T 6?7 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 1891 BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE ' m BT101 .R C 88 ne i897 VerSi,y Library CO W3Satfm&&, ±./?fti!°spphical discu olin 3 1924 029 373 028 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029373028 PUBLICATIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL UNION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA EDITED EY G. H. HOWISON, LL.D. MILLS PROFESSOR OF INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL PHILOSOPHY AND CIVIL POLITY VOLUME I THE CONCEPTION OF GOD rhe^^o THE CONCEPTION OF GOD A PHILOSOPHICAL DISCUSSION CONCERNING THE NATURE OF THE DIVINE IDEA AS A DEMONSTRABLE REALITY BY JOSIAH ROYCE PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY JOSEPH LE CONTE and G. H. HOWISON PROFESSORS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AND SIDNEY EDWARD MEZES PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS Nein gotfe THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 1897 All rights reserved Copyright, 1897, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Hotfcooorj $msg J. S. CusMdk & Co. — Berwick & Smith Norwood Mass. U.S.A. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction by the Editor ... . . ix I THE CONCEPTION OF GOD: ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE Introductory Acknowledgments . ... 3 I. God as the Omniscient Being, and Omniscience as Abso- lute Unity of Thought and Experience . . 4 II. First Definition of Human Ignorance, apparently exclud- ing Knowledge of Reality .... 15 III. Higher Definition of Human Ignorance, vindicating a Knowledge of Reality ... 18 IV. Ignorance defined as Unorganised Experience, and as implying an Experience Absolutely Organised 22 V. Reality and Experience as Correlative Conceptions . 30 — VI. Analysis of the Conception Absolute Experience : Mean- ing of its Reality . . '33 "-VII. Proof of the Reality of an Absolute Experience . 38 VIII. Summary of the Whole Argument for the Reality of the Omniscient . . . . 42 IX. This Conception of God in its Relations to Historic Philosophy and Faith ... 44 II WORTH AND GOODNESS AS MARKS OF THE ABSOLUTE: CRITICISM BY PROFESSOR MEZES Preliminary Remarks . . -53 I. No Worth and Dignity proved of the Absolute . . 54 II. Absoluteness not shown Compatible with Goodness 59 vi CONTENTS III GOD, AND CONNECTED PROBLEMS, IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION: REMARKS BY PROFESSOR LE CONTE PAGE Introductory Contrast between the Author's Method and Professor Royce's . . . 67 I. The Problem of the Divine Personality, in regard (1) to its Proof, and (2) to its Nature . . 67 II. The Problem of Evil : its Evolutional Explanation as Good in Disguise . . .69 III. The Problem of Immortality : its Proof from Evolution 75 IV THE CITY OF GOD, AND THE TRUE GOD AS ITS HEAD : COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWTSON Preliminary Statement of the Question at Issue Si I. The Criterion of Reality in a Conception . 84 II. The Criterion condemns the Monistic Conception of God .... 89 III. The Monistic Conception of God not the Theism of the West, but the Pantheism of the Orient . . 94 '--"TV. Worth of Monistic Idealism as against Agnosticism: its Failure as a Religious Metaphysic . . 100 V. Precise Analysis of Professor Royce's Argument : its Mystic and Anti-Ethical Tendency . . 108 VI. Criticism of the System of Professor Le Conte . 114 VII. The Fundamental Assumption in Professor Royce's Ar- gument: its Kantian Basis . .120 VIII. Suggestions towards transcending this Kantian Assump- tion 123 NOTE: The Discussion recapitulated in Questions 12S CON l l EN TS Vll THE ABSOLUTE AND THE INDIVIDUAL: SUPPLEMENT- ARY ESSAY BY PROFESSOR ROYCE Introduction ... Part I — The Conception of Reality PAGE '35 141 I. The Consciousness of Reality .... 144 *— H. The Possibilities of Experience . . . 149 III. The First Argument for Realism .... 153 IV. The Second Argument for Realism, and its Idealistic Interpretation . . . . 160 V. The Third Argument for Realism : Transition to Abso- lute Idealism . . . . . 1 71 Part II — The Conception of Will and its Relation to the Absolute ... . . 1S2 I. The Essential and the Non-essential Elements of the Will .... ... 187 II. The Relation of the Will to the Absolute . . 193 III. General Review of the Argument . ... 203 Part III — The Principle of Individuation . 217 I. Definition of the Problem ...... 217 II. The Thomistic Theory of Individuation . . 223 III. The Scotistic Theory of Individuation .... 230 IV. Critical Comparison of these Theories . . . 235 V. The Individual as Undefinable by Thought, and as Un- presentable in Experience ...... 247 VI. The Individual as the Object of an Exclusive Interest 258 VII. The Reality of the Individual 266 VIII. Individuality and Will ... 268 Viii CONTENTS PAGE Part IV — The Self-conscious Individual . . 272 I. Empirical Self-Consciousness, and its Contents 276 II. Genesis of the Empirical Ego . 278 III. Reality of the Ego . 289 IV. The Self-Consciousness of the Absolute . 296 V. The Absolute and the Finite Individual . . 303 VI. The Temporal Relations of the Individual . . 315 v""VII. The Immortality of the Individual . . . 322 327 Part V — Replies to Criticisms I. Professor Hovvison, and the Antinomy of the Moral World .... . . 328 II. Professor Mezes, and the Contents of Reality 337 \fll. Professor Le Conte, and the Concept of Evolution . 348 INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR The first volume of the projected Publications of the Philosophical Union of the University of Cali- fornia, delayed by unavoidable circumstances, here at length appears, as promised at the time of issuing the volume counted as second, — Professor Watson's Christianity and Idealism. It consists ( i) of the docu- ments of the public discussion held at the seat of the University in 1895, reprinted with only a very few trifling verbal alterations, and, in Article 'IV, two or three additional sentences; (2) of a new Supple- mentary Essay by Professor Royce, in which he developes his central doctrine in a more systematic way, discusses afresh the long-neglected question of Individuality, and, in conclusion, replies to his critics. The contents of the book very rightly take the form of a discussion, for discussion is the method of phi- losophy. Of the three chief objects upon which philosophy directs its search, — God, Freedom, and Immortality, — notable as also the essential objects of religion, this discussion, in its outset, aimed only at the first — the nature and the reality of God. But the feature of eminent interest in it is, that in the direct pursuit of its chosen problem it presently becomes even more engaged on the problem of Freedom, and cannot forego, either, the consideration of Immor- tality ; so true it is that the attempt to conceive God, X THE CONCEPTION OF GOD and to establish his existence, is futile apart from grappling with the other two connected ideals. The interest of the discussion at length unavoidably concentrates about the question of Freedom, and this turn in the pressure of the contest is what gives the debate its significance for the world of philosophy and of religion. One cannot but feel that this sig- nificance is marked, and for reasons that will in the sequel appear. On the initial question : Is the fundamental belief of religion valid, — is a Personal God a reality ? all the participants in the discussion are to be under- stood as distinctly intending to maintain the affirma- tive. But as soon as this question is deliberately apprehended, it becomes evident that no settlement of it can be reached until one decides what the word "God" veritably means, and also what "reality" or " existence " can rationally mean. Here, accordingly, the divergence among the participants begins. Very largely agreeing in an idealistic interpretation of what must constitute Reality if the word is to have any explicable meaning, they nevertheless soon ex- pose a profound difference as to what Idealism re- quires when one comes to the question of the reality of spiritual beings, — above all, of a being deserving to be called divine. Thence follows, of course, a like deep difference as to the nature and the conception of God himself. More specifically, these differences concern the following points : (i) Whether the novel method of proving God real, put forward by the leader of the discussion, and here given a fresh form, different from that in his INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR x j Religious Aspect of Philosophy, is adequate to es- tablish in the Absolute Reality a nature in the strict sense divine. (2) Whether the conception of God upon which the whole argument of the leader proceeds is in truth a conception of a Personal God. (3) Whether this conception is compatible with that autonomy of moral action which mankind in its fully enlightened civilisation, and especially under the Christian consciousness, has come to appreciate as the vital principle of all personality. On the first matter, Professor Mezes and Professor Howison differ with Professor Royce. Professor Le Conte declines any critical opinion upon it, though he prefers, and offers, an entirely different argument for the reality of a Personal God. On the second point, the extreme division is be- tween Professor Royce on the one side (apparently supported by his pupil, Professor Mezes), and Pro- fessor Howison on the other. Here, the question disputed being in fact the question of an Immanent God as against a God distinct from his creation, Professor Le Conte offers a mediating theory, based on the doctrine of Cosmic Evolution, by which he would conjoin the conception of God as immanent in Nature with the conception of man as eventually a literally free intelligence : through the process of evolution, operated by the God indwelling in it, the human being is at length completely extricated from Nature, hence becomes strictly self-active, and thus intrinsically immortal. To this proposal for recon- ciling an Immanent God with a Personal God, — -the xii THE CONCEPTION OF GOD test of personality being the possession by God of a World of Persons, all really free, with whom he shares in moral relations, acknowledging Rights in them, and Duties towards them, — Professor Howi- son demurs, urging that no such World of Freedom can arise out of a process of natural evolution, as this is always a process of efficient causation, and so works by a vis a tcrgo, whose law is necessitation. On the third question, which is thus brought strongly to the front, the divergence between Pro- fessor Howison and Professor Royce comes out at its sharpest. Here, Professor Howison maintains there is a chasm, incapable of closure, between the immanence of God, even as Professor Royce con- ceives this, and the real personality, the moral au- tonomy, of created minds. Professor Royce, in rejoinder, contends there is no such chasm, that a Divine Self-Consciousness continuously inclusive of our consciousness is demanded if a knowable God is to be proved, and that its existence is not only compatible with the existence of included conscious Selves, but directly provides for them, imparts to them as its own members its own freedom, and thus gives them all the autonomy permissible in a world that is moral. In this difference, it may be pre- sumed that Professor Mezes and Professor Le Conte side tacitly with Professor Royce ; though Professor Le Conte, of course, would only do so with the reser- vation that the reconciliation of the dispute must be sought in his theory of evolution. Professor Royce, however, pursues his object by another path, more purely in the region of idealistic psychology, and INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR x iii devotes his Supplementary Essay, in its main pur- pose, to a systematic investigation of the nature and the source of Individuation. He seeks in this way to show how Personality, conceived as self-conscious individuality, flows directly and even solely from his conception of God, when the essential implications of this are developed, Here Professor Howison's con- tention is, that this theory of the Person, making the single Self nothing but an identical part of the unify- ing Divine Will (as Professor Royce is explicit in declaring), gives to the created soul no freedom at all of its own ; that the moral individual, the Person, cannot with truth be thus confounded with the logical singular ; and that personality, as reached by this doctrine, is so truncated as to cease being true per- sonality. The central topic of the book, proving thus to be this question of Free Personality, marks by the region entered, and by the method of investigation employed, the advance of philosophical thought into a new stadium. On a different matter, of high philosophical im- port, with weighty religious consequences, the par- ties in the discussion all appear to agree. They unite in recognising, in some form or other, an organic correlation among the three main objects common to philosophy and religion, — God, Freedom, Immortality. They differ, to be sure, as to precisely what, and exactly how much, these three elements of the One Truth mean ; but they agree that neither of the three can adequately be stated except with the help of the properly correlative statement of the other two. Thus : No God except with human Selves x i v THE CONCEPTION OF GOV free and immortal in some sense, in some degree or other; and so, likewise, mutatis mutandis, of Free- dom and of Immortality. The differences here are as to the sense in which Freedom and Immortality are to be taken, — whether with unabated complete- ness or with a suppression and reduction. On this issue, Professor Le Conte, as to the resulting state of Real Existence aimed at by his method, is at one with Professor Howison : both hold to a God dis- tinctly real, in relation with distinctly real souls, though Professor Howison questions the conceptions on which Professor Le Conte bases his method for reaching this result. Opposed to them stands Pro- fessor Royce. Professor Mezes perhaps supports this opposition with tacit assent, though he has refrained from any open expression. Restating in the usual but more technical language of the schools the main divergence as now brought out, one would say that it is an issue between two views concerning the Whole of Real Existence — between the view known as Monism, and the view known as Pluralism. Professor Royce, and apparently Pro- fessor Mezes, adheres to Monism; Professor Le Conte and Professor Howison hold by Pluralism, though Pro- fessor Le Conte colours this with an intermediary Mon- ism, as the means by which the final Pluralism comes to be. Only it is of essential importance to add, that both parties interpret their views in terms of Idealism. To both alike, all reality at last comes back to the reality of Mind ; to the primary reality of self-con- sciousness, and the derivative reality of " things," or objects ordinarily so called, as real items in such self- INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR xv consciousness. The difference is, as to whether there really are many minds, or, in the last resort, there is only one Mind ; whether the Absolute Reality is a sys- tem of self-active beings forming a Unity, or is after all, with whatever included variety, a continuous Unit ; whether it is a free Harmony, or, as Professor James satirically calls it, a " solid Block." The one view, then, would be more accurately designated Idealistic Monism, as Professor Royce himself prefers to call it ; or Monistic Idealism, as it has sometimes been named; or Cosmic Theism, as still others at times call it, — though this last title is oftener used in an agnostic than in an idealistic sense. The opposed view would in like manner be called Pluralistic Idealism, or Ethi- cal Idealism ; 1 or, again, as its supporter would prefer, simply Personal Idealism, since all other forms of Ideal- ism are, as he thinks, in the last analysis non-personal — ■ are unable to achieve the reality of any genuine Person. Professor Le Conte's special form of Plural- ism has sometimes been called, with his approval, Evolutional Idealism ; and this is descriptive of what he regards as the most important factors in it, and is in so far suitable. 1 Professor Royce designates this view Ethical Realism. Professor Howison has no particular objection to this title, as it names, quite appropriately, an actual aspect of the doctrine. He would himself willingly call it Absolute Idealism (as in his opinion the only system expressing completely the Ideal of the Reason, and reaching an ideal that per se turns real), were not that name already associated — illegiti- mately, as he holds — with the theory of Hegel, and so with Professor Royce's own. Absolute Idealism, of course, however interpreted, must also be called Absolute Realism. Accordingly, Ethical Idealism is in its reverse aspect Ethical Realism. xvi THE CONCEPTION OF GOD So much for the chief sides represented in the dis- cussion. Its significance for the existing situation in philosophy and religion can be made duly clear by exhibiting its place in that larger movement of thought which has most prominently marked the century now passing away. This movement, so far as it affected our English- speaking communities, was in its bearing on the rational foundations of religion professedly defen- sive ; but only so by intent, and on the surface of its thinking ; in its deep undertow it was from its springs profoundly negative, — destructive in ten- dency. When in the mind of the early century the question first clearly uttered itself: "What will all our scientific discoveries, all our independent philoso- phisings, all our historical, textual, and other critical doubts, leave us of our religious tradition ? — above all, is the Personal God of past faith to remain intact for us ? " the pressure of the situation, having borne the anthropomorphic supports of Theism indiscrimi- nately away, forced thinking people to ask further: " What, then, do we indeed mean by ' God,' since we are no longer to think him ' altogether such an one as ourselves ' ? — has the meaning gone out of the word ' God ' entirely ? " To many — as, for instance, to Sir William Hamilton — it seemed that, substantially, the answer must come in this form : " God, surely, is the Absolute, the one and only unconditioned Reality ; the universal Ground of all, which it is impossible not to account real : for it is impossible not to believe that Something is real, and therefore impossible not to believe there is an Ultimate Reality. What is INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR xv ii sensibly present is finite, is thereby only derivatively real, and thus is intrinsically conditioned by this Ground of all, which is thus, again, intrinsically the Unconditioned. Hence, though God therefore cer- tainly is, he is forever unknown and unknowable : because to know is to think, to think is to condition, and to condition the Unconditioned is a self-contra- diction." In this way the so-called being of God was supposed to be saved at the cost of his essence ; and the mysteries of traditional faith were held to be further preserved and vindicated, because, as it was announced, need was now shown, and a way made, for Revelation, since our human knowledge had been demonstrated incompetent. In contrast to this attempted theistic Agnosticism, there appeared almost simultaneously, issuing from France through Comte, an Agnosticism openly athe- istic. It was entitled Positivism, as restricting its credence to the only things certain by " positive " evidence — the immediate and autocratic evidence of sensible experience. It said : " Let there be an end now, not only to theological, but to all meta- physical Entities quite as much ; for all are alike the illusory products of mere abstraction and conjecture." As the substitution of the "Ultimate Reality" for God had turned God into something unknowable, God — and the "Ultimate Reality" too, as for that — became, as the positivist justly enough observed, an affair of no more concern to us knowers than if he or it didn't exist. So, let human life be organised without any reference to any " Reality " beyond phenomena, and let us confine our knowledge to its xviii THE CONCEPTION OF GOD authentic objects, namely, "the things which do appear." Comte brought to the task of this "posi- tive" organisation of life a comprehensive acquaint- ance with the results and the general methods of all the sciences, and a noticeable facility in classified and generalised statement. These qualities, joined with an ardour of conviction and an insistence of advocacy that lent their possessor something of the character of the prophet and the apostle, earned for the new cause an attention sufficient not only to found a new sect, intense in cohesion, if limited in numbers, but to spread the contagion of its general empirical view wide through a world interested in the theory of knowledge, however indifferent to the religious powers claimed for the new doctrine. A philosophy insisting on the sole credibility of scien- tific evidence, and chiefly busied in formulating scientific truths in generalisations so rarefied as to seem from their unexpectedness like new scientific discoveries, naturally appealed to many a scientific expert, but still more to the ever-swelling throng of general readers who fed upon scientific "results," and gradually formed the public now known to the venders of "popular science." So matters stood, in the world that was balancing between the interests of philosophy and of religion, till about the middle of the century. At that junct- ure, following upon the latest developments in the sciences, particularly in the field of biology, Herbert Spencer appeared with his project of a " Synthetic Philosophy," based on the principle of Evolution carried out to cosmic extent. This view presently INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR X J X received an almost overwhelming reinforcement, at least for the general scientific intelligence, by the unexpected scientific proofs of biological evolution, worked out chiefly by Darwin. The change of front in the scientific world, upon the question of Species and of Origins, was almost as immediate as it was revolutionary. The conception of the origin of natu- ral things in a direct act of "creation" — a supposed instant effect of a Divine Will operating without any means — thus seemed to the popular mind to be assailed in the seat of its life. Many felt, indeed, that this view, so ingrained in the religious tradition, had received its deathblow. In this feeling, as fact requires us to acknowledge, they had at any rate the countenance, if not the direct leading, of many of the scientific experts who promoted the new evolu- tional theory. The nature of the Eternal Ground of things appeared to need a radical reconception, to adjust it to the evidences, felt to be irresistible, of the presence of evolution in the world. The way was thus made, over a field widely prepared, for the favourable reception of a philosophy that proposed nothing less than the harmonious satisfaction and fulfilment, in an alleged Higher Synthesis, of the conflicting interests reflected in the Agnosticism of Hamilton, in the Positivism of Comte, in the evolu- tional results of science, and even in the Theism of the traditional religious consciousness. The theist was to be shown right, in so far as he resisted the positivist by asserting the fact of an " Ultimate Real- ity"; for this was not only an "absolute datum of consciousness," but the unavoidable presupposition XX THE CONCEPTION OF GOD of the fact of evolution, which could only be ex- plained by "the reality of an Omnipresent Energy." The positivist, in his turn, was to be shown right, in so far as he maintained against the theist, theologi- cal or metaphysical, traditional or philosophical, the weighty discovery that all knowledge is necessarily relative to the constitution of the knowing subject, therefore cannot be the knowledge of any Ultimate Reality, nor of things as they are in themselves, but must be knowledge of phenomena only — of things as they appear to conscious experience, limited as this is by correlation with a specific nervous organ- ism. The agnostic, however, was to be shown the most comprehensively right of all : for his was the truth that embraced and harmonised the truth of the positivist and the truth of the theist, at once and together ; his was the immovable assurance of the fact of an Ultimate Reality, whose nature neverthe- less could only be stated as the " Unknowable," or as the Power present in all things, the Eternal Mys- tery immanent in all worlds ; his was the possession, too, of a boundless cosmos of phenomena, indefinitely receding into the mysterious recesses of the past, and unfolding by orderly evolution, ever more richly com- plex both in psychic and in physical intricacy, into the indefinite mystery of the future. Thus he was able, moreover, to meet the genuine demands of the religious consciousness, and to meet them supremely ; namely, by an Eternal Power immanent in the world, instead of by an anthropomorphic God transcendent of the world, — to meet them supremely, because religion, at its authentic base, was founded in Solemnity and INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR xxi Awe, and these had their only secure footing in the unfathomable and the mysterious — the omnipresence of the Omnipotent, from which none can escape, whose ways are past finding out. Thus, finally, — let it not be overlooked, — the belief of traditional religion in the Personality of God, in the self-con- scious purposive Wisdom and Love at the root of all things, was to disappear. Not, to be sure, in behalf of Materialism ; not in behalf of Atheism, taken as the dogmatic denial of God ; but in behalf of Agnos- ticism, the far subtler avoidance of a Personal Abso- lute, — an avoidance all the more plausible from its appeal to the impartiality which is of the essence of reason ; an appeal to the rational neutrality that would no more deny than it would assert God, would no more assert than it would deny the eternity of Matter, but with disciplined self-restraint would con- fine itself to the affirmation, declared alone defensible, of simply some Ultimate Reality, whose nature was impenetrable to our knowledge. Confronted as our human intelligence always is with the fact of our ignorance, and bred as the re- ligious thinking of that day had been in apologetics based on an agnostic philosophy such as Hamilton's ; impressed, too, as the general public was, religious and non-religious alike, with the steadfast march of natural science towards bringing all facts under the reign of physical law, — above all, under the law of evolution, — we need not wonder that this public was widely and deeply influenced by this philosophy. It is accessible to the general intelligence, and its evi- dences are impressive to minds unacquainted with the Xxii THE CONCEPTION OF GOD subtleties inseparable from the most searching thought, while its refutation unavoidably carries the thinker into the intricacies of dialectic that to the general mind are least inviting, or are even repellent. Since the diffusion of the doctrines of Darwin and Spencer, the more alert portion of the religious world has exhibited a busy haste to readjust its theo- logical conceptions to the new views. In fact, these efforts have been noticeable for their speed and adroitness rather than for their large or considerate judgment ; in their anxiety for harmony with the new, they have not seldom lost sight of the cardinal truths in the old. Memorable, unrivalled among them, was the proposal of Matthew Arnold, in the role of a devoted English Churchman, to replace the Personal God of "the religion in which we have been brought up,*' and in the name of saving this religion, by his now famous " Power, not ourselves, that makes for Righteousness " : a proposal which while sacri- ficing the very heart of the warrant for calling the religion Christian — the belief in the divine Person- ality — was put forward in the most evident good faith that it was Christian still, and in a form so eminent for literary excellence that it beyond doubt increased the spread of its agnostic views in the very act of satirising the " Unknowable," and preserved for the New Negation, in a lasting monument of English letters, the aesthetic charm which it added to the cause. Agnosticism thus became adult and adorned, and made its conquests. But it was to meet a mortal foe ; a foe, too, sprung from its own germinal stock. The Introduction by the editor xx ;jj successive stages of its growth, by the express declara- tion of their authors, all had their impulse in doctrines of Kant. Though their religious negations were con- nected with Kant by a more or less violent misinter- pretation of his philosophical method and aim, Kant's own way of dealing with what he called Theoretical as distinguished from Practical Reason was doubtless still largely responsible for these results, so erasive of Personality, in all its genuine characters, from the whole of existence. The counter-movement in thought was also founded on Kant, by another one-sided con- struction of his doctrines. For meanwhile, indeed during a whole generation prior to these negative movements in the English- speaking world and in France, there had followed Kant's thinking, in Kant's own fatherland, a succes- sion of systems deriving from his theoretical prin- ciples, and distinguished by the great names of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, each aiming to sur- mount the Agnosticism lurking in Kant's doctrine of knowledge. If Kant made the bold attempt to re- move religion beyond the reach of intellectual assault forever, by drawing around the intellect, under the depreciatory name of the Theoretical Reason, the boundary of restriction- to objects of sense ; if he thus left religion in the supposed impregnable seat of the Practical Reason, which alone dealt with super- sensible things, — with God, with Freedom, and with Immortality, — but dealt with them unassailably, as the very postulates of its own being and action ; and if to him this made religion, in all its several aspects of devotion, of aspiration, and of hope, the xxiv THE