradox vanishes. The unity of the world of knowledge is not “solipsistic,” in the sense in which that word was first used. There is, indeed, but one knowing Self, when we pass to the highest unity of the world of knowledge, or to what we have before called the Absolute as Knower. At the same time, even this very unity of the Absolute Knowledge implies, as we have seen, and contains an organic variety of interrelated selfhood, even when we confine ourselves to the categories of knowledge alone. On the other hand, the Absolute Self, as such, is not the finite individual, as such; and when, as knower, the individual identifies himself with the Absolute Knower, he does not do this in so far as he is this finite individual, but in so far as his knowledge is universally reasonable knowledge. Meanwhile, both the Absolute and the finite individual are true individuals. The Absolute, as individual, is One; the finite individuals, as such, are many. They are not confounded with one another. They do not slip as ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/374 ​point out how the unity of the eternal world is related to the significant temporal events of the moral world. Professor Mezes is, however, perfectly right in declaring that both the foregoing questions: What finite beings exist? and, What is the relation of the moral world to the Absolute? are questions of great importance for philosophy. He is right in observing that, since my discussion omitted the definite consideration of these problems, it is inadequate. I need make here only the general plea, in “avoidance,” that I did not profess that my discussion was adequate.

As to the particulars, however, of Professor Mezes’s objections, I have indeed a few observations to offer. Professor Mezes, in the first of his two general comments, expresses some curiosity as to how I should undertake to supplement my conception, so far as concerns the wealth and the “spirituality” of the Absolute Life. Whence, he asks, can I derive, on the basis of my argument, the more “spiritual” attributes of my Absolute? My natural reply is a question addressed to Professor Mezes: Whence does he himself derive the conception of the “spirituality” whose presence he misses from the conception of the Absolute so far as I have defined it? For him to answer my question will inevitably involve the answer to his own. One has somehow or other formed, upon the basis of one’s finite experience, thought, reflection, and will, an idea of types of life that are higher in the scale of spirituality than are other types of life. In consequence, one avers that the single finite individual is, as such, of less import ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/376 ​of spirituality which Professor Mezes chooses to mention. But in mentioning such forms, he himself at once defines their place in the unity of my conception, precisely in so far as he regards this ideal spirituality as something whose presence is needed in order to complete the perfection of the life of the Absolute.

Perhaps Professor Mezes may insist that his objection, as stated, is not in this way adequately met. For, as he states his case, “Nothing can be held to be a part of the inclusive experience of the Absolute until its existence is fully proven.” He admits, indeed, that “it is not the business of philosophy to prove the existence of individual facts,” but he adds that “it is the business of philosophy to establish the truth of such principles as are indispensable for proving the existence of any and every individual fact not directly observed.” With this latter statement I cannot at present adequately deal. I admit, of course, that philosophy is concerned with numerous relatively special “principles” which form no part of the present discussion of one most fundamental concept. On the other hand, I should not admit that philosophy can undertake to consider all the principles that would be “indispensable” in proving the existence of “any and every fact not directly observed,” including, for instance, the principles that would be needed to guide one in finding out how far what he reads in the newspapers about the battles in Cuba agrees with the “unobserved” occurrences in that unhappy and apparently mendacious island. Philosophy can as little take the place of common-sense as the latter can take the place of philosophy; and ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/378 ​a cheat, although the Absolute Life is clear and sure? If this last may be the case, then what do I care for the Absolute? For then his truth is not what I call ‘spiritual.’ But if the Absolute’s organisation insures the truth of any and all finite ideas, merely in so far as somebody holds them, where is the distinction between truth and error? I demand, then, a guiding principle, whereby I can distinguish true from illusory types of finite ideas. And I demand this principle from philosophy as such, and decline to be merely sent back to the realm of common-sense.” Now the demand thus defined is indeed fair enough. And while our former abstract statement failed to furnish an explicit answer to this demand, it did indicate the criterion which I have just applied to the questions stated by Professor Mezes, and which serves, rightly applied, to meet all questions that can fairly be asked of the philosopher, and that are not directly practical problems about the mere plausibilities of the world of common-sense, viewed as such mere plausibilities.

The criterion in question is not hard to state. As finite being you can err, you can dream, you can suffer from illusions, you can go insane; in brief, your finite judgment is never infallible. Just in your fallibility lies, as I have shown in my above-cited chapter on “The Possibility of Error” (The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Chapter XI), one ground for the proof that the Absolute is, and is infallible. But now, when you err, you still form an idea of the beyond; and this idea really refers to, bears upon, and so belongs to, the world that includes the be​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/380 ​and illusions too, are refuted only through the realisation of all that was rationally positive about their meaning.