CONCEPTION OF GOD direct expression of human rational will : to all of his great successors, on the contrary, this rescuing of faith by identifying it with pure will, after depriv- ing it of all support from intelligence, seemed in fact the evaporation of freedom itself into a merely formal or nominal power, meaningless because void of intelligible contents ; and hence the method, so far from being the support, appeared to be simply the undermining of religion. So, in ways succes- sively developing an organic logic, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel set seriously about the task of bringing the entire conscious life, religion included, within the unbroken compass of knowledge. But as they all alike accepted one characteristic tenet of Kant's theory of knowledge, namely, that the possibility of knowledge is conditional upon its object's being embraced in the same "unity of consciousness" with its subject, they either had to confess God — for re- ligious consciousness the Supreme Object — unknow- able and unprovable (as Kant had maintained in his famous assault on the standard theoretical arguments for God's existence), or else had to say that God must henceforth be conceived as literally immanent in the world, not as strictly transcendent of it. God, as an intelligibly defensible Reality, thus appeared to be- come indisputably immanent in our human minds also : this, too, whether our minds were conceived, with Fichte, as having the physical world immanent in them ; or, with Schelling, as being embraced in Nature as component members of the Whole in- formed with God ; or, again, with Hegel, as standing over against the members of Nature, members in a INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR xxv correlated world of Mind, and implicated together with Nature in the consciousness of God, — compo- nents in that Consciousness, in fact, — items in the Divine Self-Expression unfolding from eternity to eternity. By this theory of a Divine Immanence, fulfilling the "Divine Omnipresence" of the tradi- tional faith, they aimed at once to convict Kant of construing God as a "thing in itself," — of the very fallacy of "transcendental illusion" which he had himself exposed in his Transcendental Dialectic, — and to refute his criticism, made in the same place, of the Ontological Proof for the existence of God. Drop, they said, this whole illusion of the " thing in itself," shown to be meaningless and therefore null, and God, human freedom, and human immortality would once more fall within the bounds of knowledge, since the being of God would become continuous with the being of man, the being of man with the being of God. The condition of this apparent victory for religion, however, as we must not fail to note, was the accept- ance of the Immanent God, the all-pervasive Intelli- gence ; precisely as later, in the system of Spencer, the solution of the tension between Positivism and agnostic Pietism was the acceptance of the Imma- nent Unknowable. But more worthy of note is the fact, that in the continuous dialectical development involved in the self-expression of the " Divine Idea," as this was worked out by Hegel, provision had been made, as if ready to hand, not only for the great law of evolution in the creation, but — of far greater sig- nificance — for its explanation by something more illu- XX VI THE CONCEPTION OF GOD mining than a "final inexplicability," — the utmost explanatory reach of the " Unknowable." These sketches of the historic thought lying di- rectly behind us, barest outline though they are, suffice to explain the issues in which we at this day are engaged. If the scientific doctrine of Evolution, taken with all its suggestions, has been to the religious conceptions inherited by our century the surpassing summons to prepare for a radical change ; and if to those friends of the deep things in the traditional faith who incline to hearken at the summons the Spencerian construction of evolution in terms of the "Unknowable" seems a revolution amounting to the abandonment of all religious conceptions worth human concern, — since it puts an end to the con- scious communion of the creature with a conscious Creator and Saviour, and in its depths unmistakably forebodes the eventual extinction of personal being from the universe, — if these things are so, then it is easy to understand how the idealistic conceptions of Kant's successors, especially in the form given to them by Hegel, should appeal as strongly as they have appealed, and are still appealing, to those who would preserve to their conviction the Personality of the Eternal, and all that this carries with it for religion. For this idealistic philosophy seems by one and the same stroke to assure them of God's reality, and to adjust his nature, and his way of existence, to their minds " as affected by modern knowledge." It assigns to him such an immanence in his works as explains evolution by presenting it as " continuous creation," and it gives, at last, what seems like a INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR xxv ii real meaning to the traditional dogma of his Omni- presence. In this light, the conflict existing in thought down to the present day, so far as it bears on religion, appears to lie between the conception of the Im- manent God and the conception of the Immanent Unknowable, — between a world-informing Person, whom it is supposed this idealistic Monism secures us, and a world-pervading Power, perpetually trans- forming its effects, which is all that the agnostic Monism leaves us. On this view, Monism would appear as if settled : there would only remain, as the reflecting world so far appears to think, a choice be- tween its two species. It was therefore with perti- nence that Mr. Balfour, in his Foundations of Belief, set these two systems, under the titles of " Natural- ism " and "Transcendental Idealism," in a contrast- ing agreement in lack, and, exposing some of their incurable defects, while assuming them to exhaust the possibilities of rational ingenuity, made this as- sumption the basis of his subtle and rather telling plea for a return to external authority, as the only foundation for religious stability. The day has assuredly gone by, however, when men, confessing there is no support for religion in reason, are will- ing to rest it on decrees and on might ; or, going M. de Voltaire one better in his cynicism, are " for the safety of society" not only willing to "invent a God," but are ready to enforce him. " When it comes to that," the minds of this generation surely would say, " it is time to give religion over, and to let God go." On the other hand, quite as surely, xx via THE CONCEPTION OF GOD multitudes of them are still of firm hope, and even of persuasion, that religion, in its highest historic meaning, is verifiable by reason. Their inheritance in aspirations after Immortality as the only field for exercising to the full their moral Freedom,— in longings after the reality of God, in which alone, as they see, have those aspirations any sure warrant, — this inheritance they are still confident will be shown valid at the bar of knowledge, will be vindicated as of the substance of reality itself, when once the nature of that reality gets stated as genuine intelligence sees it to be. They know the inheritance is worthless unless it has this certification by intelligence, but they are alert in the trust that the certification is there, and only waits to be shown. The hour has arrived, they are sure, for a higher philosophy, thoroughly Personal, which will prove itself Complete Idealism and Fulfilled Realism at one and the same time. It is on this ground, one now may repeat, that the existing interest in that form of Theism which culmi- nates in the school of Hegel can be explained. In this way, too, one can understand why this interest, in spite of interrupting pauses, has continued to grow since the day of its beginning, and why, coming into a religious medium more serious and stable when it took possession of the English-speaking mind, it has spread far more widely since the rise and growth of scientific evolution. At present, the way of thinking which engages this interest moves, in one form or another, side by side with the advancing spread of Spencerian thought, and appears more and more as INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR xx j x the reliance of those who would vindicate an eternal Person against the hostile theory of Agnosticism. That this spread of the conception of an Immanent God is a fact, affecting not only the world of techni- cal philosophy but also the world of applied theology and practical religion, it is enough to cite in evidence the writings and influence of the late Professor Green in England, of the brothers Caird in Scotland, of Professor Watson in Canada, and, in the United States, — besides its presence in various modified forms in the philosophical chairs at the leading universities, — the preaching of Phillips Brooks, the long and impressive philosophical industry of our National Commissioner of Education, the noticeable book of Professor Allen entitled The Continuity of Christian Thought, the recent public declaration of Dr. Strong, and the writings of Dr. Gordon, such as his Christ of To-day and his Immortality and the New Theodicy. Nor should one forget, in this connexion, the Bampton Lectures of 1893, by Mr. Upton. Ideal- istic Monism pervades the religious influence of all these minds, gives this its controlling tone, and tinges deeply the New Theology, as it is called, wherever this appears, — be it among Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Metho- dists, or Unitarians, or even among the progressive Romanists: one finds clear traces of it in the " liberal " theological seminaries in almost every denomination. A significant fact of the same order was the irenical essay of Mr. John Fiske, The Idea of God as affected by Modern Knowledge, with its extraordinary popular success. Here a professed XXX THE CONCEPTION OF GOD follower of Darwin and of Spencer undertook to in- terpret the Philosophy of Evolution so as to impart to the Immanent Power, the " Omnipresent Energy " of the evolutionist, a tinge of the Personal God, and to transfigure evolutional Agnosticism into Cosmic Theism. Of this, the pervading theme was the substitution of a "^wzj-z'-personal God immanent in the world " for the traditional " God remote from the world." Evolutionism joined forces with a semi- idealistic Monism, to extend the spread of the con- ception of a one and only Immanent Spirit. 1 But whatever religious advantages this form of Idealism may have, — in the way of displacing Ag- nosticism and of recovering an Absolute that shall be personal so far as regards possession of self-con- sciousness and intelligent purpose, — or even in the way of winning an assurance of something for the human Self that may excusably be called everlasting life, — there still remains to be settled a question of far graver import for religion and for human worth ; the question, namely, of Freedom, and of the moral responsibility and moral opportunity dependent on freedom. Can the reality of human free-agency, of moral responsibility and universal moral aspiration, of unlimited spiritual hope for every sold, — can this be made out, can it even be held, consistently with 1 The pervasion of pure literature by this fascinating theme must not be overlooked in recounting the causes of its present prevalence. It has filled, especially, almost the whole realm of Poetry, from the days of Goethe. The English poetry of the century is alive with it: Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, — it seems the ceaseless refrain of all their song. Nur, to turn to the essayists may we forget Carlyle ; nor, in his theistic moods, Emerson. INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR X XX1 the theory of an Immanent God? This, for a few awakened minds at least, now becomes the "burning question." It well may be, that, in their preoccupa- tion with the task of rescuing out of Agnosticism something absolutely real which they could also call a Person, these philosophical allies of religion have overlooked a lurking but fatal antagonism between their form of Idealism and the central soul of the traditional faith, the vital interests of man as man. At all events, the time has come when the question whether this is not so should be raised with all emphasis, and examined to the end. For if our genuine freedom is to disappear when we accept the religion whose God is the Immanent Spirit, then the new religion is in truth a decline from the highest conceptions of the historic faith, and in this regard has no advantage over the religion of the "Unknowable," — a religion which, not simply by the confession, but by the emphatic proclamation of its philosophical sponsor and its chief heralds, is based on the doctrine of hereditary necessitation, and from which personal freedom and moral oppor- tunity equal for all minds are cancelled entirely and finally. Our question, then, urgent for religion and for philosophy alike, is the one that must surely give character to the immediate future of both. As shown already, it is really the main question of the present book. If the discussion here printed has any signifi- cance for current thought, the significance lies in the fact that its centre of conflict is upon just this ques- tion. The problem of Freedom, the search into the xxxii THE CONCEPTION OF GOD meaning and the fact of Individual Reality and^ Real Individuality, has in the pressure of the unavoidable course of philosophy long been left in abeyance. One might almost say, with truth, that no effective argumentation upon it has appeared since the memo- rable reasonings of Jonathan Edwards carried, ap- parently, such disaster upon the cause of human free-will, — disaster that the wide-spread theory of the total explanation of man by cosmic evolution seems to deepen beyond reprieve. At any rate, one can securely say that nothing of crucial import has come forward in the interest of human freedom since Kant started the inspiring but hitherto little fruitful conception of moral autonomy. Instead, as we have seen, the world's thinking has been absorbed in ques- tions that thus far have ended in a persuasion of the immanence of the Eternal in all things, — at best, the all-pervasive presence of an Immanent Spirit. Is it possible, now, for Kant's kindling suggestion of our moral autonomy, so pregnant to the conscience dis- ciplined in the higher traditional religion, — is it pos- sible for this to be met by this monistic conception of the Absolute, even when this takes on its highest and most coherent, its most intelligible and most intellectual form in a monistic Idealism ? Professor Royce, in the pages ensuing, answers Yes, — with the proviso, however, that in answering there must be a critically discriminating knowledge of what moral autonomy in truth can mean ; and he devotes his Supplementary Essay to a searching analy- sis of (i)the conception of an absolute Unity of Self- Consciousness, which he argues is required for the INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR xxxiii reality of knowledge, and is essential to the knowledge of reality, (2) the conception of Individuality, and the Principle of Individuation, and (3) the conception of Moral Freedom, — all with the object of furnishing the philosophical proof that the answer Yes is the truth. Professor Howison, on the other hand, main- tains that the answer is unqualifiedly No ; and after considering everything advanced in the Supplement- ary Essay, he still holds to the answer. The significance, then, of the present discussion is that it enters the historical conflict in religious philoso- phy at just the crisis which has above been described. Professor Royce represents, in a fresh and subtly reasoned way, the Idealistic Monism which has now been explained as one of the main sides in that con- flict, and which he, in the pages that follow, himself explains with greater fulness and force. The Plural- istic Idealism which Professor Howison in opposition contends for, receives in the book no correspondingly detailed defence, analytic and affirmatively theoreti- cal. Professor Howison's contribution to the discus- sion is by the exigencies of the case chiefly critical and consequently negative. Its office must be re- garded as fulfilled, for the time being, if it has served the important purpose of challenging the Monism — especially the idealistic form of this — which so long has filled the philosophic and religious imagination, and which has received at the hands of Professor Royce a defence so detailed, so carefully organised, and so expressive. If it help, as its author ventures to hope it may, to serve the further object of directing philo- sophical discussion upon the field where the next XXXIV THE CONCEPTION OF GOD signal conflict in advancing thought is to occur, its suc- cess will be all that could be expected, with the present statement of its case. Its author would not have the reader suppose, however, that the complete Ideal- ism which maintains the mutually transcendent and still thoroughly knowable reality of God and souls is not, to his mind, supplied with a defence at least as organic as that which Idealistic Monism has here re- ceived. Nor would he have it assumed — as from the silence imposed on him by the limits of the volume it might perhaps be assumed — that he considers the account given by such Monism of the nature and the source of Personal Individuality, either conclusive, or sufficient, or correct, even when this account is expounded with the brilliant force given to it by Professor Royce. In his judgment, this intensely interesting problem requires an altogether different analysis, and has a profoundly different explanation, issuing directly in an idealistic Pluralism. He admits, of course, the pertinence of the claim that this analy- sis and explanation should be given. To be sure, the principles upon which he would found the defence of Personal Idealism, with its genuine Personal God, with its human Persons genuinely real because really free, have been plainly indicated in his article follow- ing ; even the course of reasoning has there been out- lined (sufficiently, he thinks, for its steps to be caught by those versed in philosophy), 1 by which he would expose and rectify that error of Kant's which he believes to be responsible for the Monistic Idealism that has indeed claimed, and with good credentials, 1 See pp. 123-127 below. INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR xxxv legitimate descent from Kant, but which, it is useful to remember, Kant himself expressly repudiated. But the matter in controversy, especially now that Professor Royce, with the aim of adjusting Idealistic Monism to the demands of our moral reason, has supplemented his philosophy by this new and striking inquiry into the Principle of Individuation and the nature of Indi- viduality, undoubtedly requires, somewhere, a sys- tematic presentation of the proofs for the opposing Pluralistic Idealism; especially is the solution which this affords of the riddle of Individuality demanded. Professor Howison therefore hopes to offer, in a sepa- rate writing, and at a date not too remote, a thorough affirmative treatment of the theory here only sug- gested. In this the questions here started will appear in their proper setting, in the system of philosophy to which they belong. One misapprehension of his position he feels it necessary to guard against ; particularly since Pro- fessor Royce himself, alert and exact thinker as he is, appears to have fallen into it. Professor Howison's point is not at all to set the moral consciousness, simply as a "categorical imperative," at odds with the theoretical, and merely have the " heart " breathe defiance to the "intellect" ; not that the spirit cannot do this, as Carlyle does in Sartor Resartus, but that doing it doesn't amount to philosophy. His position is by no means correctly apprehended as one side of " an antinomy between the claims of theory and the presuppositions of ethics." Ethics, for him as for Professor Royce, can have no valid presuppositions except such as find their place in xxxvi THE CONCEPTION OF GOD a totally coherent, totally embracing theoretical view. His position is that of a side in a controversy between two schemes of theory, one of which, as he still maintains, in full view of everything that has now been said in its favour, makes, and can make, no provision for that self-activity which the moral con- sciousness recognises as the crucial, though not in- deed the only factor in a moral order ; while the other aims to construe the moral consciousness itself as a part, and the intellectually organising part, of the theoretical whole. He therefore doesn't at all remain standing on the historical position of Kant merely, which made moral autonomy a thing not only " pri- mate " over the theoretical world, but utterly discon- nected with it. The way — a way wholly indirect, and therefore easily overlooked — by which the true and continuously significant autonomy of Conscience is to be shown, as the really integrating factor in the theoretical consciousness itself, — the way by which a genuine development of Kant's fundamental prin- ciples is to be effected, — has been clearly hinted at in Professor Howison's article, as already said. The full exhibition of this way — which involves the rediscussion, in the footsteps of Kant, of the entire problem of the conditions necessary and suffi- cient for natural science — ■ must await a later and a freer occasion. As for Professor Howison's associates in the criti- cism of Professor Royce, in their behalf it is only possible to enter here a simple caveat, as brief as may be. Professor Le Conte asks not even for that ; but he authorises the statement, that, much as Professor INTRODUCTION BY THE EDITOR xxxvii Royce's supplementary discussion has interested him, particularly its colouring of the Divine Consciousness with an aspect of Will under the form of Attention, he is not led, on the whole, to any withdrawal of his original criticisms of Professor Royce's system, nor, indeed, to any material modification of them ; in fact, that he comes out of the whole discussion, with its objections to his own system from all hands, without feeling that he must retract or materially alter the propositions which give it a distinguishing character. Its real value, whatever that may be, he would leave to a discerning public to decide. Neither does Professor Mezes feel that Professor Royce's formal reply to his criticisms requires him to withdraw them, or to modify their substance. He notes that Professor Royce makes to the first of these criticisms three distinct answers. As to the second of these answers, — about the responsibility of philoso- phy for principles of inference, — he desires the reader should observe that it proceeds upon a mis- apprehension of his meaning, and fails when this misapprehension is corrected. As to the first and the third, he would simply give notice that he replies by a counter-dissent, and is ready with his written defence of this. Regarding the reply to his second criticism, he quite agrees with Professor Royce that the " Eternal Now " is " simply not the temporal present," and believes the reader will find that his remarks about the "Eternal Now" really character- ise this as the " Absolute Moment." With reference, generally, to the questions raised in this second con- nexion, he brings forward suggestions upon the meta- XXXvili THE CONCEPTION OF GOD physical relations of Omniscience and Will that are curiously premonitory of the views set forth in Parts II, III, and IV of the Supplementary Essay. He adds, in substance, that if in Professor Royce's origi- nal argument the question were simply of proving real the conception of an Absolute, the objections he made would indeed fail of pertinence, but that they seem to hold unyieldingly when the conception is offered as the conception of God. He wishes it known, however, that with respect to this charge of deficiency in divine fulness he writes only in view of Professor Royce's original argument, his earlier books, and his direct reply to the objections, and without acquaintance with the remainder of the Sup- plementary Essay, — that is to say, with the body of it, — which he has not seen. 1 University of California, Berkeley, July 26, 1897. 1 The editor, for his part, feels much regret that the limits of the volume have forbidden the insertion of Professor Mezes's rejoinder in full. Its unavoidable length precluded its appearance as a whole, while the close articulation of its parts made impracticable any excerpts that would do it justice. It is to be hoped the public may see it else- where, and in a less restricted and more adequate form than its author was constrained to give it in his communication to the editor. THE CONCEPTION OF GOD AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE PHILOSOPHICAL UNION BY JOSIAH ROYCE, Ph.D. PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY THE CONCEPTION OF GOD ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE I cannot begin the discussion of this evening without heartily thanking first of all my friend the presiding officer, and then the members of the Philo- sophical Union, for the kindness which has given to me the wholly undeserved and the very manifold privi- leges which this occasion involves for the one whom your invitation authorises to lead the way in the dis- cussion. It is a privilege to meet again many dear friends. It is a great privilege to be able to bring with me to my old home, as I do, the warm academic greetings of Harvard to my Alma Mater. It is an uncommon opportunity to encounter in a discussion of this sort my honoured colleagues who are to-night of your company. And there is another privilege involved for me in this occasion, which I must not omit to mention. I come here as a former student, to express as well as I can, by means of my poor performance of the present academic task, my thanks to the teachers who guided me in undergraduate days. It is the simplest duty of piety to them to say how I rejoice to be able to see, in this way, those of them who are still here, and with us to-night. Nor can I forbear, in this brief word of personal confession, to express with what especial earnest- ness of gratitude I come to-night into the presence 3 4 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD of one of your number, and one of my former, teachers, whose lectures and whose counsel were to me, in my student days, especially a source of light, of guidance, and of inspiration. This teacher it was, I may say, who first set before me, in living presence, the ideal, still to me so remote, of the work of the thinker ; and whenever since, in my halting way, I have tried to think about central problems, I have remembered that ideal of my under- graduate days, — that light and guidance and inspi- ration, — and the beloved teacher too, whose living presence in those days meant the embodiment of all these things. It is a peculiar delight, ladies and gentlemen, — a wholly undeserved boon, — to have this opportunity to come face to face, in your pres- ence, with Professor Le Conte, and to talk with you, and with him, of questions that are indeed often called vexed questions, but that he first of all taught me to regard with the calmer piety and gentleness of the serious reason. GOD AS THE OMNISCIENT BEING, AND OMNISCIENCE AS ABSOLUTE UNITY OF THOUGHT AND EXPERIENCE I have been asked to address the Philosophical Union upon some aspects of the problem of Theism. During the past year the Union has been devoting a very kind attention to a volume entitled The Reli- gioits Aspect of PJiilosopliy, which I printed more than ten years ago. Were there time, I should be glad indeed if I were able to throw any direct light either ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 5 upon that little book or upon your own discussions of its arguments. But, as a fact, my time in your pres- ence is very short. The great problems of philosophy are pressing. I can do you more service on this occa- sion, if I devote myself to a somewhat independent confession of how the problems of philosophical The- ism look to me to-day, than I could do if I took up your time with an effort to expound or defend a text which, as I frankly confess, I have not read with any care or connectedness since I finished the proof-sheets of the book in question. A man may properly print a philosophical essay for several reasons, taken in combination ; namely, because he believes in it, and because he wants to get himself expressed, and, finally, because he wants to get freed from the acci- dents of just this train of thought. But, on the other hand, no philosophical student is ever persuaded of his opinions merely because he has formerly learned to believe them, or because he has once come to express them. The question for the philosophical student always is : How does the truth appear to me now, with the best reflection that I can at present give ? Past expression is therefore no substitute for present effort in philosophy. The very essence of philosophy is an unconcern for every kind of tradition, just in so far as it has become to the individual student mere tradition. For while the contents of any tradition may be as sacred as you please, the traditional form, as such, is the very opposite of the philosophical form. A tradition may be true ; but only a present and liv- ing insight can be philosophical. If this is the case with any tradition, — even a sacred tradition, — it is 6 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD above all the case with the very poor and perhaps, if you will, very profane sort of tradition that an indi- vidual student of philosophy may find in the shape of a past piece of his own writing. It is the death of your philosophising, if you come to believe any- thing merely because you have once maintained it. And therefore I am not unwilling to confess that, if I had to-night to pass an examination upon the text of my book, I might very possibly get an extremely poor mark. Let us lay aside, then, for a moment, both text and tradition, and come face to face with our philosophical problem itself. The Conception of God — this is our immediate topic. And I begin its consideration by saying that, to my mind, a really fruitful philosophical study of the conception of God is inseparable from an attempt to estimate what evidence there is for the existence of God. When one conceives of God, one does so be- cause one is interested, not in the bare definition of a purely logical or mathematical notion, but in the attempt to make out what sort of real world this is in which you and I live. If it is worth while even to speak of God before the forum of the philosophical reason, it is so because one hopes to be able, in a measure, to translate into articulate terms the central mystery of our existence, and to get some notion about what is at the heart of the world. Therefore, when to-night I speak of the conception of God, I mean to do so in the closest relation to a train of thought concerning the philosophical proof that this conception corresponds to some living Reality. It is useless in this region to define unless one wishes ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE y to show that, corresponding to the definition, there is a reality. And, on the other hand, the proof that one can offer for God's presence at the heart of the world constitutes also the best exposition that one can suggest regarding what one means by the con- ception of God. Yet, of course, some preliminary definition of what one has in mind when one uses the word " God " is of value, since our proof will then involve a develop- ment of the fuller meaning of just this preliminary definition. For this preliminary purpose, I propose to define, in advance, what we mean under the name " God," by means of using what tradition would call one of the Divine Attributes. I refer here to what has been called the attribute of Omniscience, or of the Divine Wisdom. By the word " God " I shall mean, then, in advance of any proof of God's existence, a I being who is conceived as possessing to the full all logically possible knowledge, insight, wisdom. Our ; problem, then, becomes at once this: Does there demonstrably exist an Omniscient Being ? or is the conception of an Omniscient Being, for all that we can say, a bare ideal of the human mind ? Why I choose this so-called attribute of Omniscience as constituting for the purposes of this argument the primary attribute of the Divine Being, students of philosophy — who remember, for instance, that the Aristotelian God, however his existence was proved, was defined by that thinker principally in terms of the attribute of Omniscience — will easily understand, and you, as members of this Union and readers of my former discussion, will perhaps especially com- 8 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD prehend. But, for the present, let this selection of the attribute of Omniscience, as giving us a prelimi- nary definition of God, appear, if you will, as just the arbitrary choice of this address. What we here need to see from the outset, however, is that this conceived attribute of Omniscience, if it were once regarded as expressing the nature of a real being, would involve as a consequence the concurrent presence, in such a being, of attributes that we could at pleasure ex- press under other names ; such, for instance, as what is rationally meant by Omnipotence, by Self-Conscious- ness, by Self-Possession — yes, I should unhesitat- ingly add, by Goodness, by Perfection, by Peace. For, consider for an instant what must be meant by Omniscience if one undertakes for a moment to view an Omniscient Being as real. An Omniscient Being would be one who simply found presented to him, not by virtue of fragmentary and gradually completed processes of inquiry, but by virtue of an all-embracing, direct, and transparent insight into his own truth, — who found thus pre- sented to bim, I say, the complete, the fulfilled answer to every genuinely rational question. Ob- serve the terms used. I say, the answer to every question. The words are familiar. Consider their meaning. We mortals question. To question in- volves thinking of possible facts, or of what one may call possible experiences, that are not now present to us. Thinking of these conceived or possible experi- ences that we do not now possess, we question in so far as we ask either what it would be to possess them, or whether the world is such that, under given ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE g conditions, these experiences that we think of when we question could be presented to us. In other words, to question means to have ideas of what is not now present, and to ask whether these ideas do express, or could express, what some experience would verify. I question, on the country road : " Is it four miles to the railway station, or more, or less ? " In this case I have ideas or thoughts about possible experiences not now present to me. I question in so far as I wonder whether these possible experiences, if I got them, — that is, if I walked or rode to yonder railway station and measured my way, ■ — would fulfil or verify one or another of these my various thoughts or ideas about the distance. To be limited to mere questions, then, — and here is the essential point about questioning, — involves a certain divorce be- tween your ideas and their objects, between facts conceived and facts directly experienced, between what you think about and what you regard as possi- bly to be presented to your direct experience. In this divorce of idea or thought and experience or fact, lies the essence of the state of mind of a being who merely questions. On the other hand, to answer to the full, and with direct insight, any question, means to get your ideas, just in so far as they turn out to be true ideas, ful- filled, confirmed, verified by your experiences. When with full and complete insight you answer a question, then you get into the direct presence of facts, of ex- periences, which you behold as the confirmation or fulfilment of certain ideas, as the verification of cer- -tain thoughts. Take your mere ideas, as such, alone IO THE CONCEPTION OF GOD by themselves, and you have to question whether or no they are true accounts of facts. Answer your questions, wholly for yourself, without intermediation, and then you have got your ideas, your thoughts, somehow into the presence of experienced facts. There are thus two factors or elements in completed and genuine knowing, namely : fact, or something experienced, on the one hand ; and mere idea, or pure thought about actual or possible experience, on the other hand. Divorce those two elements of knowledge, let the experienced fact, actual or possi- ble, be remote from the idea or thought about it, and then the being who merely thinks, questions, and, so far, can only question. His state is such that he wonders: Is my idea true? But let the divorce be completely overcome, and then the being who fully knows answers questions, in so far as he simply sees his ideas fulfilled in the facts of his experience, and beholds his experiences as the fulfilment of his ideas. Very well, then, an Omniscient Being is defined as one in whom these two factors of knowledge, so often divorced in us, are supposed to be fully and univer- sally joined. Such a being, I have said, would be- hold answered, in the facts present to his experience, all rational, all logically possible questions. That is, for him, all genuinely significant, all truly thinkable ideas would be seen as directly fulfilled, and fulfilled in his own experience. These two factors of his knowledge would, how- ever, still remain distinguishable. He would think, or have ideas, — richer ideas than our present frag- ments of thought, I need not say ; but he would ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE Ir think. And he would experience. That is, he would have, in perfect fulness, what we call feeling — a world of immediate data of consciousness, presented as facts. This his world of feeling, -of presented fact, would be richer than our fragments of scattered sensation, as I also need not say ; but he would ex- perience. Only, — herein lies the essence of his con- ceived Omniscience, — in him and for him these facts would not be, as they often are in us, merely felt, but they would be seen as fulfilling his ideas; as answering what, were he not omniscient, would be his mere questions. But now, in us, our ideas, our thoughts, our ques- tions, not merely concern what experienced facts might come to us through our senses, but also con- cern the value, the worth, the relations, the whole significance, ethical or sesthetic, of our particular ex- periences themselves. We ask : Shall I win success ? And the question implies the idea of an experience of success which we now have not. We ask : What ought I to do ? And the question involves the idea of an experience of doing, which we conceive as ful- filling the idea of right. Misfortune comes to us, and we ask : What means this horror of my frag- mentary experience ? — why did this happen to me ? The question involves the idea of an experience that, if present, would answer the question. Now such an experience, if it were present to us, would be an experience of a certain passing through pain to peace, of a certain winning of triumph through partial de- feat, of a certain far more exceeding weight of glory that would give even this fragmentary horror its 12 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD place in an experience of triumph and of self-posses- sion. In brief, every time we are weak, downcast, horror-stricken, alone with our sin, the victims of evil fortune or of our own baseness, we stand, as we all know, not only in presence of agonising fragmentary experiences, but in presence of besetting problems, which in fact constitute the very heart of our calam- ity. We are beset by questions to which we now get no answers. Those questions could only be an- swered, those bitter problems that pierce our hearts with the keen edge of doubt and of wonder, — when friends part, when lovers weep, when the lightning of fortune blasts our hopes, when remorse and failure make desolate the lonely hours of our private despair, — such questions, such problems, I say, could only be answered if the nickering ideas then present in the midst of our darkness shone steadily in the pres- ence of some world of superhuman experience, of which ours would then seem to be only the remote hint. Such superhuman experience might in its wholeness at once contain the answer to our ques- tions, and the triumph over — yes, and through — our fragmentary experience. But, as we are, we can only question. Well, then, — if the divorce of idea and experience characterises every form of our human consciousness of finitude, of weakness, of evil, of sin, of despair, — you see that Omniscience, involving, by definition, the complete and final fulfilment of idea in experience, the unity of thought and fact, the illumination of feel- ing by comprehension, would be an attribute implying, for the being who possessed it, much more than a ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 13 universally clear but absolutely passionless insight. An Omniscient Being could answer your bitter Why f when you mourn, with an experience that would not simply ignore your passion. For your passion, too, is a fact. It is experienced. The experience of the Omniscient Being would therefore include it. Only his insight, unlike yours, would comprehend it, and so would answer whatever is rational about your present question. This is what I mean by saying that the definition of God by means of the attribute of Omniscience would involve far more than the phrase " mere omniscience" at first easily suggests. As a fact, in order to have the attribute of Omniscience, a being would necessarily be conceived as essentially world- possessing, — as the source and principle of the uni- verse of truth, — not merely as an external observer of a world of foreign truth. As such, he would be conceived as omnipotent, and also in possession of just such experience as ideally ought to be ; in other words, as good and perfect. So much, then, for the mere preliminary definition. To this definition I should here add a word or two of more technical analysis. We mortals have an incom- plete experience. This means that the ideas awakened in us by our experience far transcend what we are now able to verify. We think, then, of actual or of possible experience that is not now ours. But an Omniscient Being would have no genuine or logically permissible ideas of any experience actually beyond his own or remote from his own. We express this by saying, technically, that an Omniscient Being would 14 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD possess an Absolute Experience; that is, a wholly complete or self-contained experience, not a mere part of some larger whole. Again, the Omniscient Being would be, as we have said, a thinker. But we, as thinkers, are limited, both in so far as there is possible thought not yet attained by us, and in so far as we often do not know what ones amongst our thoughts or ideas have a genuine meaning, or corre- spond to what an absolute experience would fulfil. But the Omniscient Being would not be thus/ limited as to his thinking. Accordingly, he would/ possess what we may call an Absolute Thought ; Ifhat is, a self-contained thought, sufficient unto itself, and need- ing no further comment, supplement, or correction. As the union of such an Absolute Thought and Ab- solute Experience, our Omniscient Being is technically to be named simply the Absolute ; that is, the being sufficient unto himself. Moreover, I should also say that the experience and thought of this being might be called completely or fully organised. For us, namely, facts come in a disjointed way, out of connex- ion ; and our thoughts, equally, seek a connexion which they do not now possess. An Omniscient Being would have to have present to himself all the conceivable relations amongst facts, so that in his world nothing would be fragmentary, disunited, con- fused, unrelated. To the question : What is the connexion of this and this in the world ? the Omni- scient Being would simply always find present the fulfilled answer. His experience, then, would form one whole. There would be endless variety in this whole, but the whole, as such, would fulfil an all- ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 15 embracing unity, a single system of ideas. This is what I mean by calling his Experience, as we here conceive it, an absolutely organised experience, his Thought an absolutely organised thought. And now our question returns. We have defined the Omniscient Being. The question is : Does such a being exist ? We turn from the ideal to the hard fact that we mortals find ourselves very ignorant beings. What can such as we are hope to know of the Absolute? II FIRST DEFINITION OF HUMAN IGNORANCE, APPARENTLY EXCLUDING KNOWLEDGE OF REALITY Yes, the vast extent of our human ignorance, the limitations of our finite knowledge, — these great facts, so familiar to the present generation, confront us at the outset of every inquiry into our knowledge about God, or about any absolute issue. So little am I disposed to neglect these great facts of our limitation, that, as perhaps you will remember from the book that you studied, philosophy seems to me, primarily, to be as much the theory of human igno- rance as it is the theory of human knowledge. In fact, it is a small thing to say that man is ignorant. It is a great thing to undertake to comprehend the essence, the form, the implications, the meaning, of human ignorance. Let us make a beginning in this task as we approach the problem of Theism. For my thesis to-night will be that the very nature of human ignorance is such that you cannot conceive iQ THE CONCEPTION OF GOD or define it apart from the assertion that there is, in truth, at the heart of the world, an Absolute and Universal Intelligence, for which thought and experi- ence, so divided in us, are in complete and harmoni- ous unity. "Man is ignorant," says one, — "ignorant of the true nature of reality. He knows that in the world there is something real, but he does not know what this reality is. The Ultimate Reality can therefore be defined, from our human point of view, as something unknowable." Here is a thesis nowadays often and plausibly maintained. Let me remind you of one or two of the customary arguments for this thesis — a thesis which, for us on this occasion, shall constitute a sort of first attempt at a definition of the nature of our human ignorance. All that we know or can know, so the defenders of this thesis assert, must first be indicated to us through our experience. Without experience, without the ele- ment of brute fact thrust upon us in immediate feel- ing, there is no knowledge. Now, so far, as I must at once assure you, I absolutely accept this view. This is true, and there is no escape from the fact. Apart from — that is, in divorce from — experience there is no knowledge. And we can come to know only what experience has first indicated to us. I willingly insist that philosophy and life must join hands in asserting this truth. The whole problem of our knowledge, whether of Nature, of man, or of God, may be condensed into the one question : What does our experience indicate ? But, to be sure, experience, as it first comes to us mortals, is not yet insight. ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 17 Feeling is not yet truth. The problem : What does our experience indicate ? implies in its very wording that the indication is not the result. And between the indication and the truth that experience indicates there actually lies the whole travail of the most ab- struse science. But the partisans of our present thesis continue their parable thus : This being true, — experience being the life-blood of our human knowledge, — it is a fact that our human experience is determined by our peculiar organisation. In particular, the specific energies of our sensory nerves determine our whole experience of the physical world. The visual centres get affected from without in such wise only that sensations of light accompany their excitement. The auditory centres respond to sensory disturbance in such wise only that we hear sounds. The physical fact beyond us never gets directly represented in our mental state ; for between the physical fact and our experience of its presence lie the complex conditions that give our sensations their whole specific character. And what is true of our sensations is true of the rest of our experience. As it comes to us, this experi- ence is our specific and mental way of responding to the stimulations which reality gives us. This whole specific way therefore represents, not the true nature of outer reality, so much as the current states of our own organisations. Were the outer reality, as it exists not for our senses but in itself, to be utterly altered, still our experience, so long as one supposed our organisation itself somehow to survive in a relatively unchanged form, might retain very many of its pres- r 8 the conception of god ent characters — so many, in fact, that we need not necessarily suspect the metaphysical vastness of the change. On the other hand, if even a very slight cause, such as the inhaling of a little nitrous oxide or chloroform, chances to alter some essential process in the organisation upon which our specific sort of experience depends, then at once our whole immedi- ate experience undergoes a vast change, and it is as if our world came to an end, and a new world began. Yet the metaphysically real alteration of the universe in such a case may be almost inappreciable. Thus, then, our experience changes with the cur- rent states of our own organisations, rather than reveals the reality beyond ; and this reality beyond, as it is in itself, remains unknowable. So far, the well-known and popular argument for agnosticism as to every form of absolute truth. Ill HIGHER DEFINITION OF HUMAN IGNORANCE, VINDICAT- ING A KNOWLEDGE OF REALITY This first definition of the nature of our ignorance is a very familiar one in the present day. It is a definition that contains, but also, as I must add, con- ceals, a great deal of truth. I do not know how many times or in how many forms you may meet with it in current literature. You often seem to be meeting it everywhere. I regard it, however, as a statement of a truth in a form so confused as to be almost useless, without revision. And first, let me ask, when one thus laments our ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 19 ignorance of the supposed Absolute Reality, what it is that he desires as his unattainable goal, when he thus laments. You cannot rationally say " I lack," without being properly called upon to define, in some intelligible terms, what you suppose yourself to be lacking. And I know not how the present question can be answered, unless thus : That which man now \ lacks, in so far as he is ignorant of the Absolute Reality, is logically definable as a possible, but to us unattainable, sort of experience ; namely, precisely an experience of what reality is. And I lay stress upon this view, in order simply to point out that our ignorance of reality cannot mean an ignorance of some object that we can conceive as existing apart from any possible experience or knowledge of what it is. What you and I lack, when we lament our human ignorance, is simply a certain desirable and logically possible state of mind, or type of experience ; to wit, a state of mind in which we should wisely be able to say that we had fulfilled in experience what we now have merely in idea, namely, the knowledge, the immediate and felt presence, of what we now call the Absolute Reality. Let us remember, then, this first simple insight : That our ignorance of the Absolute Reality can mean only that there is some sort of possible experience, some state of mind, that you and I want, but that we do not now possess. And next let us proceed to ask why it is that the foregoing popular argument for our human ignorance has seemed to us so convincing, — as it usually does seem. Why is it that when men say : " You are confined to your sensations, and your 20 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD sensations never reveal to you the external physical realities as they are in themselves," this argument seems so crushing, this exposure of our human fallibility so impressive ? To this question I answer, that, as a fact, the argu- ment just stated from the physiology of the senses convinces us of our human fallibility and ignorance so persuasively, only because, in the concrete appli- cation of this argument, we actually first assume that we have a real knowledge, not, to be sure, of ulti- mate truth, but of a truth known to us through a higher experience than that of our senses ; namely, the experience of that very science of the physiology of the senses which is relied upon to prove our total ignorance. When compared with this assumed higher form of indirect experience, or scientific knowledge, the direct experience of the senses does indeed seem ignorant and fallible enough. For the foregoing argument depends upon the supposition that we do know very well what we mean by the physical states of our organisms, and by the physical events outside of us. And the thesis involved is, in this aspect, simply the doctrine that any given group of sensa- tions, e.g. those of colour, of temperature, or of odour, are inadequate indications of the otherwise known or knowable physical properties of the bodies that affect us when we see or feel or smell in their pres- ence. On this side, then, I insist, the doctrine that our sensory experience is dependent upon the physi- cal states of our organism is a doctrine expressive, not of our ignorance of any Absolute Reality (or Ding an sick), but of our knowledge of a phenomenal ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 2 I world. We happen to know, or at all events to believe that we know, concerning what our experi- ence reveals and our science analyses, viz., concern- ing the so-called physical world, so much, that we can actually prove the inadequacy of our current sensa- tions to reveal directly, or to present to us, physical truths that our science otherwise, and more indi- rectly, well makes out. The relatively indirect expe- rience of science can and does correct the existent and unconquerable momentary ignorance of our senses. Indirect insight proves to be better, in some ways, than immediate feeling. • To use Professor James's more familiar terminology, we declare that we know about the physical world more than we can ever grasp by direct acquaintance witli our sensa- tions. And so, now, it is because we are supposed to know these things about the so-called reality, that we are aware of the limitations of our passing expe- riences. Thus viewed, the present statement of our limitations appears to be merely a correction of our narrower experience by the organised experience of our race and of our science. It tells us that we are ignorant, in one region of our experience, of what a wider experience, indirectly acquired, reveals to us. The physiology of the senses, then, rightly viewed, does not assert that all our human experience is vainly subjective, including the very type of experi- ence upon which the sciences themselves are founded. What science says is simply that there is a sort of indirect and organised experience which reveals more of phenomenal truth than can ever be revealed to our direct sensory states as these pass by. But our popu- 22 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD lar doctrine of the Unknowable Reality uses this so- called " verdict of science " only by confounding it with a totally different assertion. The "verdict of science" is that organised experience indicates much phenomenal truth that the senses can never directly catch. The doctrine of the Unknowable Reality asserts that no human experience can attain any gen- uine truth, and then appeals to that aforesaid "ver- dict " to prove this result. But the sciences judge the ignorance of sense by comparing it with a know- ledge conceived to be actually attained ; namely, the knowledge of certain indirectly known physical phe- nomena as they really are, not to be sure as absolute realities, but as the objects of our organised physical experience. You surely cannot use the proposition that organised experience is wiser than passing experi- ence, to prove that no experience can give us any true wisdom. IV IGNORANCE DEFINED AS UNORGANISED EXPERIENCE, AND AS IMPLYING AN EXPERIENCE ABSOLUTELY ORGANISED Yet I said, a moment ago, that this popular con- ception of the nature of our human ignorance con- tains — or, rather, conceals — much truth. And this notion of the relative failure of every sort of merely immediate experience to reveal a truth at which it kindly hints, is a very instructive notion. Only, we plainly need to try a second time to define the nature of human ignorance, in terms of this very contrast ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROVCE 23 between a lower and a higher sort of experience. Let us begin anew our analysis of this same signifi- cant problem of the nature and limits of knowledge. The fortune of our empirical science has been, that as we men have wrought together upon the data of our senses, we have gradually woven a vast web of what we call relatively connected, united, or organ- ised knowledge. It is of this world, in its contrast with the world of our sensations, that I have just been speaking. Now, as we have just seen, this organised knowledge has a very curious relation to our more direct experience. In the first place, wher- ever this organised knowledge seems best developed, we find it undertaking to deal with a world of truth, of so-called reality, or at least of apparent truth and reality, which is very remote from the actual sensory data that any man of us has ever beheld. Our or- ganised science, as many have pointed out ever since Plato's first naive but permanently important obser- vations upon this topic, deals very largely with con- ceived — with ideal — realities, that transcend actual human observation. Atoms, ether-waves, geological periods, processes of evolution, — these, are to-day some of the most important constituents of our con- ceived phenomenal universe. Spatial relations, far more exactly describable than they are directly veri- fiable, mathematical formulae that express again the exactly describable aspects of vast physical processes of change, — such are the topics with which our exacter science is most immediately concerned. In whose sensory experience are such objects and rela- tionships at all directly pictured ? The ideal world 24 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD of Plato, the product of a more elementary sort of infant science, was made up of simpler contents than these ; but still, when thus viewed, our science does indeed seem as if absorbed in the contemplation of a world of pure, — yes, I repeat, of Platonic ideas. For such realities get directly presented to no man's senses. But of course, on the other hand, we no sooner try to define the work of our science in these terms than we are afresh reminded that this realm of pure Pla- tonic ideas would be a mere world of fantastic shad- ows if we had not good reason to say that these ideas, these laws, these principles, these ideal objects of science, remote as they seem from our momentary sensory experiences, still have a real and, in the end, a verifiable relation to actual experience. One uses the scientific conceptions because, as one says, one can verify their reality. And to verify must mean to confirm in sensory terms. Only, to be sure, such verification always has to be for us men an extremely indirect one. The conceived realities of constructive science, — atoms, molecules, ether-waves, geological periods, processes of change whose type is embodied in mathematical formulae, — these are never directly presented to any moment of our verifying sensory experience. But nevertheless we say that science does verify these conceptions ; for science computes that if they are true, then, under given conditions, particular sensory experiences, of a predictable char- acter, will occur in somebody's individual experience. Such predictions trained observers can and