We cannot say to the finite being, then: “You are infallible; you are subject to no illusions.” On the contrary, we must say: “All finite ideas involve more or less illusion.” But we must add: “No illusion is a total illusion;” and, “You are wrong only in so far as the truth is richer, is more concrete and significant, than is your error.” Therefore, when one asks whether his ideas of his fellows, of the social order, of his wife, of his children, and of his spiritual destiny, are warranted in the light of an idealistic analysis, we reply: “Yes, and No.” They are all sure to be coloured by finite illusions, and that fact you yourself already recognise whenever you reflect. But thee truth confirms all that is significant about your meaning, all the essential ideas involved in these illusions, just in so far as they are ideas that have a positive conscious intent and sense. For instance, if your meaning involves essentially moral ideas, then you are, in absolute truth, a member of a real and concrete social and moral order, which contains your life along with the lives of other moral individuals. You are this; for all these ideas, upon analysis, prove to possess an essential positive meaning, such as the Absolute Life inevitably fulfils. Moreover, whatever you do and intend as your act in a moral world really accomplishes what it morally ought to accomplish. So far, then, your life is real, and not illusory. And the Absolute, which includes life of such types, is as genuinely “spiritual” as any definable idea can ask ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/382 ​now demands, in its turn, that moral activities should be conceived as incapable of being ended in time. The solution of the antinomy would, as before, insist upon the difference of the points of view. It would demand that we render unto eternity the things that are eternity’s. These things are precisely the fulfilled ideals, the attained goals, of the Absolute Life as such. Unto time, on the other hand, we should render the things that are time’s; namely, the processes whose end cannot be temporally conceived, and whose significance lies in their struggle for goals which they find always remote. Illustrations of such twofold realities, drawn from the mathematical world, have been so often repeated as to be philosophically tedious, and I need not dwell upon them here. Any convergent infinite series approaches, as to its sum, an unattainable Limit. When this Limit chances to be definable by us in terms quite other than those which the infinite series embodies, we are able to be, at once, in possession of the Limit, aware that this is the Limit of the infinite series, and able to see how the infinite series is absolutely incapable of ever attaining this its own goal. On the other hand, when the Limit is an irrational number, it is, in general, known to us only as the unattainable goal of an infinite series; and here we see only one aspect of the Limit. Applying the simile, one may declare that the moral consciousness, as such, views its goal only as the term of an infinite series, and so as unattainable. That, from an eternal point of view, this Limit should be viewed as attained, is no more surprising than that the mathematical consciousness should be able to de​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/384 ​a concrete whole as includes every shadow and wavelet of finite experience; and it transcends relatively illusory points of view precisely because it includes them. Therefore, from the absolute point of view, there is real change, and in only one direction, in time; there is real progress wherever there is a temporal success; there is a real difference between past and future time; in brief, all temporal items and significances remain what they are, even while, as included in the completer whole, they are viewed as forming a part of the content of the Eternal Instant. The eternal Now is simply not the temporal present. On the other hand, all present temporal moments are amongst the facts which form the experience of the Absolute Moment. And so, in general, we may say, to Professor Mezes or to any other objector: “Show us what you need for the moral world, in the way of progress, of real difference between past, present, and future, and whatever else you choose to define, and we will undertake to find a place for such facts, precisely in so far as they are facts, in the organisation of the Eternal Moment.”

As I approach, finally, the comments of my revered teacher Professor Le Conte, I must first express the strong hope that he may find in this supplementary paper a more or less acceptable development of some ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/386 ​resents one of the moral individuals of the eternal world. But I have so defined the moral individual that it is perfectly possible for anybody who is one to discover the fact in self-conscious terms. The other human beings, if such exist, may as well expect to find philosophy sparing of compliments in this matter; and I do not myself think it required by humanity to identify every empirical human being as a separate moral individual. On the contrary, I very much hope that many of the people who phenomenally appear to us as human beings are not, as we see them, distinct moral individuals at all, but mere fragments of a finite personality whose type is hidden from us, and whose individual meaning may therefore be much less sinister than the fragments within our ken would suggest. In immortality as a boon offered to anybody who feels a wish for it, — as a solace for our ill fortune, or as a character to be attributed, by way of social compliment, to any featherless biped who happens to be called a man, — in all this I feel no philosophical and but little personal interest. What we ought to wish to find finally saved, in our own fortune, in our own lives, or in the lives of those whom we love and honour, is distinctly moral personality, conceived as a self-conscious process aiming towards a unique goal, — a goal that cannot be conceived as attainable at any temporal moment. Such individual goals, as Idealism teaches us, must be attained in the eternal world. And in the eternal world there are therefore moral personalities, — individuals, who are yet one in God. The only immortality that I pretend to know about ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/388 ​his extensive discussions in other places, and therefore with a suggestion of ideas whose discussion would carry me far beyond the present limits. For the rest, as Professor Le Conte’s pupil, who first learned from his lips the meaning of the doctrine of Evolution, I must frankly confess that, as Professor Le Conte well knows, I have never been able to give to this doctrine, justly central as it is in the world of recent empirical science, the far-reaching, the philosophical, the universal significance which he still attributes to this aspect of reality. Evolution, to me, is not a process in the light of which we can hope to learn much either concerning the Absolute or concerning the relation of the eternal to the temporal world. On the other hand, evolution is by no means any mere illusion or any merely human appearance, without foundation in extra-human metaphysical truth. In recent papers in the Philosophical Review, I have offered, as an hypothesis in philosophical Cosmology, an interpretation of the metaphysics of evolution which, if right, would make this collection of natural processes an indication of a real, and extra-human, finite world of life, whose relations to our own finite life are viewed by us, as it were, in perspective. Thus viewing our relations to other finite life in the universe, we naturally conceive the portions of the finite world more distant from us in type as lifeless, and the various forms of life which, in temporal sequence, or in contemporaneous relations to us, gradually approach our own type as indicative of a real progress from what we call “dead Nature” to our own grade. This process, ​Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/390 ​admit of any one assured metaphysical interpretation. Least of all could I hope to find in the consideration of this process the solution of any metaphysical problem so fundamental as are the problems of Evil, of Freedom, of Immortality, or, in general, of the relations of the Absolute and the Individual.