do suc- cessfully undertake to verify. The verification is ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 25 itself, indeed, no direct acquaintance with the so- called realities that the aforesaid Platonic ideas de- fine. But it appears to involve an indirect knowledge about such realities. Yet our direct experience, as it actually comes, remains at best but a heap of fragments. And when one says that our science reduces our experience to order, one is still talking in relatively ideal terms. For our science does not in the least succeed in effectively reducing this chaos of our finite sensory life to any directly presented orderly wholeness. For think, I beg you, of what our concrete human experience is, as it actually comes, even at its best. Here we are all only too much alike. The sensory experience of a scientific man is, on the whole, nearly as full of immediately experienced disorder and fragmentariness as is that of his fellow the lay- man. For the scientific student too, the dust of the moment flies, and this dust often fills his eyes, and blinds him with its whirl of chance almost as much as it torments his neighbour who knows no Platonic ideas. I insist: Science throughout makes use of the contrast between this flying experience which we have, and which we call an experience of unreality, and the ideal experience, the higher sort of organised experience which we have not, and which we call an experience of reality. Upon this contrast the whole confession of our human ignorance depends. Let us still dwell a little on this contrast. Remember how full of mere chance the experience of nearly every moment seems to be ; and that, too, even in a laboratory; much more, in a day's walk or in a lecture-room. The 26 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD wind that sighs; the cart or the carriage that rumbles by; yonder dress or paper that rustles; the chair or boot that squeaks ; the twinge that one suddenly feels ; the confusions of our associative mental pro- cess, "fancy unto fancy linking" ; the accidents that filled to-day's newspapers, — of such stuff, I beg you to notice, our immediate experience is naturally made up. The isolating devices of the laboratory, the nightly silence of the lonely observatory, the narrowness of the microscopic field, and, best of all, the control of a fixed and well-trained attention, often greatly diminish, but simply cannot annul, the disorder of this outer and inner chaos. But, on the other hand, all such efforts to secure order rest on the presupposition that this disorder means fragmentariness — random selection from a world of data that our science aims to view indirectly as a world of orderly experience. But even such relative reduction of the chaos as we get never lasts long and continuously in the life of any one person. Your moments of unfragmentary and more scientific experience fill of themselves only fragments of your life. A wandering attention, the interruption of intruding sensations, ■ — such frag- ments may at any time be ready, by their intrusion, to destroy the orderliness of even the best-equipped scientific experience. The student of science, like other men, knows in fragments, and prophesies in fragments. But — and here we come again in sight of our goal — the world of truth that he wants to know is a world where that which is in part is to be taken away. He calls that the world of an organised experience. But he sees that world as through a ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 2 J glass, — darkly. He has to ignore his and our ignorance whenever he speaks of such a world as if it were the actual object of any human experience whatever. As a fact, direct human experience, apart from the elaborately devised indirect contrivances of conceptual thought, knows nothing of it. But let us sum up the situation now before us. It is the very situation that our first statement of human ignorance as dependent on our organisation tried to define. We now define afresh. All our actual sensory experience comes in passing moments, and is fragmentary. Our science, wherever it has taken any form, contrasts with this immediate fragmentari- ness of our experience the assertion of a world of phenomenal truth, which is first of all characterised by the fact that for us it is a conceptual world, and not a world directly experienced by any one of us. Yet this ideal world is not an arbitrary world. It is/ linked to our actual experience by the fact that its! conceptions are accounts, as exact as may be, of sys| terns of possible experience, whose contents woulc be presented, in a certain form and order, to beings whom we conceive as including our fragmentary moments in some sort of definite unity of experience That these scientific accounts of this world of organ- ised experience are true, at least in a measure, we are said to verify, in so far as, first, we predict that, if they are true, certain other fragmentary phenomena will get presented to us under certain definable con- ditions, and in so far as, secondly, we successfully proceed to fulfil such predictions. Thus all of our knowledge of natural truth depends upon contrasting 2 8 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD our actually fragmentary and stubbornly chaotic in- dividual and momentary experience with a conceived world of organised experience, inclusive of all our fragments, but reduced in its wholeness to some sort of all-embracing unity. The contents and ob- jects of this unified experience, we discover first by means of hypotheses as to what these contents and objects are, and then by means of verifications which depend upon a successful retranslation of our hypotheses as to organised experience into terms which our fragmentary experience can, under certain conditions, once more fulfil. If, however, this is the work of all our science, then the conception of our human ignorance easily gets a provisional restatement. You are ignorant, in so far as you desire a knowledge that you cannot now get. Now, the knowledge you desire is, from our present point of view, no longer any knowledge of a reality foreign to all possible experience ; but it is an adequate knowledge of the contents and the objects of a certain conceived or ideal sort of experi- ence, called by you organised experience. And an organised experience would be one that found a system of ideas fulfilled in and by its facts. This sort of knowledge, you, as human being, can only define indirectly, tentatively, slowly, fallibly. And you get at it thus imperf ectly, — why ? Because your immediate experience, as it comes, is always fleeting, fragmentary. This is the sort of direct knower that you are, — a being who can of himself verify only fragments. But you can conceive infi- nitely more than you can directly verify. In thought ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 2 Q you therefore construct conceptions which start, indeed, in your fragmentary experience, but which transcend it infinitely, and which so do inevitably run into danger of becoming mere shadows — pure Platonic ideas. But you don't mean your concep- tions to remain thus shadowy. By the devices of hypothesis, prediction, and verification, you seek to link anew the concept and the presentation, the ideal order and the stubborn chaos, the conceived truth and the immediate datum, the contents of the organ- ised experience and the fragments of your momentary flight of sensations. In so far as you succeed in this effort, you say that you have science. In so far as you are always, in presented experience, limited to your chaos, you admit that your sensations are of subjective moment and often delude you. But in so far as your conceptions of the contents of the ideal organised experience get verified, you say that you acquire the aforesaid indirect knowledge of the contents of the ideal and organised experience. We men know all things through contrasts. It is the contrast of your supposed indirect knowledge oi the contents of the ideal organised experience with your direct and actual, but fragmentary, passing! experience, that enables you to confess your igno-l ranee. Were you merely ignorant, you could not know the fact. Because you are indirectly assured of the truth of an insight that you cannot directly share, you accuse your direct experience of illusory fragmentariness. But in so doing you contrast the contents of your individual experience, not with any mere reality apart from any possible experience, but 3 o THE CONCEPTION OF GOD with the conceived object of an ideal organised expe- rience — an object conceived to be present to that experience as directly as your sensory experiences are present to you. V REALITY AND EXPERIENCE AS CORRELATIVE CONCEPTIONS In the light of such considerations, our notion of the infinitely remote goal of human knowledge gets a transformation of a sort very familiar to all students of philosophical Idealism. And this transformation relates to two aspects of our conception of knowledge, viz. : first, to our notion of what reality is, and secondly to our notion of what we mean by that Organised Experience. In the first place, the reality that we seek to know has always to be defined as that which either is or would be present to a sort of experience which we ideally define as an organised — that is, a united and transparently reasonable — experience. We have, in point of fact, no concep- tion of reality capable of definition except this one. In case of an ordinary illusion of the senses we often say : This object seems thus or so ; but in reality it is tints. Now, here the seeming is opposed to the reality only in so far as the chance experience of one point of view gets contrasted with what would be, or might be, experienced from some larger, more ration- ally permanent, or more inclusive and uniting point of view. Just so, the temperature of the room seems ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 31 to a fevered patient to vary thus or thus ; but the real temperature remains all the while nearly con- stant. Here the seeming is the content of the pa- tient's momentary experience. The real temperature is a fact that either is, or conceivably might be, present to a larger, a more organised and scientific and united experience, such as his physician may come nearer than himself to possessing. The sun seems to rise and set ; but in reality the earth turns on its axis. Here the apparent movement of the sun is somewhat indirectly presented to a narrow sort of human experience. A wider experience, say an ex- perience defined from an extra-terrestrial point of view, would have presented to it the earth's rota- tion as immediately as we now can get the sunrise presented to us. To conceive any human belief as false — say, the belief of a lunatic, a fanatic, a phi- losopher, or a theologian — is to conceive this opin- ion as either possibly or actually corrected from some higher point of view, to which a larger whole of experience is considered as present. Passing to the limit in this direction, we can accord- ingly say that by the absolute reality we can only mean either that which is present to an absolutely organised experience inclusive of all possible experi- ence, or that which would be presented as the con- tent of such an experience if there were one. If there concretely is such an absolute experience, then there concretely is such a reality present to it. If the absolute experience, however, remains to the end barely possible, then the concept of reality must be tainted by the same bare possibility. But the two 32 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD concepts are strictly correlated. To conceive, for in- stance, absolute reality as containing no God, means simply that an absolutely all-embracing experience, if there were one, would find nothing Divine in the world. To assert that all human experience is illu- sory, is to say that an absolutely inclusive experience, if there were one, would have present, as part of its content, something involving the utter failure of our experience to attain that absolute content as such. To conceive that absolute reality consists of material atoms and ether, is to say that a complete experience of the universe would find presented to it nothing but experiences analogous to those that we have when we talk of matter in motion. In short, one must be serious with this concept of experience. Reality, as opposed to illusion, means simply an actual or possible content of experience, not in so far as this experience is supposed to be transient and fleeting, but in so far as it is conceived to be some- how inclusive and organised, the fulfilment of a sys- tem of ideas, the answer to a scheme of rational questions. It remains, however, to analyse the other member of our related pair of terms, viz. : the conception of this organised sort of experience itself. In what sense can there be any meaning or truth about this conception ? ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 33 VI ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPTION ABSOLUTE EXPERI- ENCE : MEANING OF ITS REALITY The conception of organised experience, in the limited and relative form in which the special sci- ences possess it, is unquestionably through and through a conception that for us men, as we are, has a social origin. No man, if isolated, could devel- ope the sort of thoughtfulness that would lead him to appeal from experience as it comes to him to experience as it ideally ought to come, or would come, to him in case he could widely organise a whole world of experience in clear relation to a single system of conceptions. Man begins his intelligent life by imitatively appealing to his fellow's experi- ence. The life-blood of science is distrust of indi- vidual belief as such. A common definition of a relatively organised experience is, the consensus of the competent observers. Deeper than our belief in any physical truth is our common-sense assurance that the experience of our fellows is as genuine as our own, is in actual relation to our own, has present to it objects identical with those that we ourselves experience, and consequently supplements our own. Apart from our social consciousness, I myself should hold that we men, growing up as we do, can come to have no clear conception of truth, nor any definite power clearly to think at all. Every man verifies for himself. But what he verifies, — the truth that he believes himself to be making out when he verifies, 34 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD — this he conceives as a truth either actually or pos- sibly verifiable by his fellow or by some still more organised sort of experience. And it becomes for him a concrete truth, and not a merely conceived possibility, precisely so far as he believes that his fellow or some other concrete mind does verify it. My fellow's experience, however, thus supplements my own in two senses ; namely, as actual and as pos- sible experience. First, in so far as I am a social being, I take my fellow's experience to be as live and real an experience as is mine. In appealing to the consensus of other men's experiences, I am so far appealing to what I regard as a real experience other than my own momentary experience, and not as a merely pos- sible experience. But in this sense, to be sure, human experience is not precisely an organised whole. Other men experience in passing moments, just as I do. Their consensus, in so far as it is reached, is no one whole of organised experience at all. But, on the other hand, the fact of the con- sensus of the various experiences of men, so far as such consensus appears to have been reached, sug- gests to our conception an ideal — the ideal of an experience which should be not only manifold but united, not only possessed of chance agreements but reduced to an all-embracing connectedness. As a fact, this ideal is the one constantly used by anyone who talks of the "verdict of science." This signifi- cant, whole, and connected experience remains, to us mortals, a conceived ideal, — always sought, never present. The ultimate question is : Is this concep- tion a mere ideal ? — or does it stand for a genuine ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 35 sort of concrete experience ? The social origin of the conception, as we mortals have come to get it, suggests in an ambiguous way both alternatives. The experience to which, as a social being, I first appeal when I learn to talk of truth, is the live actual experience of other men, which I, as an imita- tive being, primarily long to share, and which I therefore naturally regard as in many respects the norm for my experience. In society, in so far as I am plastic, my primary feeling is that I ought, on the whole, to experience what the other men experi- ence. But in the course of more thoughtful mental growth, we have come to appeal from what the vari- ous men do experience to what they all ought to experience, or would experience if their experiences were in unity ; that is, if all their moments were linked expressions of one universal meaning which was present to one Universal Subject, of whose insight their own experiences were but fragments. Such an ideally united experience, if it could but absolutely define its own contents, would know real- ity. And by reality we mean merely the contents that would be present to such an ideal unity of expe- rience. But now, on this side, the conception of the ideally organised experience does indeed at first look like a mere ideal of a barely possible unity. The problem still is : Is this unity more than a bare pos- sibility ? Has it any such concrete genuineness as the life of our fellows is believed to possess ? Observe, however, that our question : Is there any such real unity of organised experience ? is precisely equivalent to the question : Is there, not as a mere 36 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD possibility, but as a genuine truth, any reality ? The question: Is there an absolutely organised experi- ence? is equivalent to the question: Is there an absolute reality? You cannot first say: There is a reality now unknown to us mortals, and then go on to ask whether there is an experience to which such reality is presented. The terms " reality " and " or- ganised experience " are correlative terms. The one can only be defined as the object, the content, of the other. Drop either, and the other vanishes. Make one a bare ideal, and the other becomes equally such. If the organised experience is a bare and ideal possi- bility, then the reality is a mere seeming. If what I ought to experience, and should experience were I not ignorant, remains only a possibility, then there is no absolute reality, but only possibility, in the uni- verse, apart from your passing feelings and mine. Our actual issue, then, is : Does a real world ulti- mately exist at all ? If it does, then it exists as the object of some sort of concretely actual organised experience, of the general type which our science indirectly and ideally defines, only of this type carried to its absolute limit of completeness. The answer to the ultimate question now before us — the question: Is there an absolutely organised experience ? — is suggested by two very significant considerations. Of these two considerations, the first runs as follows : The alternative to saying that there is such a real unity of experience is the assertion that such a unity is a bare and ideal possibility. But, now, there can be no such thing as a merely possible truth, definable ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 37 apart from some actual experience. To say : So and so is possible, is to say : There is, somewhere in ex- perience, an actuality some aspect of which can be denned in terms of this possibility. A possibility is a truth expressed in terms of a proposition beginning with if, or a hypothetical proposition, — an is ex- pressed in terms of an if. But every hypothetical proposition involves a categorical proposition. Every if implies an is. For you cannot define a truth as concretely true unless you define it as really present to some experience. Thus, for instance, I can easily define my actual experience by expressing some aspect of it in the form of a supposition, even if the supposition be one contrary to fact, but I cannot believe in the truth of such a supposition without believing in some concrete and experienced fact. The suitor asks for the daughter. The father re- plies : "I will give thee my daughter if thou canst touch heaven." Here the father expresses his actu- ally experienced intention in the form of a hypotheti- cal proposition each member of which he believes to be false. The suitor cannot touch heaven, and is not to get the gift of the daughter. Yet the hypothetical proposition is to be true. Why ? Because it expresses in terms of an if what the father experiences in terms of an is, namely, the obdurate inner will of the for- bidding parent himself. Just so with any if proposi- tion. Its members, antecedent and consequent, may be false. But it is true only in case there corresponds to its fashion of assertion some real experience. And now, to apply this thought to our central problem : You and I, whenever we talk of reality as 3 8 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD opposed to mere seeming, assert of necessity, as has just been shown, that if there were an organised unity of experience, this organised experience would have present to it as part of its content the fact whose reality we assert. This proposition cannot, as a merely hypothetical proposition, have any real truth unless to its asserted possibility there corre- sponds some actual experience, present somewhere in the world, not of barely possible, but of concretely actual experience. And this is the first of our two considerations. In fine, if there is an actual experi- ence to which an absolute reality corresponds, then you can indeed translate this actuality into the terms of bare possibility. But unless there is such an act- ual experience, the bare possibility expresses no truth. - J The second consideration appears when we ask our finite experience whereabouts, in its limited cir- cle, is in any wise even suggested the actually ex- perienced fact of which that hypothetical proposition relating to the ideal or absolute experience is the expression. What in finite experience suggests the truth that if there were an absolute experience it would find a certain unity of facts ? VII PROOF OF THE REALITY OF AN ABSOLUTE EXPERIENCE To the foregoing question, my answer is this : Any finite experience either regards itself as suggesting some sort of truth, or does not so resrard itself. If . ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 39 it does not regard itself as suggesting truth, it con- cerns us not here. Enough, one who thinks, who aims at truth, who means to know anything, is re- garding his experience as suggesting truth. Now, to regard our experience as suggesting truth is, as we have seen, to mean that our experience indicates what a higher or inclusive, i.e. a more organised, ex- perience would find presented thus or thus to itself. It is this meaning, this intent, this aim, this will to find in the moment the indication of what a higher experience directly grasps, — it is this that embodies for us the fact of which our hypothetical proposition aforesaid is the expression. But you may here say : " This aim, this will, is all. As a fact, you and I aim at the absolute experience ; that is what we mean by wanting to know absolute truth ; but the absolute experience," so you may insist, "is just a mere ideal. There need be no such experience as a concrete act- uality. The aim, the intent, is the known fact. The rest is silence, — perhaps error. Perhaps there is no absolute truth, no ideally united and unfragmentary experience." But hereupon one turns upon you with the inevi- table dialectic of our problem itself. Grant hypo- thetically, if you choose, for a mosiient, that there is no universal experience as a concrete fact, but only the hope of it, the definition of it, the will to win it, the groaning and travail of the whole of finite experi- ence in the search for it, in the error of believing that it is. Well, what will that mean ? This ultimate limitation, this finally imprisoned finitude, this abso- lute fragmentariness and error, of the actual experi- 4 o THE CONCEPTION- OF GOD ence that aims at the absolute experience when there is no absolute experience at which to aim, — this ab- solute finiteness and erroneousness of the real experi- ence, I say, will itself be a fact, a truth, a reality, and, as such, just the absolute truth. But this sup- posed ultimate truth will exist for whose experience ? For the finite experience ? No, for although our finite experience knows itself to be limited, still, just in so far as it is finite, it cannot know that there is no unity beyond its fragmentariness. For if any experience actually knew (that is, actually experienced) itself to be the whole of experience, it would have to experi- ence how and why it were so. And if it knew this, it would be ipso facto an absolute, i.e. a completely self-possessed, experience, for which there was no truth that was not, as such, a datum, — no ideal of a beyond that was not, as such, judged by the facts to be meaningless, — no thought to which a presen- tation did not correspond, no presentation whose real- ity was not luminous to its comprehending thought. Only such an absolute experience could say with as- surance : " Beyond my world there is no further ex- perience actual." But if, by hypothesis, there is to be no such an experience, but only a limited collec- tion of finite experiences, the question returns: The reality of this final limitation, the existence of no ex- perience beyond the broken mass of finite fragments, — this is to be a truth, — but for whose experience is it to be a truth ? Plainly, in the supposed case, it will be a truth nowhere presented — a truth for no- body. But, as we saw before, to assert any absolute reality as real is simply to assert an experience — and, ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE ^j in fact, just in so far as the reality is absolute, an absolute experience — for which this reality exists. To assert a truth as more than possible is to assert the concrete reality of an experience that knows this truth. Hence, — and here, indeed, is the conclusion of the whole matter, — the very effort hypothetically to assert that the whole world of experience is a world of fragmentary and finite experience is an effort involving a contradiction. Experience must constitute, in its entirety, one self-determined and consequently absolute and organised whole. Otherwise put : All concrete or genuine, and not barely possible truth is, as such, a truth somewhere experienced. This is the inevitable result of the view with which we started when we said that with- out experience there is no knowledge. For truth is, so far as it is knotvn. Now, this proposition applies as well to the totality of the world of finite experi- ence as it does to the parts of that world. There must, then, be an experience to which is present the constitution {i.e. the actual limitation and narrow- ness) of all finite experience, just as surely as there is such a constitution. That there is nothing at all beyond this limited constitution must, as a fact, be present to this final experience. But this fact that the world of finite experience has no experience beyond it could not be present, as a fact, to any but an absolute experience which knew all that is or that genuinely can be known ; and the proposition that a totality of finite experience could exist without there being any absolute experience, thus proves to be simply self-contradictory. j 2 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD VIII SUMMARY OF THE WHOLE ARGUMENT FOR THE REALITY OF THE OMNISCIENT Let us sum up, in a few words, our whole argu- ment. There is, for us as we are, experience. Our thought undertakes the interpretation of this ex- perience. Every intelligent interpretation of an experience involves, however, the appeal from this experienced fragment to some more organised whole of experience, in whose unity this fragment is con- ceived as finding its organic place. To talk of any reality which this fragmentary experience indicates, is to conceive this reality as the content of the more organised experience. To assert that there is any absolutely real fact indicated by our experience, is to regard this reality as presented to an absolutely organised experience, in which every fragment finds its place. So far, indeed, in speaking of reality and an abso- lute experience, one talks of mere conceptual objects, — one deals, as the mathematical sciences do, with what appear to be only shadowy Platonic ideas. The question arises : Do these Platonic ideas of the abso- lute reality, and of the absolutely organised experi- ence, stand for anything but merely ideal or possible entities ? The right answer to this question comes, if one first assumes, for argument's sake, that such answer is negative, and that there is no organised, but only a fragmentary experience. For then one has to define the alternative that is to be opposed to ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 43 the supposedly erroneous conception of an absolute experience. That alternative, as pointed out, is a world of fragmentary experiences, whose limited nature is not determined by any all-pervading idea. Such a world of finite experiences is to be merely what it happens to be, — is to contain only what chances here or there to be felt. But hereupon arises the question : What reality has this fact of the limitation and fragmentariness of the actual world of experiences? If every reality has to exist just in so far as there is experience of its existence, then the determination of the world of experience to be this world and no other, the fact that reality contains no other facts than these, is, as the supposed final real- ity, itself the object of one experience, for which the fragmentariness of the finite world appears as a pre- sented and absolute fact, beyond which no reality is to be viewed as even genuinely possible. For this final experience, the conception of any possible expe- rience beyond is known as an ungrounded concep- tion, as an actual impossibility. But so, this final) experience is by hypothesis forthwith defined as One/ as all-inclusive, as determined by nothing beyond itself, as assured of the complete fulfilment of ita own ideas concerning what is, — in brief, it becomes] an absolute experience. The very effort to deny anf absolute experience involves, then, the actual asserf tion of such an absolute experience. Our result, then, is : There is an Absolute Experi-i ence, for which the conception of an absolute reality, i.e. the conception of a system of ideal truth, is fulfilled by the very contents that get presented to this Ex- 44 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD perience. This Absolute Experience is related to our experience as an organic whole to its own fragments. /It is an experience which finds fulfilled all that I the completest thought can rationally conceive as [genuinely possible. Herein lies its definition as an ' Absolute. . For the Absolute Experience, as for ours, there are data, contents, facts. But these data, these contents, express, for the Absolute Experience, its own meaning, its thought, its ideas. Contents beyond these that it possesses, the Absolute Experience knows to be, in genuine truth, impossible. Hence its contents are indeed particular, — a selection from the world of bare or merely conceptual possibilities, — but they form a self-determined whole, than which nothing completer, more organic, more fulfilled, more transparent, or more complete in meaning, is concretely or genuinely possible. On the other hand, these contents are not foreign to those of our finite experience, but are in- clusive of them in the unity of one life. IX THIS CONCEPTION OF GOD IN ITS RELATIONS TO HIS- TORIC PHILOSOPHY AND FAITH The conception now reached I regard as the philo- sophical conception of God. Some of you may observe that in the foregoing account I have often, in defining the Absolute, made use of the terms lately employed by Mr. Bradley, 1 rather than of the 1 F. H. Bradley : Appearance and Reality. London : Swan Son- nenschein & Co., 1893. ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 45 terms used in either of my two published discussions of the topic, i.e. either in the book that you have been studying or in my Spirit of Modem Philosophy. Such variation of the terms employed involves indeed an enrichment, but certainly no essential change in the conception. The argument here used is essentially the same as the one before employed. You can cer- tainly, and, as I still hold, quite properly, define the Absolute as Thought. But then you mean, as in my * J ■!■■! HWlfcH Hi Il I II __J J 'J book I explicitly showed, a thought that is no longer, like ours in the exact sciences, concerned with the shadowy Platonic ideas, viewed as conceptional possi- bilities, but a thought that sees its own fulfilment in the world of its self-possessed life, — in other words, a thought whose Ideas are not mere shadows, but have an aspect in which they are felt as well as meant, appreciated as well as described, — yes, I should un- hesitatingly say, loved as well as conceived, willed as well as viewed. Suchjm Absolute Thought you can also call, in its wholeness, a Self ; for it beholds the fulfilment of its own thinking, and views the deter- mined character of its living experience as identical with what its universal conceptions mean. All these names: "Absolute Self," "Absolute Thought," "Ab- solute Experience," are not, indeed, mere indifferent names for the inexpressible truth ; but, when carefully defined through the very process of their construc- tion, they are equally valuable expressions of different aspects of the same truth. God is known as Thought fulfilled ; as Experience absolutely organised, so as to have one ideal unity of meaning ; as Truth transparent to itself ; as Life in absolute accordance with idea ; 46 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD as Selfhood eternally obtained. And all this the Absolute is in concrete unity, not in mere variety. Yet our purpose here is not religious but specula- tive. It is not mine to-night to declare the glory of the Divine Being, but simply to scrutinise the defini- tion of the Absolute. The heart of my whole argu- ment, here as in my book, has been the insistence that all these seemingly so transcendent and impru- dent speculations about the Absolute are, as a fact, the mere effort to express, as coherently as may be, the commonplace implications of our very human ignorance itself. People think it very modest to say : We cannot know what the Absolute Reality is. They forget that to make this assertion implies — unless one is using idle words without sense — that one knows what the term " Absolute Reality " means. People think it easy to say : We can be sure of only what our own finite experience presents. They forget that if a world of finite experience exists at all, this world must have a consistently definable constitution, in order that it may exist. Its constitu- tion, however, turns out to be such that an Absolute Experience — namely, an experience acquainted with limitation only in so far as this limitation is deter- mined by the organised and transparent constitution of this experience — is needed as that for which the fragmentary constitution of the finite world of expe- rience exists. The very watchword, then, of our whole doctrine is this : All knowledge is of some- thing experienced. For this" means that nothing actually exists save what is somewhere experienced. If this be true, then the total limitation, the deter- ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 47 mination, the fragmentariness, the ignorance, the error, — yes (as forms or cases of ignorance and error), the evil, the pain, the horror, the longing, the travail, the faith, the devotion, the endless flight from its own worthlessness, — that constitutes the very essence of the world of finite experience, is, as a positive reality, somewhere so experienced in its wholeness that this entire constitution of the finite appears as a world beyond which, in its whole con- stitution, nothing exists or can exist. But, for such an experience, this constitution of the finite is a fact determined from an absolute point of view, and every finite incompleteness and struggle appears as a part of a whole in whose wholeness the fragments find their true place, the ideas their realisation, the seek- ing its fulfilment, and our whole life its truth, and so its eternal rest, — that peace which transcends the storms of its agony and its restlessness. For this agony and restlessness are the very embodiment of an incomplete experience, of a finite ignorance. Do you ask, then : Where in our human world does God get revealed? — what manifests his glory? I answer : Our ignorance, our fallibility, our imper- fection, and so, as forms of this ignorance and im- perfection, our experience of longing, of strife, of pain, of error, — yes, of whatever, as finite, declares that its truth lies in its limitation, and so lies beyond itself. These things, wherein we taste the bitterness of our finitude, are what they are because they mean more than they contain, imply what is beyond them, refuse to exist by themselves, and, at the very mo- ment of confessing their own fragmentary falsity, 4 8 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD assure us of the reality of that fulfilment which is the life of God. The conception of God thus reached offers itself to you, not as destroying, but as fulfilling, the large collection of slowly evolving notions that have ap- peared in the course of history in connection with the name of God. The foregoing definition of God as an Absolute Experience transparently fulfilling a system of or- ganised ideas, is, as you all doubtless are aware, in essence identical with the conception first reached, but very faintly and briefly developed, by Aristotle. Another definition of God, as the Absolute (or Per- fect) Reality, long struggled in the history of specula- tion with this idea of God as Fulfilled Thought, or as Self-possessed Experience. The interrelation of these two central definitions has long occupied philo- sophical thinking. Their rational identification is the work of recent speculation. The all-powerful and righteous World-Creator of the Old and New Testaments was first conceived, not speculatively, but ethically ; and it is to the rich experience of Christian mysticism that the historical honour belongs, of having bridged the gulf that seemed to separate, and that to many minds still separates, the God of practical faith from the God of philosophical defini- tion. Mysticism is not philosophy; but, as a stage of human experience, it is the link that binds the contemplative to the practical in the history of re- ligion, since the saints have taken refuge in it, and the philosophers have endeavoured to emerge from its mysteries to the light of clearer insight. To ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 49 St. Thomas Aquinas belongs the credit of the first explicit and fully developed synthesis of the Aris- totelian and the Christian conception of God. The Thomistic proofs of God's existence — repeated, di- luted, and thus often rendered very trivial, by popu- lar apologetic writers — have now, at best, lost much of their speculative interest. But the conception of the Divine that St. Thomas reached remains in certain important respects central, and in essence identical, I think, with the definition that I have here tried to repeat ; and that, too, despite the paradoxes and the errors involved in the traditional concept of the creation of the world. For the rest, let me in closing be perfectly frank with you. I myself am one of those students whom a more modern and radical scepticism has, indeed, put in general very much out of sympathy with many of what seem to me the unessential accidents of reli- gious tradition as represented in the historical faith ; and for such students this scepticism has transformed, in many ways, our methods of defining our relation to truth. But this scepticism has not thrown even the most radical of us, if we are enlightened, out of a close, a rational, a spiritually intelligent relation to those deep ideas that, despite all these accidents, have moulded the heart of the history of religion. In brief, then, the foregoing conception of God under- takes to be distinctly theistic, and not pantheistic. It is not the conception of any Unconscious Reality, into which finite beings are absorbed ; nor of a Universal Substance, in whose law our ethical inde- pendence is lost; nor of an Ineffable Mystery, which 5o THE CONCEPTION OF GOD we can only silently adore. On the contrary, every ethical predicate that the highest religious faith of the past has attributed to God is capable of exact interpretation in terms of our present view. For my own part, then, while I wish to be no slave of any tradition, I am certainly disposed to insist that what the faith of our fathers has genuinely meant by God, is, despite all the blindness and all the unessential accidents of religious tradition, identical with the inevitable outcome of a reflective philosophy. II WORTH AND GOODNESS AS MARKS OF THE ABSOLUTE A CRITICISM OF PROFESSOR ROYCE'S ARGUMENT BY SIDNEY EDWARD MEZES, Ph.D. PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS WORTH AND GOODNESS AS MARKS OF THE ABSOLUTE CRITICISM BY PROFESSOR MEZES Not unworthy of note, in the exercises of this evening, is the fact that nearly all the participants have stood to each other in the relation of teacher and pupil. Only a few years ago, the meeting of such persons in a public discussion would have been nearly impossible ; or, at all events, the key-note of the meeting would most probably have been an en- tirely genuine and yet somewhat monotonous agree- ment. But a frank independence of thought is the informing spirit of modern teaching in this country. Teachers care comparatively little to have students agree with them, but insist very strongly that they shall think out their own thoughts for them- selves. Students are not merely informed of old solutions. They are rather trained and encouraged ' to think out new solutions, on the chance that the new may supplement some of the imperfections of the old. Some modern teachers even carry this so far as positively to distrust such students as agree with them. Now, Professor Royce is a typical modern teacher; and, indeed, in what I have just said, I am doing little more than repeat what I have often heard him say to his classes. For a long time, as I will now confess, it was desperately difficult to 53 54 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD disagree with him and yet seem to oneself at all rea- sonable. ,For he has a way of mounting his facts in a setting of stringent logic, and of driving home his conclusions with the persuasive power of a finished rhetoric. • But by dint of long and strenuous effort to look at things for myself, I have succeeded in meet- ing his requirement that I should disagree with him, and I have some hope of persuading you, and possi- bly Professor Royce too, that my disagreements are solidly founded. But of that you shall now judge. NO WORTH AND DIGNITY PROVED OF THE ABSOLUTE In considering Professor Royce's position, as out- lined in the address we have just heard, I shall limit myself to two criticisms. My first, in a word, is this : I cannot agree with the Professor that the Being whose existence, as I freely admit, he has fully established, has been proved by him to be a being possessing worth and dignity. When he says, that, under pain of self-contradiction, we must assert that an Ultimate Being exists, that he is fully conscious, that his experience is organised, or, what amounts to the same thing, that within his experience there are to be found no unanswered questions and no unsat- isfied desires, I find the reasoning compulsory, in- evitable. A confusion, an unanswered problem, a thwarted desire, in order to be such, holds in solution its own clarification, answer, or satisfaction, as the case may be. All this Professor Royce has ex- CRITICISM BY PROFESSOR MEZES 55 pounded at some length, far more convincingly than I can, and I need not repeat it. But what I miss is, his promised proof that there is a real being worthy of the exalted name of God. The difficulty I experience with his view may be stated in the form of a question : How does he find out what facts, what problems, confront the Absolute ? To this question, the answer is not far to seek. Professor Royce accepts such facts and problems at the hands of current belief and science. That we all do the same, and must do so, is of course true, as a few words would make clear. But the important ques- tion, to be considered presently, is : Upon how many facts, thus attained, does philosophy, or rather Pro- fessor Royce's philosophy, set its stamp of approval ? At the present moment, my words, possibly a few thoughts and problems suggested by them, and what we feel and see, are the only facts directly present to us ; and, as you will readily admit, the other moments of our lives are just about as meagrely supplied with directly verified data. That vast sum-totals of facts have existed in past ages, and that others are exist- ing now in the distant stretches of space, we all confidently believe ; but, observe, only on indirect evidence. We get at absent facts by means of mem- ory, sympathetic thinking of the thoughts of others, and reasoning founded on these two, combined with personal observation. The existence of such a fact as the Crocker Building, we now get at by memory ; we get to know the experiences and beliefs of our friends, acquaintances, and scientific co-workers who 56 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD verify our results, largely by sympathetic thought; while the scientific historian reconstructs the Napole- onic period by very elaborate processes of reasoning and observation. And so we project idea after idea out of the present into the past, the distant, and the future, holding each to be a fact there, gradually peopling our previously empty world, and extending its bounds in thought till we come to believe in the complicated immensity of the universe of reality. But observe, once more, that all except the meagre present is reached indirectly, i.e. by means of infer- ences. These inferences no doubt are justifiable, as we all most certainly believe ; but my present point is, that they must be justified; that nothing can be held to be a part of the inclusive experience of the Absolute until its existence is fully proven. Now, it is not the business of philosophy to prove the exist- ence of individual facts ; but, on the other hand, 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 di- rectly observed. Further, it is a commonplace of philosophy, that the principle of Causality is the supreme principle of the kind just described. Ac- cordingly, wherever Professor Royce holds this prin- ciple to have validity, just there, and nowhere else, can he seek for the items of fact to set in the experi- ence of the Absolute. Now, as readers of his second book, The Spirit of Modem Philosophy, will remem- ber, he holds that the principle of Causality is true in the outer world of our senses and of natural science, but is not true in the world of inner experiences, nor CRITICISM BY PROFESSOR MEZES 57 in inferences from the former to the latter and vice versa ; and, so far as I know, he nowhere offers any other principle to justify such inferences, though he has a theory of their origin. Let us now remind ourselves, once again, that our fellow-beings' inner experiences are among the facts never directly presented to us. When a man speaks to us, we hear his words, but merely infer his thoughts ; when another cries out or writhes in pain, we hear the cry or see the writhing, but the pain, once more, is only inferred. And in like manner, aspira- tion, hope, doubt, despair, — the whole of the inner life of others, is reached indirectly only. Add to this, that his inner life completely exhausts and fath- oms what we mean by our fellow-being, and we see that in failing to offer any principle that justifies in- ferences from observed facts to inner experiences Professor Royce fails to give any philosophic reason for belief in the existence of our fellow-beings. Let us suppose, now, that the outer or physical universe, in which according to Professor Royce the principle of Causality does obtain, — and whose facts are there- fore attainable, — let us suppose, for argument's sake, that its reality is not destroyed by the philosophic annihilation of other beings. What sum-total of firmly established facts is left over to us ? At best, the whole outer world and so much inner experience as the present moment affords. Just now you can at the utmost assert — and all assertion is in some now — that Reality is composed of so much outer fact as science establishes, plus your present feelings, thoughts, puzzles, and aspirations. 58 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD And now let us consider the experience-contents of that sort of Absolute whose existence Professor Royce has proved. These consist, once more, of the outer world of science, of your present feelings, thoughts, puzzles, and aspirations, and, in addition, of the answers to your present puzzles and the satis- faction of your present aspirations. Now, a being with such an experience, as I should maintain, is not deeply spiritual. His experience consists of a vast physical universe with its myriads of mechanically whirling atoms, and, tucked away in one corner, the least bit of spiritual life, which, to be sure, has its questions answered and its desires gratified. My only contention, observe, is that unless the gaps I have pointed out in Professor Royce's argu- ment are filled, we are left with the slightly spiritual Ultimate Being I have just described. I maintain that Professor Royce's two books and his address of to-night do not justify us in introducing any more spirituality into the experience of the Inclusive Self. I do not maintain, of course, that he has in reserve no considerations capable of establishing a larger measure of spirituality; still less do I contend that no such considerations exist. On the contrary, I very firmly believe that there are facts at our dis- posal which will give philosophical justification for the assertion of the completest conceivable spiritual- ity of the Ultimate Being, conceived of in the terms so clearly outlined in this evening's address. CRITICISM BY PROFESSOR MEZES 59 II ABSOLUTENESS NOT SHOWN COMPATIBLE WITH GOODNESS Passing now to my second point, let us recall what Professor Royce said about the attributes of the Su- preme Being; or, rather, let us recollect two of those attributes. I refer to Absoluteness and Goodness. In calling God the Absolute, we mean that he is quite complete — is a rounded whole; has, so to speak, no ragged edges, no internal gaps. Sleep is a chasm in each day of our lives ; while, from time to time, we have gaps of unconsciousness. Again, if we try to tear our lives from their setting in the world, we find that the line that bounds them is jagged and broken throughout. At times one feels that his life is ex- haustively summed up in relations to other lives, and that what is left over when those bonds are snapped is too poor to be worth saving. Not so the Absolute. His life is completely finished, rounded and whole, and has no relations to any beyond. And now I will ask you to look at this attribute of Absolute- ness or Completeness under the conception of time. For, temporally speaking, Completeness is eternal existence. According to Professor Royce, as readers of his books will readily remember, the whole universe is present to the Supreme Being in one moment, and that moment is eternal. There is for the Supreme Being nothing whatever in the least analogous to what we call the past and the future. What occurred yesterday in 60 THE CONCEPTION OE GOD your experience or in mine, what will occur to-morrow for us, or for any other human being whatever, is just as really, vitally, vividly, distinctly present to God as the gentlemen now sitting on this platform are to you at the present moment. And in all eternity this is, for God, true of all facts, whether called by its past, present, or future. It is as if all of us were cylinders, with their ends removed, moving through the waters of some placid lake. To the cylinders the zvater seems to move, — what has passed is a memory, what is to come is doubtful. But the lake knows that all the water is equally real, and that, in fact, it is quiet, unruffled, immovable. Speaking technically, time is no reality ; things seem past and future, and, in a sense, non-existent to us, but in fact they are just as genuinely real as the present is. Is Julius Cassar dead and turned to clay ? No doubt he is. But in reality he is also alive, he is conquering Spain, Gaul, Greece, and Egypt. He is leading the Roman legions into Britain, and dominating the envious Senate, just as truly as he is dead and turned to clay, — just as truly as you hear the words I am now speaking. Every reality is eternally real ; pastness and futurity are merely illusions. You look into a stereoscope, and two flat cards variously shaded ap- pear to be a large city spread out before your eyes. But that seeming city is not a fact. The two cards variously shaded are the reality. Babylon and Tyre, on the other hand, seem unreal to us ; but those cities are real, and the throb of life pulses through the veins of their citizens, even now, just as truly and strongly as it does through yours. I do not know how many CRITICISM BY PROFESSOR MEZES gj of you have caught this view, — this idea of the eternal existence of everything real ; but those of you who have, will bear me out that it is perfectly comprehensible, realisable, natural. The illusory un- reality of pastness and futurity is an entirely reason- able doctrine ; and I have dwelt on it only in order to contrast with it another sense of the word "eternal," also necessary if it is to be synonymous with Com- pleteness as expounded by Professor Royce. For there are two senses essential to the notion of Eternity, if it is to be synonymous with the notion of Complete- ness. In the sense already developed, it contradicts the notion of time in asserting that past or future experience is as real as present experience. In the second sense, it also contradicts the notion of time, in a way that will presently appear. And now, if you will kindly give me your very sharp attention for a minute or two, I will try to develope this second sense quite plainly. I will do so by showing that, though past and future coexist, time has not been entirely done away with ; the full mean- ing of Eternity, and therefore of Completeness, has not been attained. Even if past and future are equally real with the present and with each other, does it follow that there is no distinction between the past and the future ? Does it follow that what we call the completion of a process is in no wise different from what we call its beginning ? To put it some- what graphically, could we begin at the end of a sym- phony, play the notes backwards, and get the same results as if we had begun at the beginning and played them forwards? Of course, the same facts g 2 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD would be there in the former case as in the latter, and we have already maintained that first and last and intermediate notes are to be coexistent. The first do not cease to exist, the next come into existence, ceas- ing in turn, and giving place to those that follow. They all exist at once ; that has been admitted. The question I am now considering is the possibility of reversing any significant process without utterly de- stroying its significance ; or, if reversing be too strong a word, the possibility of conceiving any whole of facts that appear to us as a succession quite indifferently as regards their order, — backwards quite as truly as forwards. Ordinarily, you see, we view the end as if it were the product of the beginning. The facts are looked upon as having a true order, from A to Z, say, while the order from Z to A is declared unreal. Now, if we are right in maintaining that in some true sense the movement of things is in one direction, we have not done away with time entirely. The full meaning of Eternity is not attained. We still admit a difference between past and future. This difference is not one of existence; it is not that the past no longer is, and the future is not yet. Both past and future most really are , and yet, if our ordinary view is correct, the past is not the same as the future. But suppose our ordinary view is not correct ; what is the penalty for its incorrectness ? I answer, in a word, it is death to all significance. The world, as a whole, is emptied of. meaning : art is no longer real ; morality ceases to be. For morality is victory achieved over temptation, and not temptation follow- ing upon victory. Temptation does succeed to victory CRITICISM BY PROFESSOR MEZES 63 in our experience, but the growth of temptation out of victory is not morality. The very life of morality is toil, struggle, achievement ; we must overcome difficul- ties ; the stream of morality must rise higher than its source. Take progress away, and you destroy moral- ity. This, after all, is very obvious, nor would I be understood to say that Professor Royce denies this. On the contrary, he is at considerable pains to assert and illustrate it. He maintains that the Supreme Being is moral for the very reason that he hates and conquers immorality. He maintains that evolution gives a truer view of reality than does descriptive science, for the reason that evolution asserts progress, apprehends the significance of progress, reads the beginning in the light of the end, would, as a com- pleted doctrine (which it is not), uphold what Mr. John Fiske might call Cosmic Morality. But I vent- ure to suggest that Goodness requires progress, and of the whole. That there is progress in bits of the Inclusive Self, Professor Royce does maintain ; but if the Inclusive Self is to be moral, he must be in his totality progressive. The zvhole of him must advancq without limitation towards some goal. If the universe is moral, it points in one direction ; it has grown from a germ, budded out more and more widely, grown ever higher, at no time fully satisfied, ever striving onwards and upwards. But once admit movement in one direction, and all the antinomies — all the antago- nistic contradictions — of time are upon us with undi- minished force. The arbitrariness inherent in both beginning and end is not diminished by their coexist- ence. No real beginning or end can be rationally 64 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD established ; for whatever one we may hit upon as real, the problem Why this rather than another? must always, as Lord Bacon would say, be left abrupt. What I venture to suggest, as you will now see, is that the attribute of Goodness demands progress, growth ; and that progress, even though past and future coexist, comes into collision with Complete- ness, because of the inherent arbitrariness of begin- ning and ending, of germ and fruition. If this position is well taken, either one or the other attri- bute, either Goodness or Completeness, as Professor Royce conceives Completeness, must be abandoned. I am far from saying that there is no possible way of so conceiving Completeness that it shall be in har- mony with Goodness ; nor would I even imply that Professor Royce may not have in reserve some mode of proving the existence of a Complete Reality that would avoid a conflict between its Completeness and its Goodness. What I halt at, is simply the mode of proof that he has actually employed, to-night as well as in his book. Upon that, it certainly seems to me that the Completeness established is quite destitute of consistency with Goodness. Ill GOD, AND CONNECTED PROBLEMS, IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION WITH REMARKS ON PROFESSOR ROYCE'S VIEWS BY JOSEPH LE CONTE, MD, LL.D. PROFESSOR OF GEOLOGY AND NATURAL HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA GOD, AND CONNECTED PROBLEMS, IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION REMARKS BY PROFESSOR LE CONTE I can only admire, not criticise, the subtle method of Professor Royce in reaching the conclusion of the Personal Existence of God. I have my own way of reaching the same conclusion, but in comparison it is a rough and ready way. His is from the point of view of the philosopher ; mine, from that of the sci- entist. I am not saying that his is not the best and most satisfactory, but only that it is a different way. He has given you his ; I now give you, very briefly, mine — as I have been accustomed to give it. Suppose, then, I could remove the brain-cap of one of you, and expose the brain in active work, — as it doubtless is at this moment. Suppose, further, that my senses were absolutely perfect, so that I could see everything that was going on there. What should I see ? Only decompositions and recomposi- tions, molecular agitations and vibrations ; in a word, pliysical phenomena, and nothing else. There is ab- solutely nothing else there to see. But you, the sub- ject of this experiment, what do you perceive ? You see nothing of all this; you perceive an entirely differ- ent set of phenomena, viz., consciousness, — thought, emotion, will; psycJiical phenomena; in a word, a self, 67 68 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 2l person. From the outside we see only physical, from the inside only psychical phenomena. Now take external Nature — the Cosmos — ■ instead of the brain. The observer from the outside sees, and can see, only physical phenomena ; there is ab- solutely nothing else there to see. But must there not be in this case also, on the other side, psychical phenomena — consciousness, thought, emotion, will? — in a word, a Self, a Person? There is only one place in the whole world where we can get behind physical phenomena — behind the veil of matter; viz., in our own brain; and we find there — a self, a person. Is it not reasonable to think that if we could get behind the veil of Nature we should find the same, i.e. a Person ? But if so, we must conclude, an Infi- nite Person, and therefore the only Complete Per- sonality that exists. Perfect personality is not only self-conscious but self-existent. Our personalities are self-conscious, indeed, but not self-existent. They are only imperfect images, and, as it were, separated fragments of the Infinite Personality — God. So much for my habitual preference, as contrasted with Professor Royce's, in the matter of proving God to exist; and there seem to be differences between us on other matters too, though perhaps these are more apparent than real. For instance : Professor Royce accounts it best to state the essential nature of God in terms of Omni- science, and with this my customary preference of thinking would hardly seem to accord. For Profes- sor Royce, God is Thought ; conscious, indeed, but REMARKS BY PROFESSOR LE CONTE 6g passive, powerless, passionless Thought; Omni- science alone is fundamental, and all else flows from that. And yet I cannot but think that the difference between us here is more apparent than real. For example, when he denies God power, is it not a power like that of man that he is talking about ? — that is, an action or energy going out and terminating on something external and foreign ? God's power, I grant, is not like that ; for there is nothing external or foreign to him. And when he denies him love, at least as a fundamental and essential quality, is it not the human form of love that he is thinking of ? — that which stirs the human blood, and agitates the human heart ? Doubtless the Infinite Benevolence of God is different from that ; but is there not a simi- lar difference in the matter of thought also ? Is it not equally true that "His thoughts are not as our thoughts" ? All we can say is, that there is in God something which corresponds to all these things in man. The formula of St. John, God is Love, or the popular formula God is Power, is as true as the philo- sophic formula God is Thought. All of these are truths, but partial truths. A more fundamental formula than either is the formula of the Divine Master, God is Spirit. For Spirit is essential Life, and essential Energy, and essential Love, and essen- tial Thought ; in a word, essential Person. Again : On the great question of Evil, — its nature, its origin, its reason, — a question inseparably con- nected with the conception of God, — there are apparent differences between Professor Royce and y Q THE CONCEPTION OF GOD myself ; and yet these, too, may be less than they seem. In a general way, certainly, I agree with his explanation of the dark enigma of Evil. Evil cannot be the true meaning and real outcome of the uni- verse ; on the contrary, it is the means, the necessary means, of the highest good ; and thus it is, in a legiti- mate sense, nothing but good in disguise This is a necessary postulate of our moral nature. Professor Royce has admirably shown this, in his chapter en- titled " The World of the Postulates." Our moral and religious nature is just as fundamental and essential as our scientific and rational nature. As science is not simply passionless acquisition of knowlege, but also enthusiasm for truth, so morality is not passion- less rules of best conduct, but impassioned love of righteousness. And this last is what we call Reli- gion ; for religion is morality touched and vivified with noble emotion. Now, the necessary postulate of science, without which scientific activity would be impossible, is a Rational Order of the universe ; and, similarly, the necessary postulate of religion, without which religious activity would be impossible, is a Moral Order of the universe. As science postu- lates the final triumph of reason, so religion must postulate the final triumph of righteousness. Science believes in the Rational Order, or in law, in spite of apparent confusion ; she knows that disorder is only apparent, only the result of ignorance ; and her mission is, to show this by reducing all appearances, all phenomena, to law. So also Religion is right in her unshakable belief in the Moral Order, in spite of apparent disorder or evil ; she knows that evil is only REMARKS BY PROFESSOR LE CONTE 71 apparent, the result of our ignorance and our weak- ness ; and her mission is, to show this by helping on the triumph of moral order over disorder. We may, if we like, — as many indeed do, — reject the faith in the Infinite Goodness, and thereby paralyse our re- ligious activity ; but then, to be consistent, we must also reject the faith in the Infinite Reason, and thereby paralyse our scientific activity. So much for a rational justification of the inde- structible faith Religion has in the Infinite Righteous- ness, even in the presence of abounding evil. It is founded on the same ground as our indestructible faith in the Reign of Law in the natural world, and is just as reasonable. Why is it, then, it may be asked, that every one is willing to admit the postulate of science, while so many doubt that of religion ? I answer : Partly because of the feebleness of our moral life in comparison with our physical life ; but mainly because the steady advance of science, with its progressive conquest of chaos, and its extension of the domain of order and law, is a continual verifi- cation of the postulate of science, and justification of our faith therein; while, on the contrary, the progress of morality and religion is uncertain and often unre- cognised, the increase of righteousness and decrease of evil doubtful and even denied. In the presence of such uncertainty, our faith is often sorely tried. We cry out for some explanation — for some philoso- phy which shall show us how evil is consistent with the Infinite Goodness. We know it is, for that is a necessary postulate. But — how f In regard to moral evil, or sin, — which, I need not 72 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD say, is the really dreadful form, — Professor Royce's explanation (which, by the way, is the same as that given in the last chapter of my book entitled Evolu- tion and Religious Thought) is, I believe, the true one. It is, that the existence or at least the possibility of what we call Evil is the necessary condition of a moral being like that of man. There are some things which God himself cannot do, viz., such things as are contrary to his essential nature, and such things as are a contradiction in terms and therefore absurd and unthinkable. Such a thing would be a moral being without freedom to choose right or wrong. God could not make man eternally and of necessity sinless, for then he would not be man at all. To make him incapable of sin would be to make him also incapable of virtue, of righteousness, of holiness ; for he must acquire these for himself by free choice, by struggle and conquest. Professor Royce brings this out admirably ; but it seems to me this view is singularly emphasised by the evolutional account of the origin of man. For if humanity gradually emerged out of animality, then it is evident that man's higher nature — his distinctive humanity — was at first very feeble, and that the whole mission of man is the progressive conquest of the animal by the distinctively human nature. It has been a long and hard struggle, and even yet, as we all know and feel, is far from com- plete. As already said, then, I believe Professor Royce gives a true answer so far as moral evil is concerned, although he misses the emphasis which evolution gives that view. But other evil — physical evil — he REMARKS BY PROFESSOR LE CONTE 73 gives up, in his book, in despair. And yet, from the point of view of evolution, this is exactly the form of evil that is most explicable. For as moral evil is a necessity for a progressive moral being, just so, and far more obviously, is physical evil a necessity for a progressive rational being. As the one form of evil is closely connected with our moral nature, so is the other indissolubly connected with our intellectual nature. Let me explain : The necessary condition of any evolution is a struggle with an apparently in-, imical environment. For example, the end and goal,; the significance, the only raison d'etre, of organic evo- lution in general, is the achievement of a rational being! — man. The necessary condition of that achievement was the struggle with what seemed at every stage an inimical, i.e. evil, environment. But looking back over the course in the light of its glorious result — the achievement of man — we at once see that what seemed evil is really good. Now, it is equally the same with human evolution in relation to physical evil. The goal and end, the raison d'etre, of social progress is the achievement of the ideal man — per- fect both in knowledge and in character. But the attainment of perfect knowledge is impossible except in the presence of what seems at every stage an evil environment, and by conflict with it. But, evidently, such an environment is evil only through ignorance of the laws of Nature. Evil is therefore the neces- sary spur that goads us on to increase of knowledge. We are but foolish little children, at school. Nature, our schoolmistress, chastises us relentlessly until we get our lessons. It is quite evident, that, without the 74 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD scourge of evil, humanity would never have emerged out of animality, or, having emerged, would never have advanced beyond the lowest stages. It is also evident that perfect knowledge of the laws of Nature would remove every physical evil. Looking back over the course, then, from the elevated plane of per- fect knowledge, and perceiving that the attainment of that plane was conditioned on the existence of evil — on punishment for ignorance — shall we any longer call it evil ? Is it not really good in disguise ? But it may be answered : " Yes, this is all true if we accept evolution by struggle as a necessary pro- cess ; but why may not the same result have been at- tained in some less expensive, less distressing way ? " I answer : Because, as already seen, no other pro- cess is conceivable that would result in a moral being, and achievement of such a being is the purpose of all evolution. One law, one process, one meaning and purpose, runs through all evolution, and that purpose is only revealed at the end. As in biology the laws of form and structure are best studied in the lowest organisms, where these are simplest, but those of function are studied best in the highest organisms, because only there clearly expressed, just so the laws of process in evolution are best understood in its lower and simpler stages, but the end, the purpose and meaning of the whole process from the begin- ning, is not fully declared until the end. That end is the achievement of a moral being ; and a moral being without struggle with evil is impossible because a contradiction in terms, and the same law must run throughout. REMARKS BY PROFESSOR LECONTE 75 Finally : The true conception of God, as this appears to me, and especially in his relation to us, is closely bound up with the absorbing question of Immortality. And on this I surmise that Professor Royce and I differ; though I am less sure that we do, judging by his hints of what is coming in his more esoteric lec- tures next week. 1 But in his book he gives up the question of Immortality as insoluble by philosophy. Well, — perhaps it is; but upon this question, as upon that of Evil, I think a great light is thrown by the evolutional view of the origin of man. Until recently, man's mind was studied wholly apart from mind as appearing in all the rest of Nat- ure. Thus an elaborate system of philosophy was built up without the slightest reference to the psychic phenomena of animals. The grounds of our belief in immortality were based largely on a supposed sepa- rateness of man from brutes — his complete unique- ness in the whole scheme of Nature. This is now no longer possible. If man came by a natural pro- cess from the animal kingdom, — his spirit from the anima of animals, — then the psychical phenomena of man should no longer be' studied apart from those of animals nearest approaching him. As anatomy, physiology, and embryology became scientific only by becoming comparative anatomy, comparative physiology, and comparative embryology, so psychol- ogy can never become scientific and rational until it becomes comparative psychology — until the psychi- cal phenomena of man are studied in comparison 1 For the substance of what is here referred to, see The Absolute and the Individual, pp. 322-326 below. Cf. also pp. 348-353. jQ THE CONCEPTION OF GOD with those foreshadowings and beginnings of similar phenomena which we find in animals most nearly approaching him. Evolution is not only a scientific theory ; it is not only a philosophy ; it is a great sci- entific method, transforming every department of thought. Every subject must be studied anew in its light. The grounds of belief in immortality must be thus studied anew. It is well known that I have striven earnestly to make such a study. I know that many think that this method of study destroys those grounds completely and forever; but I also know that those who think so take a very superficial view of evolution and of man. At the risk of tediousness, I will bring forward, once more, an outline of my view, but in a different way, which I hope will be understood readily by those who have followed my previous writings. I assume, then, the immanence of Deity in Nature. Furthermore, as you already know, I regard physical and chemical forces, or the forces of dead Nature, as a portion of the omnipresent Divine Energy in a diffused, unindividuated state, and therefore not self- active but having its phenomena determined directly by the Divine Energy. Individuation of this Energy, i.e. self-activity, begins, as I suppose, with Life, and proceeds, pari passu with organisation of matter, to complete itself as a Moral Person in man. / Mr. Upton, 1 in his Hibbert Lectures, given in 1893, takes a similar view, except that he makes all force — even physical force — in some degree self-active ; and 1 C. B. Upton : Bases of Religious Belief. Hibbert Lectures for 1893. London: Williams and Norgate, 1894. REMARKS BY PROFESSOR LE CONTE 77 thence it goes on with increasing individuation and self-activity to completion in man, — as in my view. The difference is unimportant. To use his mode of expression, God may be conceived as self-sundering his Energy, and setting over against himself a part as Nature. A part of this part, by a process of evo- lution, individuates itself more and more, and finally completes its individuation and self-activity in the soul of man. On this view, spirit — which is a spark of Divine Energy — is a potential in dead Nature, a germ in plants, a quickened embryo in animals, and comes to birth into a higher world of spirit-life in man. Self-consciousness — from which flows all that is distinctive of man — is the sign of birth into the spiritual world. Thus an effluence from the Divine Person flows downward into Nature to rise again by evolution to recognition of, and com- munion with, its own Source. Now observe, and this is the main point : The sole purpose of this self-sundering of the Divine Energy is thereby to have something to contemplate. And the sole purpose of this progressive individuation of the Divine Energy by evolution is finally to have, in man, something not only to contemplate but also to love and to be loved by, and, in the ideal man, to love and to be loved by supremely. Thus God is not only necessary to us, but — we also to him. This part of God, self-separated and, as it were, set over against himself, and including every visible manifestation or revelation of himself, may well be called a Second Person of the godhead, which by eternal generation developes into sons in man, and finally into fulness of yg THE CONCEPTION OF GOD godhead in the ideal man — the Divine Man — as his well-beloved Son. By this view, there is a new significance in Nature. ^Nature is the womb in which, and evolution the process by which, are gener- ated sons of God. Now, — do you not see? — with- out immortality, this whole purpose is balked — the whole process of cosmic evolution is futile. Shall God be so long and at so great pains to achieve a spirit, capable of communing with him, and then allow it to lapse again into nothingness ? ^ IV THE CITY OF GOD, AND THE TRUE GOD AS ITS HEAD COMMENTS ON ALL THE FOREGOING THEORIES BY G. H. HOWISON, LL.D. MILLS PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA THE CITY OF GOD, AND THE TRUE GOD AS ITS HEAD COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON A task now falls to me, ladies and gentlemen, and fellow-members of the Union, which for its difficulty I would gladly decline, but which the Union will expect me at least to undertake. As younger students of philosophy, you my associates in the Union have called upon me to be your elder adviser ; and on such an occasion as the present, which marks an epoch in your philosophical intercourse, you naturally look for me to put at your service any larger experience than your own that I may chance to possess in these fields, however insufficient it may prove when compared with the wide and deep reaches over which your speakers have carried you to-night. The impressive close of the argument by the ven- erated man who has but just now ceased addressing you is such as must awaken a deep response in every human heart not touched with apathy. It is one of those rare outbreaks of accumulated expectation, hope, and longing, into which, at the contemplation of the reason that is apparently struggling to get a footing in the world, human nature pours forth all its commingled doubt and faith. Such is the impas- g 81 8 2 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD sioned force of the argument from analogy, fortified, as it can be in these later days, by the doctrine of evolution. As Dr. Le Conte has so eloquently and so forcibly shown, it does seem clear, through the long and agonising path of evolution, — through struggle, and death, and survival, — that a rational, a moral, a self-active being is on the way toward realised exist- ence ; and it is true that, unless there is immortality awaiting it, this long and hard advance through Nature will be balked, and the whole process of evolution turn futile. As surely as there is a God, — as surely as eternal Reason and Justice is really at the heart of things, — it is certain, on this showing, that there is everlasting continuance for the being, whatever it may be, that forms the goal toward which evolution is pressing. If in very deed and truth there is a God, then that he " shall be so long and at so great pains to achieve a spirit, capable of communing with him, and then allow it to lapse again into nothingness " is indeed incredible, — nay, it is impos- sible. And I doubt not that your undulled human hearts are so roused by the pathos-laden question with which Dr. Le Conte closed his reasonings — a question almost appalling in its outcry to Justice and to Pity — that it will require all your poise of philo- sophic will to bring yourselves back into the region of collected thought once more, and look the great prob- lem of to-night steadily in the face again, with what Professor Royce has so fitly named " the calmer piety and gentleness of the serious reason." For, in sober truth, the central awe of all such faith-compelling questions and analogies is just this: COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON 83 that we see the whole matter hangs on the slender thread of the query whether there is indeed a God. If there is, then immortality — yes, the immortality of each particular soul — is certain, by God's own immutable nature ; and evolution, though it cannot ascertain it, nevertheless gives premonition of it then, and supports the real proof. But — what if there is not? The goal of evolution, as really verifiable by observation, is unfortunately not the preservation and completion of any single life, but only of a kind, — only of a human family, — ever made up, I beg you will notice, of new and wholly different members ; a family, moreover, whose abode is only on this globe, and on this side of the grave, with no indication what- ever that this its home will or can last forever ; nay, with all the observed indications steadily against this, and all the metaphysical necessities of physical existence declaring it impossible. And so we are brought back, perhaps somewhat sternly, to the great questions of our meeting. We have had, from men of such eminence as to command serious attention everywhere, two high efforts to set forth the conception of God and the proofs of his existence ; and we have listened to a keen criticism of the first of them by the young but highly qualified pupil of all three of us, — a criticism fascinating by its speculative and almost dreamy subtlety. Now let us gather our calmness and our wits together as best we may, and, during the short period that is left to us, try to discover what abiding store we ought to set by these endeavours. What I say must be, I fear, all too brief — too brief, that is, to do these arguments the 84 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD justice that their intricacy, their remoteness, and the long and deep studies which have gone to their mak- ing, would in reason demand. But I will set before you, as clearly as I can, the main points on which I think the evening's discussion turns, adding such comments on the conceptions and arguments as my own way of thinking suggests. THE CRITERION OF REALITY IN A CONCEPTION I am glad I can tell you, first of all, that there is a profound agreement among all the previous speakers in the important matter of the foundation on which all of this evening's reasonings rest ; yes, I am confident I may go farther, and say that we are all agreed upon this, and, further, as to the entire foun- dation of philosophy itself. I agree with all three of the previous speakers in the great tenet that evi- dently underlies their whole way of thinking. Our common philosophy is Idealism — that explanation of the world which maintains that the only thing absolutely real is mind ; that all material and all temporal existences take their being from mind, from consciousness that thinks and experiences ; that out of consciousness they all issue, to conscious- ness are presented, and that presence to conscious- ness constitutes their entire reality and entire existence. But this great foundation-theme may be uttered in very various ways ; and your other COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HO WIS ON 85 speakers, while they go on in agreement with each other very far, at length diverge ; and they diverge at a very early point from the way of interpreting idealistic philosophy that I have myself learned to use. And, if I am not unaccountably mistaken, you have already had presented here to-night two con- siderably varying systems of Idealism, albeit they still go on together far above the foundations common to all idealistic philosophy. I say tzvo ; for, unless I mistake Professor Mezes, his view accords so nearly with that of Professor Royce as to permit us to neg- lect the differences and count the pair as one, setting it in contrast to the system of Dr. Le Conte. I speak here with hesitancy, however, and only with such positive evidences as our evening's work has af- forded ; and I accordingly leave room for the suppo- sition that Professor Mezes covers in his thinking a further variety of Monistic Idealism, though holding with Professor Royce to Monism. For the Professor has exercised such a fine reserve as to speak without much exposure of what his own philosophy is ; he has confined himself very rigorously to a criticism of Professor Royce's apparatus of argument, and has said next to nothing that tells what is his own con- ception of the Absolute Reality. Still, when he freely admits that Professor Royce's argument inevi- tably proves an Ultimate Reality, and employs as an engine of criticism the premise that the inner life of our fellow-men — their aggregate of inner experi- ences, their feelings, thoughts, puzzles, aspirations ; in short, their successive or simultaneous states of 86 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD mind — "exhausts and fathoms what we mean by our fellow-being," we naturally put this and that together, and conclude that he, too, holds the central doctrine of his latest teacher, — the doctrine that all existence is summed and resumed into the enfolding consciousness of one single Inclusive Self; that human selves, and other selves, if others there be, are not selves in at all the same sense that the In- clusive Self is, nor in the meaning that moral com- mon-sense attaches to the word. They are mutually exclusive groups of empirical feelings — merely sum- maries, more or less partial and fragmentary, of separate items of experience, at best only partially organised. It is He that gives vital unity and real life to all, He alone that embraces all, penetrates and pervades all, and is genuinely organic ; He alone is integral and one. Yet He is just as unquestionably all and many ; his unity is not in the least excludent, not in the least repellent, but, on the contrary, is in- finitely inclusive, absolutely ^//-embracing. Liter- ally, " His tender mercies are over all his works " ; and whatever is at all, is his work, his act, directly. His being encompasses alike perfection and imperfec- tion, evil and good, joy and anguish, the just and the unjust. His is the Harmony of discords actually present, but also actually dissolved; the Peace of conflicts at once raging and stilled; the Love that bears in the bosom of t its utterly infinite benignity even malice itself, and atones for it with infinite Pity and by infinite Benevolence ; his, finally, is the Eternal Penitence that repents of his sin in its very act, — nay, in its very germination, — and provides COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON gy the Expiation as the very condition on which alone his offence is possible and actual. Such is the con- ception of Absolute Reality that has been set forth to us this evening with such resources of subtlety, of acuteness, of comprehensiveness, of possessions in weighty material, of almost boundlessly flexible ex- pression ; and we are asked to receive it as the philosophic account, the only account genuine and authentic, of the conception of God. God, we are told, is that one and sole Absolute Experience, the utter union of Absolute Thought and Absolute Perception, of ideal and fact, in which all relative and partial experiences are directly taken up and included, though indeed reduced and dissolved, and to be some part of which is all that existence or reality means, or can mean, for anything else that claims to be, whether it be called material or mental. And that the God thus conceived is the only au- thentic God of philosophy is declared on the ground — or, rather, on the claim — that upon this concep- tion alone can God be proved real. The conception — so our chief speaker's implication runs — may indeed be far different from what under an experi- ence less organised than the philosophic, less brought to coherence, we had fancied the name "God" to mean ; but what that name does mean must be ex- actly this, no more and no less : That which rigorous thought, penetrating to its inevitable and final impli- cations, can and does make out to be not merely Idea but Reality. Our master-question about it, Professor Royce would say, must not be whether we like it, nor whether it agrees with something we had sup- 88 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD posed, but whether it is demonstrably true, and alone so demonstrable. With this last statement every mind sufficiently dis- ciplined in philosophy to appreciate its true nature will of course agree. The philosophical conception of anything is the conception of it that thought attains when it takes utter counsel of its own utmost deep. For philosophy, accordingly, utter ideality and utter reality are reciprocal conceptions; complete and final agreement with thought, as thought sees itself whole, is the only test of reality, and recip- rocally, that alone is sanely and soundly ideal which can be proved, — that is, to the total insight turns real. But in another and still more important ref- erence, the definitive question is still to come ; in fact, arises directly out of that great first question about every conception. That first, controlling question un- doubtedly is : Can we prove the conception real, and thus alone show it is the right conception ? But the all-important question beyond will be : Are we now at length certain that we take the ideal view of the con- ception — that the light in which we see it is indeed the light of the whole, the final unit-vision under which alone our ideal can turn real ? Not until we are able to aver securely that this is so, have we a right to assert the conception as philosophic, and the only philosophic conception. Above all must they who have come to the insight that philosophy means Idealism — that mind is the measure of all things, and complete ideality the only sure sign of reality — hold themselves rigorously to this criterion. COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON 8 9 II THE CRITERION CONDEMNS THE MONISTIC CONCEPTION OF GOD And, now, what I have to say about the conception of God that we have had so imposingly set forth this evening, — a conception in which all the previous speakers, varying as they do, seem largely to agree, — what I have to say, at a stroke, is this: It does not seem to me to meet this criterion. As professed idealists, its advocates have come short of their calling. The doctrine is not idealistic enough. No doubt it has long gone by the name of Absolute Idealism, the name conferred upon it by Hegel, the weighty and justly celebrated thinker who first gave it a well-organised exposition. But I venture to con- test the propriety of the name, and maintain, rather, that an Idealism of this character is not Absolute Idealism at all ; that its exact fault is, not waiting for thought to take the fruitful roundness of its entire Ideal before declaring its equivalence to the Real. In short, greatly as I admire all that has been said here to-night, gladly and gratefully as I recognise the genuinely philosophic temper and the authentic philosophic place it all most certainly has, I am still moved to say that my honoured colleagues, in this their common underlying conception, have to my mind all " missed the mark and come short of the glory of God." They have not seized nor expressed the complete Ideal of the Reason. I agree with them that this Ideal is the sole measure and the certain sign g THE CONCEPTION OF GOD of what reality is ; I agree with Professor Royce, and with Hegel before him, that reality, in its turn, must be the test of the genuine Ideal, — that " whatever is real is rational, and whatever is rational is real." I agree that the Ideal is ipso facto the Real ; but I insist that the vital question is : Have zve stated the Ideal ? I insist, further, that the conception of God expounded with such lucid fulness by Professor Royce, and in various implications accepted by Professor Mezes and Dr. Le Conte, in its fundamental aspect at least, — that of the immanence of God in the world, — I insist that this falls fatally short of our rational Ideal, and is therefore, happily, only so far real as its limitations permit it to be ; for, by every idealist of course, some truth, some reality, must be accorded to all genuine thought, — it is all true, all real, as far as it goes. But the great concern is, just how far such a thought as has been offered us this evening does go on the lofty way to the Ideal ; just what relative truth, what measure of partial reality, we shall assign it. And so I may restate my comment on this conception of God by saying that, while on the one hand I see it come as far short of God's verity and God's existence as earth comes short of heaven, as the creation comes short of the Creator, nevertheless, on the other hand, when expressed as Professor Royce expresses it, it does attain to the real nature of the real creation, and, when expressed as Dr. Le Conte would express it, to the real nature of the phenomenal aspect in the real creation, besides. In other words, the conception is a philosophical and real account of the nature of an isolated human COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOW I SON g 1 being, or created spirit, the numerical unit in the created universe, viewed as such a spirit appears in what has well been called its natural aspect; viewed, that is, as the organising subject of a natural-scientific experience, marked by fragmentariness that is forever being tentatively overcome and enwholed, — if I may coin a word to match the excellent German one crgdnzt. The supernatural, that is to say, the com- pletely rational aspect of this being is left out of the conception we are discussing, — the aspect under which it is seen as the subject and co-operating cause of a moral i.e. completely rational or metaphysical ex- perience. In this last context, the word " experience " has suddenly changed its meaning in kind} and the human consciousness is seen to have, in its total unity, the all-encompassing form of a Conscience, — that Complete Reason, of a truly infinite sphere, in which the primal self-consciousness of the creature actively posits the Ideal which is its real world of being. In this complete reason, or Conscience, the single spirit sees itself as indeed a person — a self -active member of a manifold system of persons, all alike self-active in the inclusive unit of their being ; all independent centres of origination, so far as efficient causation is concerned; all moving from "within," i.e. each from its own thought, and harmonised in a society of 1 The principle here involved is a signal one in language, of vast sig- nificance philologically as well as philosophically, and deserves a study which it has never received. By it, words have a power of coming to mean the very opposite of what they were first used to denote. I be- lieve it to be a fundamental law of vocabulary, imbedded in the very nature of language. g 2 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD accordant free-agents, not by any efficient causation, but by the operation of what has been called, since Aristotle, final causation — the attraction of an Ideal Vision, the vision of that City of God which they constitute, and in which, reciprocally, they have their being ; a vision immortalised by Dante as the Vision Beatific, by which no one is driven, but by which, to borrow the meaning of Goethe's famous line, the Eternal, womanlike, drazvs us onward, — "Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht tins Milan." 11 Now, it is greatly worth your notice, that this ideal is not merely the passing vision or phrased fancy of some poet, nor of some group of human beings in an accidental mood of rapt imagination. On the contrary, it is a great and solid matter of fact, of no less compass of reality than to deserve and re- quire the name of historic. It constitutes the key- conception of historical progress, and is the very life of that highest stage of this which we designate and praise by the name of Western Civilisation. It is at the mental summons of this ideal, that the West as a stadium in historic progress emerges from the hoary and impassive East; and the entire history of the West as divergent from the oriental spirit, as the scene of energetic human improvement, the scene of the victory of man over Nature and over his merely natural self, has its controlling and explanatory motive in this ideal alone. It is the very life-blood of that more vigorous moral order which is the manifest dis- tinction of the West from the Orient. Personal re- sponsibility and its correlate of free reality, or real COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON 93 freedom, are the whole foundation on which our enlightened civilisation stands ; and the voice of aspiring and successful man, as he lives and acts in Europe and in America, speaks ever more and more plainly the two magic words of enthusiasm and of stability — Duty and Rights. But these are really the signals of his citizenship in the ideal City of God. By them he proclaims : We are many, though indeed one ; there is one nature, in manifold persons ; person- ality alone is the measure, the sufficing establishment, of reality ; unconditional reality alone is sufficient to the being of persons ; for that alone is sufficient to a Moral Order, since a moral order is possible for none but beings who are mutually responsible, and no beings can be responsible but those who originate their own acts. The entire political history of the West is accordingly a perpetual progress of struggle toward a system of law establishing liberty, and of liberty habilitated and filled with stable contents by law. The emergence, too, of western religion from oriental is similarly marked by the rise of this con- sciousness of individual and unconditional reality ; we hear its presaging voice in that Hebrew prophet who declares : " Ye have said, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge ; but I say unto you, The soul that sinneth, it shall die." And the whole history of western theology, broken and incomplete and apparently tragic as it looks in the stage whither it has now at length come, is but the sincere and devout response of the human spirit to that inward voice of this ideal, which an- nounces the supremacy of reason and declares the 94 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD unconditional reality and majesty of human nature as possessing it. Remove this supreme vision of this Republic of God, and western civilisation — nay, the whole of human history, which but culminates in it, is without intelligibility, having neither explanatory source nor goal. The central and real meaning of the Christian Religion, in which the self-conscious- ness of the West finds its true expression, and which thus far has found no home except in the West, lies exactly in the faith that the Creator and the creature are reciprocally and equally real, not identical ; that there is Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of men ; that God recognises rights in the creature and acknowledges duties toward him; and that men are accordingly both unreservedly and also indestructibly real, — both free and immortal. In that religion alone, I venture to assert, is the union of this triad of faiths to be found — in God, in freedom, in immortality — faiths that, while three, are inseparably one, since neither can be stated except in terms of the other two. Ill THE MONISTIC CONCEPTION OF GOD NOT THE THEISM OF THE WEST, BUT THE PANTHEISM OF THE ORIENT We are now led to notice Professor Royce's inter- esting statement, marked by such candour, at the close of his address. He traces briefly the philo- sophical and theological genealogy of his view, and expresses his belief that this view is at heart the thought really intended by the faith of the fathers, COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOIVISON 95 and in due time formulated in the conception of God set forth by that greatest and most accredited doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas. This raises a nice question of exegesis, into which we cannot go with any fulness ; but I will say, in passing, that if the statement is correct it only shows how far men's efforts to analyse and to formulate their highest and deepest practical insights fall short of the facts. It is too true that much of the theology which professes and aims to be Christian is in reality only the cloth- ing or wrapping of Christianity in the prechristian garments that have descended to the West as heir- looms from the East, or to the converted West as inheritances from its paganism. And we ought never to forget, therefore, that the real test of the faith of Christians is the implications in their reli- gious conduct, and not at all their attempts, most likely unsuccessful, or at least unhappy, to analyse those implications and set them formally forth. In these attempts, transmitted beliefs quite below the Chris- tian level, accepted and continued habits of ritual, and modes of feeling, that are nothing but survivals from the faiths which the new vision in Christ would forever put away, will inevitably play a large part. They have in fact played too large a part ; a part so large that the thought which Jesus imparted to man- kind, and which has survived and flourished in spite of them, has been almost buried from view in the wrappages compacted out of these prechristian ma- terials, — materials for the most part drawn from the Orient, whence they came from the religions and philosophies the very remotest from the Glad Tidings 9 6 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD proclaimed by Christ. The spirit of all these was pantheistic, in the really unchristian sense of that word : they were all preoccupied with the sovereign majesty of the Almighty, the mystery of the Impene- trable Source, and knew nothing of the truly infinite Graciousness or everlasting Love. Their monotonous theme was the ineffable greatness of the Supreme Being and the utter littleness of man. Their tradi- tion lay like a pall upon the human spirit, — nay, it lies upon it to this day, — and it smothers now, as it smothered then, the voice that answers there to the call of Jesus: Son of Man, thou art the son of God. Rouse, heart ! put on the garments of thy majesty, and realise thy equal, thy free, thy immortal membership in the Eternal Order! Under the suffocating burden of the old things that should have passed away, the Christian consciousness forgets, at least in part, that all things are become new, and that man is risen from the dead. It is not enough, then, for vindicating as Christian the conception of God offered us to-night, to show, for instance, that St. Thomas held it, if so be he did. In my own opinion, which you must take for what you will, he quite escapes its objectionable traits in some regards, and, were he here to explain himself, would disclaim that interpretation of the Divine im- manence in the world, and the reciprocal immanence of the world in God, which is characteristic of both the philosophies expounded here this evening. At the same time, his resting his own conception of God on the foundations of Aristotle, in the form which the great Greek succeeded in giving them, — a form COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON 97 which comes so short of Aristotle's greatest philo- sophical hints, — is occasion enough for thinkers like Hegel and our chief speaker to see a great resem- blance between St. Thomas's view and theirs, and to overlook the contradiction between these aspects of his doctrine and those in which he reflects the Chris- tian apercu of genuine creation, and the consequent distinctness of the world from God. This ought to carry as a corollary the unqualified freedom of men in the City of God ; and if St. Thomas fails to draw that corollary, the explanation must be sought in his prepossession by the older and prechristian tradition. Aristotle, after justifiable criticism of Plato's course with the world of Ideas, unquestionably struck into a new path more thoroughly idealistic. Had he ex- plored this far enough, and with close enough scrutiny, it must have led him beyond Pantheistic Idealism. But his doctrine that the criterion of deity is Omni- science, and that creation is simply the divine Still Vision — Oeaipia — had its discussion arrested too early to admit of that achievement. The descent of the doctrine we have heard to-night is correctly traced from Aristotle's; and the doctrine does not get essentially beyond his, nor attain any distinction between the Creator and the creation sufficient to make out creation as creation at all. Unless creators arc created, nothing is really created. I venture, you see, to dissent from Professor Royce when he claims that the conception of God — if God we may name it — afforded by his Monistic Idealism is distinctly theistic instead of pantheistic. Unques- tionably, " it is not the conception of any Unconscious g8 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD Reality, into which finite beings are absorbed; nor of a Universal Substance, in whose law our ethical independence is lost; nor of an Ineffable Mystery, which we can only silently adore." But we do not escape Pantheism, and attain to Theism, by the easy course of excluding the Unconscious, or the sole Sub- stance, or an inscrutable Mystery, from the seat of the Absolute. We must go farther, and attain to the distinct reality, the full otherhood, of the creation ; so that there shall be no confusion of the creature with the Creator, nor any interfusion of the Creator with the creature. Above all, we must attain to the moral reality of the creature, which means his self-determin- ing freedom not merely with reference to the world of sense, but also with reference to the Creator, and must therefore include his imperishable existence. The conception set forth to-night is certainly not that of an Unconscious ; it is certainly not that of a mere Substance, to which our independence is subjected by sheer physical law ; and it is certainly not a Mystery, in the sense of having a nature made up of traits wholly strange to our human cognition. For its essence is intelligence, and that omniscient ; and hence its activity is not by transmission in space ; and, finally, consciousness — or, as Professor Royce apparently would prefer to say, experience — is the very thing we are most experienced in, and so best acquainted with. But if the Infinite Self includes us all, and all our experiences, — sensations and sins, as well as the rest, — in the unity of one life, and in- cludes us and them directly ; if there is but one and the same final Self for us each and all; then, with COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON 99 a literalness indeed appalling, He is we, and we are He ; nay, He is /, and / am He. And I think it will appear later, from the nature of the argument by which the Absolute Reality as Absolute Experience is reached, that the exact and direct way of stating the case is baldly : / am He. Now, if we read the conception in the first way, what becomes of our ethical independence? — what, of our personal reality, our righteous i.e. reasonable responsibility — respon- sibility to which we ought to be held? Is not He the sole real agent ? Are we anything but the stead- fast and changeless modes of his eternal thinking and perceiving ? Or, if we read the conception in the second way, what* becomes of Him ? Then, surely, He is but another name for me , or, for any one of you, if you will. And how can there be talk of a Moral Order, since there is but a single mind in the case? — we cannot legitimately call that mind a person. This vacancy of moral spirit in the Absolute Experience when read off from the end of the particu- lar self, is what Professor Mezes pertinently strikes at in the first of his two points of criticism. Judging by experience alone, — the only point of view allotted by Professor Royce to the particular self, — judging merely by that, even when the experience is not direct and nai've but comparatively organised, there is no manifold of selves ; the finite self and the Infinite Self are but two names at the opposite poles of one lonely reality, which from its isolation is without possible moral significance. This is doubt- less a form of Idealism, for it states the Sole Reality in terms of a case of self-consciousness. When read 100 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD off in the second way, it has been known in the history of philosophy as Solipsism. 1 To read it so is a harsh reductio, and rather unfair, as it can equally well be read in the other way. But that other way is the only way of escape from what our moral common- sense pronounces an intolerable absurdity. It bears the more dignified name of Monistic Idealism, or Idealistic Monism. If it is to be called a conception of God at all, it is the conception that presents God as All and in all. If the syllables "theism" can be affixed to it at all, they can only be so as part of the correcter name Pantheism. And so it seems to me that we should by no means assent when Professor Royce is disposed to insist that every ethical predi- cate which the highest religious faith of the past has attributed to God is capable of exact interpretation in terms of his view. Where is the attribute of Grace, the source of that Life Eternal which alone, according to the Fourth Gospel, knows God as the true God, and which is freedom and immortality ? IV WORTH OF MONISTIC IDEALISM AS AGAINST AGNOSTI- CISM : ITS FAILURE AS A RELIGIOUS METAPHYSIC But, after all, what we have now for some minutes been saying amounts only to a contrast between dif- _ ferent conceptions, and, at last, to a mere dispute over names. For philosophy, nothing is settled by 1 From ra/aj ipse (he himself alone), as the appropriate name for the theory that no being other than the thinker himself is real. COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON I0 £ settling any number of such things. The real ques-' tion is, not whether we like or dislike the view before us ; not whether it is Christian, or Thomistic, or Aris- totelian ; but, simply, Is it true ? Professor Royce or Hegel might well turn on us and ask : " Is not ' God ' a name for the Ultimate Reality; and is it not demon- strable that the conception in question is the Ulti- mate Reality ? — has it not been so demonstrated here and to-night ? If this is the conception of the Abso- lute ; if the Absolute must be the Omniscient, or, in other words, the Absolute Experience, — has not this ideal of an Absolute Experience demonstrated itself to be real, by the clear showing that the supposition of its unreality, if affirmed real, commits us to its reality ? — in short, that the real supposition of its unreality is a self-contradiction, and therefore impos- sible to be made ? " To this, I will venture to say, as the first step in a reply : The gist of the proof is the proposition, that a supposition which turns out to be impossible, or, in other words, which cannot really be made, — and hence never is really made, — affords no footing for a dispute ; in such case, the opposite supposition is the only one tenable ; we are in presence of a thought which our mind thinks in only one way, so that it cannot, and in reality does not, have any alter- native or opposed thought at all. Such a thought is sometimes called " necessary " ; and then the question will inevitably arise : Is the necessity objective, or is it merely subjective? —is such a thought the infallible witness of how reality has to be, or merely the unim- peachable witness of how the thinker has to think ? — I0 2 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD is it the sign of real power and genuine knowledge, or only of limitation and impenetrable ignorance f Here, the agnostic says it is the latter ; the idealist, it is the former ; and then the idealist undertakes to show, once more, that the supposition of thought being really limited and merely subjective is a flat self-con- tradiction, a proposition inevitably withdrawn in the very act of putting it. Then, to clinch the case finally, if his Idealism is only of the type here emerg- ing, he makes haste to add : The fact is, you see, the thinker, to think at all, unavoidably asserts his think- ing to be the exhaustive and all-embracing Reality, the Unconditioned that founds all conditions and imparts to things conditioned whatever reality they have, the Absolute in and througli which things relative are really relative and relatively real, the immutable IS that is implied in every if. In short, reality turns out to be, exactly, the thinker plus presentation to the thinker ; but then, and let us not forget it, says this species of idealist, the thinker is reciprocally in immu- table relation to this presentation, this detail, this fragmentary serial experience, these contents of sense. Thus we come to what Hegel called the Absolute Idea, as the absolute identity of Subject and Object, and the inseparable synthesis of the single Omniscient Mind, and its system of ideas, with its multiplicity of frag- mentary i.e. sensible objects. And so the inevitable and everlasting truth is, not Agnosticism, but Abso- lute Idealism — the ism of the Absolute Idea ; not the Unknowable Power, but the Self-knowing Mind who is at once One and All, the One Creator inclusive of the manifold creation. COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOIVISON 103 And now let me continue such reply to this as I would make, by saying, next, how altogether acute and sound I think it is as a supplement to that phase of merely subjective Idealism which now goes by the name of Agnosticism — a supplement exposing the misnomer in virtue of which such agnostic Idealism calls the Ultimate Reality the Unknowable, when yet it has no footing upon which to affirm the reality of the Inscrutable Power except the self-asserted au- thority of thought, — the " inconceivability of the opposite," as Mr. Spencer calls it, — by which he undoubtedly means, as we all see after his famous discussion of this Axiom with Mr. Mill, the tinthink- ablcness of the opposite. The real meaning of the situation is, — as I believe Professor Royce to have shown unanswerably, and more pointedly than any- body else has shown it, — that the thinker is just un- avoidably affirming his own all-conditioning reality as critic, as judge, as organiser, and as appraiser of values, in and over the field of his possible experi- ence ; the thinking self is seen to be the very con- dition of the possibility of even a fragmentary and seemingly incoherent or isolated experience, and the all-coherent unity of its inevitable reality passes cease- less sentence on the mere phenomenon, declares the isolation and fragmentariness of this to be only ap- parent, supplants the incoherence of its immediate aspect by coherence that marches ever wider and higher, and so places the phenomenon in a real system that takes it out of the category of illusion by giving it a continual and endlessly ascending approximation to unqualified reality. Thus the Ultimate Reality 104 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD actually posited and possibly positable by this pro- cedure is, indeed, the Unconditioned Conditioner with reference to a possible experience, but is unwittingly miscalled when called the Unknowable, for it is in precise fact just the Self-knowing Knower, — the comprehensive and active Supreme Judgment in whose light alone the things of experience are as they are ; since they are, as they arc, only as they are presented at its bar and there get ever more and more known. But now I ask you to notice, next, how this argu- ment, unanswerable as it is for displacing the phan- tom of the Unknowable and discovering the Idealism concealed in the philosophy that calls itself Agnos- ticism, nevertheless leaves us unrescued from an Idealism still merely subjective, though subjective in another and a somewhat higher sense. I mean, that the argument, taken strictly in itself, supplies no reason for reading off the resulting Reality from the point of view of its infinite inclusiveness, its supposed universal Publicity, rather than from that of its finite exclusiveness, its undeniable particular Privacy. Here I agree, as I have already once indicated, with the brunt of the first criticism made by Professor Mezes, and with his ground for the criticism : the argument of Professor Royce is so cast and based that no pro- vision is made for a public of thinkers. In terms of this form of Idealism, no manifold of selves is pro- vided for or can be provided for; and this I would conclude, not only as Professor Mezes does, from the limited scope assigned by Monistic Idealism to the illative principle of Causality, but also from the in- COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOW I SON I05 compatibility of Self-Completeness, as Professor Royce by his argument has to conceive of this, with the Goodness that he would vindicate for his Absolute. In short, I agree with Professor Mezes again, in his second criticism, — that the Self-Completeness reached by this argument cannot amount to Goodness ; though I may say, in passing, that I would not argue this on that fascinating but dreamy ground of the illusion declared inherent in time, the validity of which I very much doubt, but on the ground, once more, that such Self-Completeness fails to provide for any mani- fold of selves either phenomenal or noumenal, and that the very meaning of Goodness, if Goodness is moral, depends on the reality of such a public of selves. While I should dissent, too, from Professor Mezes in his implication that absolute Goodness must have the trait of progressive improvement, I hold that its very meaning is lost unless there is a society of selves, to every one of whom Goodness, to be Divine, must allot an unconditional reality and maintain it with all the resources of infinite wisdom. I repeat : My point against Professor Royce's argu- ment, and against the whole post-Kantian method of construing Idealism, summed up by Hegel and sup- plied by him with organising logic, is this : By the argument, — as by many another form of stating Hegel's view, — reading off its result as Idealistic Monism (or Cosmic Theism, if that name be pre- ferred) rather than as Solipsism, is left without logical justification. The preference for the more imposing reading, it seems to me, rests on no princi- ple that the argument can furnish, but on an instinc- io 6 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD tive response to the warnings of moral common-sense. No matter what show of logic may drive us into the corner, our instinctive moral sense prohibits us from entertaining the theorem that the single self who conducts the argument, albeit he is its cause, its de- signer, its engineer, and its authority, is the sole and absolute Reality, — the only being in existence hav- ing such compass, such sovereign judgment, such self-determining causality. By spontaneous moral sense we doubtless believe, indeed, that we are each entirely real, and a seat of inalienable rights ; but this feeling of rights, though it be no more than a resentment at invasion, points directly to our belief that there are other beings as unreservedly real as we, with rights alike inalienable, who lay us under duty. Still, this uncomprehended instinct, ethical though it be, is not philosophy. Until we shall have learned how to give it in some way the authority of rational insight, we have no right to its effects when we are proceeding as thinkers ; so far as we merely accept them, we do not think, we only feel. Moved by this feeling, I say, we evade reading the result of this strange but striking dialectic as Solip- sism, and, reading it from the reverse direction, we are fain to call it Cosmic Theism, under the silent assumption that its real contents are thus enlarged so that its embrace enfolds a universe of minds, or persons. And yet these so-called persons are rightly designated as only finite selves, mutually relative and phenomenal merely, since the reality of the unifying Organic Experience, as reached by the argument, requires that it shall be strictly one and COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOW I SON I07 indivisible, and that the supposed manifold of finite selves shall none of them have any real and change- less Self but this. One single Infinite Self, the iden- tical and sole active centre of all these g?/asi-se\ves, which are severally made up of specific groups of experiences more or less fragmentary, as the case may be, none of them with any inner organic unity of its own, — this is the theory ; and even for this hollow shell of a personal and moral order we have no logical warrant, but have silently carried it in, over our argument, on the hint of moral sense that of course there are manifold centres — or, at any rate, manifold groups — of experience besides our own. You will not, I hope, mistake my point. Like Professor Mezes, I am by no means saying that Pro- fessor Royce may not have, somewhere in the rich and crowded arsenal of his thinking, some other means of dealing with this question of the moral contents of the Absolute than the means presented in his address and his books. I am only saying that, so far as I can see, the required means is not provided anywhere in the books or the address. Especially is it not furnished in the curiously impressive argu- ment which he has now restated so lucidly for us, and which makes, one may say, the very life of the philosophy that he sets forth in print. In this last assertion, I reach the gravamen of all I have to say, in the way of criticism, about that very interesting and exceedingly hitting piece of dialectic. So I feel that I am in duty bound to support the assertion by an analysis of the argument as exact and close as I am able to make, I08 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD PRECISE ANALYSIS OF PROFESSOR ROYCE S ARGUMENT : ITS MYSTIC AND ANTI-ETHICAL TENDENCY Accordingly, let us look for a moment at the exact structure of that argument, and determine, if we can, precisely what it does make out. It may be put in two different ways, each brief and telling : (i) Our human ignorance, once confessed to be real, brings with it the reality of an Absolute Wis- dom, since nothing less than that can possibly de- clare the ignorance real , if the ignorance is real, then Omniscience is real. (2) Our human knowledge, that indirect and organ- ised experience which constitutes science, once ad- mitted to be real, brings with it the reality of an Absolute Experience, since nothing less than that can possibly give sentence that one experience when compared with another is really fallacious, and this is exactly what science does ; if the " verdict of sci- ence" is real, then an Absolute Experience is real. Now, the question that unavoidably arises, on ex- actly considering these two unusual reasonings, is this : Whose omniscience is it that judges the igno- rance to be real ? — whose absolute experience pro- nounces the less organised experience to be really fallacious ? Well, — whosesoever it may be, it is certainly acting in and through my judgment, if I am the thinker of that argument ; and in every case it is / who pronounce sentence on myself as really igno- rant, or on my limited experience as fallacious. Yes, COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON 109 — and it is / who am the authority, and the only direct authority, for the connexion put between the reality of the ignorance or of the fallacious experience on the one hand and the reality of the implicated omniscience on the other. We can perhaps see the case more clearly as it is, if we notice that the argu- ment is cast in the form of a conditional syllogism, and runs in this wise : If my ignorance is real, then Omniscience is real : but my ignorance assuredly is real; and, therefore, so also is Omniscience. Now we ask : Who is the authority for the truth of the hypothetical major premise, and who is the authority for the truth of the categorical minor ? Who conjoins, in that clutch of adamant, the reality of the ignorance with the reality of the omniscience ? And whose omniscience makes the assertion valid that my igno- rance is real ? Is it not plain that /, who am convinc- ing myself by that syllogism, am the sole authority for both the premises ? Though there were a myriad other omnisciences, they were of no avail to me, in the lone inward struggle to my own conviction through that argumentative form, unless they inter- penetrated my judgment, and so became literally mine ; -or, if you prefer, unless my judgment vanished upward and was annulled into that Infinite Judgment. In using either premise as proof of the conclusion, and a fortiori in using both, I implicate myself in actual omniscience ; I am verily guilty of that effrontery, if effrontery it really be. So must the great argu- ment of this evening be read, it seems to me, or else it must mean nothing. In short, it is the introversive act of a reasoning being, discovering the real infinity II0 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD that lies implicit in his seeming finitude. It is just / in my counter aspect — my reverse instead of my obverse, my other-side of infinite judicialness — com- ing forward to execute my proper act of infallible certainty. In such an " affectation of omniscience," unquestionably, does any and every least assumption of certainty in a judgment involve the thinker who makes it. This, to my mind, is the exact and whole meaning of Professor Royce's proof, unless we grant him the gratuitous assumption of an indefinite multi- tude of simultaneous or successive thinkers ; and this, surely, we must not do when we are professing the philosophical temper of "proving all things." There are those, no doubt, who would see in the phase that the argument is now made to assume, only a fine occasion for very knowing smiles. Chief among such, of course, are the agnostics in whose especial behoof the argument was contrived out of their own chosen materials, with the benign intent of disciplin- ing them out of their scepticism, through chastening supplied by exposed self-contradiction. They are likely now saying to themselves : " The argument has proved a little too much ; it reinforces our point very happily : he who would not cut the absurd figure of claiming omniscience must take the lowly r61e of our humble philosophy — the role of confessed igno- rance and incurable uncertainty." But such is not the way in which I would read the lesson. Indeed, I hear in fancy, even now, the author of this singular argument saying to these jubilant doubters: "Well, — confessed ignorance, and uncertainty really incura- ble it is, is it? Here's at you again, then! And COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOW I SON m there you go round in the resistless dialectical whirli- gig once more ! And so will your cheerfully obdurate negative send you whirling on perpetually ! " And in that saying I should quite agree, and I am sure that you would, also. It is not to the force or validity of the argument that I object, but to the misinterpre- tation of its scope. It is a clinching dialectical thumb- screw for the torture of agnostics ; yes, with reference to them and their unavoidable stadium of thinking, it is even a step of value in the struggle of the soul toward a conviction of its really infinite powers and prospects ; but I cannot sjc in it any full proof of the real being of God. Strictly construed, it is, as I have just endeavoured to show, simply the vindication of that active sovereign judgment which is the light of every mind, which organises even the most elementary perceptions, and which goes on in its ceaseless criti- cal work of reorganisation after reorganisation, build- ing all the successive stages of science, and finally mastering those ultimate implications of science that constitute the insights of philosophy. If I call that active all-illumining judgment, — which is indeed my life and my light, and which shines, and will shine, unto my perfect day, and is for me in all the emer- gencies of experience an ever-present and practicable omniscience, or fountain of unfailing certainty, — if I call that God, then assuredly I am employing the mood of the mystic ; nay, I am taking literally what he took only mystically; I am translating into the cold forms of logic, where it becomes meaningless, what his religious poesy and enthusiasm made a practical medium of exalted religious feeling, though II2 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD philosophically it was nought. This light within may indeed prove to be the witness of God in my being, but it is not God himself. It is often said of the mystics, whether within Christendom or in Egypt or in the elder Orient which was and still remains their proper home, that they have the high religious merit of bringing God near to us, — as if they met the saying of St. Paul : Though He be not far from every one of us : for in Him we live, and move, and have our being. But nearness may become too near. When it is made to mean absolute identity, then all the worth of true nearness is gone, — the openness of access, the freedom of converse, the joy of true reciprocity. These precious things all draw their meaning from the distinct reality of ourselves and Him who is really other than we. When mysticism plays in high poesy on the theme of the Divine Nearness, in the mood that "sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind," it quickens reli- gious emotion, but affords no genuine illumination in theology. When we turn that mood into literal phi- losophy, and cause our centre of selfhood to vanish into God's, or God's to vanish into ours, we lose the tone of religion that is true and wholesome. For true religion is built only on the firm foundations of duty and responsibility; and these, again, rest only on the footing of freedom. Hence the passing re- mark of Dr. Le Conte on the nature of religion, though indeed beautiful and noble, is yet, I think, neither noble enough nor beautiful enough. It cer- tainly ascends beyond the famous saying by Matthew Arnold, of which as a ladder it makes happy use, — COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HO IV I SON "3 that "religion is morality touched with emotion"; for Dr. Le Conte rightly reminds us that the emotion which is religious must not merely touch and kindle but must vivify, and must be not simply emotion but noble emotion. But it seems to me that his saying, like Arnold's, still leaves the true relations inverted. Yes, as much as inverted ; because, in truth, religion is not morality touched and vivified by noble emotion, but, rather, religion is emotion touched by morality, and at that wondrous touch not merely ennobled but actually raised from the dead — uplifted from the grave of sense into the life eternal of reason. For life eternal is life germinating in that true and only Inclusive Reason, the supreme consciousness of the reality of the City of God, — the Ideal that seats the central reality of each human being in an eternal circle of Persons, and establishes each as a free citizen in the all-founding, all-governing Realm of Spirits. So is it that religion can only draw its breath in the quickening air of moral freedom, and our great poet's word comes strictly true, — " So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When duty whispers low, Thou must, The youth replies, I can." And thus I am led to repeat, that the main argument of this evening, striking as it is, does not establish any Reality sufficingly religious, — does not estab- lish the being of God. This will continue true of it, for the reasons just pointed out, even if we grant that the Infinite Self is a unity inclusive of an indefinite II4 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD multitude of quasi-selves. Accordingly, for the sake of argument, this grant shall be made during the rest of the discussion. VI CRITICISM OF THE SYSTEM OF PROFESSOR LE CONTE And now, in view of the phase last assumed by our question, we naturally turn to the other system of Idealism offered us — that of Dr. Le Conte ; for its very object seems to be, to provide for the desired world of freedom. It certainly accepts one aspect of the theory from which we have just parted — the immanence of God in Nature ; interpreted, too, pretty much in the way that Professor Royce and other Hegelians interpret it. But, this accepted, Dr. Le Conte's view is apparently an attempt to supple- ment it by such a use of the theory of evolution as shall establish a conception of the Ultimate Reality which will thoroughly answer to the Vision Beatific — the conception of a World of Spirits, all immortal, and all genuinely real because themselves centres of origination and thus really free ; not that they now are so, in the present order of Nature where we see them, but that the evolutional account of their origin clearly indicates that they will become so. Charac- teristic of this new form of Idealism, is its effort to unite the Hegelian form with the form that I have been trying to set before you, — the monistic form with the pluralistic. Its means for this union is, the method it takes to prove the coming reality of the COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISOiV US City of God — the Realm of Ends. This is pre- sented as the goal toward which cosmic evolution is seen unmistakably to tend ; and its reality is argued partly by induction, partly by appeal to that moral reason which would pronounce evolution futile, should its indicated goal not be fulfilled in an end- less life whereby the self-activity only presaged here could be realised in the hereafter. This large recon- ciling office is what I suppose Dr. Le Conte to in- tend; and before taking our final look at the theory of Professor Royce, we must pause to see whether this attractive new scheme may not have supplanted it ; or whether, perchance, this too is to prove dis- appointing. I confess that by the lucid force of Dr. Le Conte's reasonings, and the great beauty of his conclusions, I am constantly tempted to yield him my entire assent. It is only by the low murmurs of half- suppressed conviction, that I am roused from that state of fascination, to take up again the task of rigid thought. But if I may venture at all upon criticism of a thinker so justly distinguished, whose mind I sincerely revere, then I will say that the sta- bility of his system depends, I think, on two things : (i) Whether it provides a sufficient proof that the Immanent Energy which is the cause of evolution is indeed a Cosmic Consciousness; (2) whether a Cos- mic Consciousness, even if real, having — as it must have — the attribute of immanence in Nature, is com- patible with the freedom and the personal immortality at which the system aims. Regarding the first of these, I feel bound to say u6 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD that the proof offered for the Cosmic Consciousness seems to me insufficient. All I am able to make of it is this : The analogy in the case of each of us, who knows that he is conscious, though to the out- side observer there is nothing of him discernible but phenomena purely physical; still more, the analogy of the reasoning by which each extends this/assur- ance of his own reality, to interpret similar physical phenomena into the existence of other persons, ani- mating bodies like his own, — these analogies would, in all reason, lead us to say that there might ivell be a Cosmic Mind animating all Nature, but by no means that there is such a Mind. True enough, there is the same kind of reason for believing in such a Mind as for believing in the minds of our fellow-men, — if, indeed, the real warrant for this belief be only the warrant of analogy. But, even on that warrant, the value of the analogy will finally depend on the degree to which we can match, in Nat- ure as a whole, the test-phenomena that prompt us to conclude the existence of human minds besides our own. The chief of these tests are speech and purposive movement ; and, Bishop Berkeley's capti- vating metaphors about them notwithstanding, the literal fact is that Nature answers to neither ; or, rather, we have no means of ascertaining, from her, whether she does or not. Coming to the second question, I find myself in still greater difficulties. I cannot see how a Cosmic Consciousness, with its intrinsic immanence in Nat- ure, can be reconciled with real freedom at all; and its consistency with an immortality truly personal is COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HO WIS ON 117 to me beset with obscure alternatives, between which either the certainty, or else the value, of the life to come vanishes away. Whether we take the imma- nence of God in Nature to mean his omnipresence in and throughout Nature, — which is something unin- telligible, — or whether we say, in consonance with Idealism, that Nature is immanent in God, the doc- trine implies that God operates evolution, including the evolution of man in every aspect of his being, by direct causation — by his own immediate efficiency. Any secondary causes that may operate — though according to the theory of evolution these are indeed real and infinitely complex — are only mediate or transmissive, and are not true causes ; God must ever remain the only real agent. In short, we have again a system of Monism ; and all the hostilities to the strict personality of created minds that we found in the doctrine of Professor Royce are on our hands once more. And if it be said that just here it is that (the philosophic virtue of evolution displays itself, by showing us that the world of efficient causation is only a means to an end coming beyond it, to whose realisation it surely points, — showing us that full self-activity, real freedom, is the plain goal, which moreover can only be won through immortality, — then I am led to ask : How will the goal be attained f I ask myself : So long as man remains a term in Nature, how can he ever escape from that causal embrace in which Nature is held immanent in God ? This very immanence in God will no doubt maintain in existence some form of Nature, as long as God himself exists ; and thus I can easily conceive of the U8 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD human spirit as going on in its share of the everlast- ing existence of Nature. But I also see that this must be at the cost of its freedom. For in the one and only life of the Cosmic Consciousness, brooding upon Nature and upon all her offspring alike, there is after all but one real agent, and that is the Con- sciousness itself. On the other hand, were I to sup- pose — as some of Dr. Le Conte's writings have at times seemed to mean — were I to suppose that death is the sublime moment in which our connexion with Nature at length comes to a close, and is thus in its truth the moment of birth for the freed spirit, so that by death the long toil of spirit-creation is com- pleted, I should indeed be at first rapt away by this surprising suggestion ; especially by the Platonic afterthought, that now the soul, set forth in her self- sufficing independence, is proof against all assaults forever, and has become indeed imperishable. But a second afterthought would follow, and I should ask : What must be the nature of this life dissevered from Nature, — bodiless, void of all sense-perception? What would be left in it except the pure elements of reason, the pure elements of perception, the pure formularies of science, and pure imagination ? But what are these, altogether, but the common equip- ment, not of my mind or of some other individual mind, but of the universal human nature ? And what is that universal nature but just the nature of the eternal Cosmic Consciousness ? Yes, my person- ality has vanished ; and death, in dissolving the tie to Nature under the alluring prospect of an existence for me wholly self-referred and self-sustaining, has COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HO WIS ON 119 resolved me back into the infinite Vague of the Cos- mic Mind, as this might, perchance, be fancied to be in itself, apart from Nature and creation, — •• that which came from out the boundless Deep Turns again home." Shall I ever issue forth again from that Inane ? Will That unfathomable Void ever create again ? — ever again enfold an embosomed Nature, to repeat again through her fertility the stupendous drama of evolu- tion ? To ask such questions is to realise how utterly we have left the native regions of our occidental thinking ; how lost we are among the most shadowy conceptions of the Orient) And no matter which alternative we take ; no matter whether we maintain Nature everlastingly, and as parts of Nature win an endless continuance, but remain forever destitute of freedom, mere aggregates of "inherited tendency" organised and moved by some new and heightened touch from the ever-immanent God ; or, on the other hand, by severance from Nature win the empty name of freedom, and vanish in a nominal immortality that only means absorption into the Eternal Inane; — in either case the so-called God is not a Personal God, since in neither does he stand in any relations of mutual responsibility and duty with other real agents. Thus I cannot see that this Evolutional Idealism makes any secure advance beyond the Monism which it seeks to amend. We appear to be left to that, after all; and for proof of it, to some such argument as that of our evening's chief speaker. Let us return, then, to that argument once more. I2 o TH E CONCEPTION OF GOD VII THE FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTION IN PROFESSOR ROYCE'S ARGUMENT : ITS KANTIAN BASIS What, now, are we to say of this argument, finally ? What are we to say to the claim that the surprising but in some sort irresistible conception reached by it must be accepted as the philosophical conception of God, be our spontaneously religious conception of that Being as different from this as it may ? This claim is rested on the two premises, (i) that no conception of God can have any philo- sophical value unless it can be proved real, or, in other words, unless it is the conception that of itself proves God to exist ; and (2) that the conception discussed before us is the only conception that can thus prove its reality. The first of these, as I have already said to you earlier, nobody with a proper training in phi- losophy would deny. The second has a very differ- ent standing, and I take but little risk, I am sure, when I question its truth entirely.. Why, then, should such an assumption be made ? I answer : Because of a still deeper assumption ; namely, that, since the thinking of Kant, the sole terms on which thought can be objectively valid are settled beyond revision. The thinking being, it is here said, cannot possibly get beyond itself ; there is no way, therefore, by which thought can reach real- ity, — unless, indeed, reality is something within the whole and true compass of the thinker's own being, as contrasted with its merely apparent and partial COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON I2 I compass. Thought, this view goes on to say, must either surrender all claims to establish reality and to know it, or else it must cease to regard reality as a "thing in itself" ; so "things in themselves" are dis- missed from critical philosophy, and henceforth thought and reality must be conceived as inseparably conjoined. But how alone is such a conjunction conceivable ? — how alone is the validity of thought specifically possi- ble ? To this it is answered : There is no way of having the required conjunction but by presupposing the unity of the thinker's self-consciousness to be intrinsically a synthetical unity — a unity, that is, con- joining in itself two correlated streams of conscious- ness. These are, the abstractly ideal and the abstractly real, mere thought and mere sense, mere idea and dead " fact." Torn from the life-giving embrace of this true unity of self-consciousness, neither of these correlates has any true reality at all, — any meaning, any growth, any being. And, reciprocally, there can be no real unity of self-consciousness apart from its living ex- pression in this pair of correlates. No knowledge — no objective certainty — is possible, if once this magic bond be broken. The price of knowledge, the price of certitude, is this inseparable union of concept with percept, of thought with sense. Sever the idea from its sensory complement, and it vanishes in the inane. The only true Ideal is the Real-Ideal, is the unity presupposed in this correlation, and embracing it, — the unity implied in every item of experie?ice, which is always just a case of this synthesis, — the unity still more profoundly implicated in every colligated group of experiences and in that progressively organised 122 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD experience which ascends the pathway of science by perpetual criticism of experience less organised, and perpetual detection of ignorance. The Real-Ideal thus turns out to be that Omniscience which is the eternal clutch holding together the two sides of ex- perience, and holding all possible forms and stages of experience in its life-giving, knowledge-assuring, reality-building grasp. Grant the accuracy and the necessity of the fundamental premise, — grant the truth of this inseparable union of pure thought with sense, of this interdependence of the rational and the sensory, — and the case is closed. The immanent Omniscience is then shown " real," in this overspan- ning meaning of that word, and nothing but such an immanent Omniscience can be made out real. There is the whole anatomy of the argument, in brief. If its fundamental premise is true, it is cer- tainly unanswerable ; and we shall be compelled to put up with this as the true account of the Absolute, whether we choose to give it the title of God or not ; nay, we shall have perforce to call it God, or else confess that this name has nothing answering to it but a baseless figment of fantasy. And yet I think it not too much to say, that, while this conception is thus made to appear as the only sound result of reason, its real meaning is no sooner realised than reason disowns it. By some slip, through some over- sight, a changeling has been put into the cradle of Reason, but Reason, when she sees it, knows that it is none of hers. Professor Royce rightly says that it is not the conception of an Ineffable Mystery, which we can only silently adore. For, in very fact, COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON 123 it is not the conception of a being that we can adore at all. The fault of it at the bar of the religious reason is, that by force of the argument leading to it all the turmoil and all the contradictions and tragic discords belonging to experience must be taken up directly into the life of the Absolute ; they are his experiences as well as ours, and must be left in him at once both dissolved and undissolved, unharmonised as well as harmonised, stilled and yet raging, atoned for and yet all unatoned. Contradiction is thus not only introduced into the very being of the Eternal, and left there, but its dialectic back-and-forth throb is made the very quickening heart of that being. It is impossible for the religious reason to accept this, no matter what the apparently philosophical reason may say in its behalf. In that fealty which is the true "substance of things hoped for," the religious reason firmly avers there must be some flaw in such philosophising, and in the name of all reason, pro- tests against the claim that this conception of God is "the inevitable outcome of a reflective philosophy." VIII SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS TRANSCENDING THIS KANTIAN ASSUMPTION Is there really, then, an impassable chasm between the logical consciousness and the religious conscious- ness ? Can the ought to be ever yield its autonomous authority to the mere is} — can the mere is, simply because it is, — nay, can the must be, simply because I2 4 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD it must be, — ever amount to the ought to be? Is the religious judgment, Whatever is, is right, a merely analytical judgment, so that what is is right merely because it is, and the predicate "right" is merely an idle other name for what is already named by its true and best name "is" ? Or is it a synthetic judg- ment, whose whole meaning lies in the complete transcending of the subject by the predicate, of the "is" by the "right," and in the shining of the Right by its own unborrowed radiance ? There can be no question how the religious reason will answer. And there will be, and will ever remain, an impassable gulf between the religious consciousness and the logical, unless the logical consciousness reaches up to embrace the religious, and learns to state the absolute Is in terms of the absolute Ought. And whether this upward and all-embracing reach can be made by the logical consciousness depends entirely — as I said a few moments ago — upon whether that fundamental premise brought into philosophy by Kant is true or not. If it is true, — if there is no knowledge transcendent of sense, and can be none, — then the absolute Is is tied up in the Being that Professor Royce has described to us, and no refuge is left to the unsatisfied Conscience but the refuge of faith : the religious consciousness will fain still believe though it cannot know, and will maintain a stainless allegiance to the City of God though this be a city without foundations. It was in this attitude of faith as pure fealty to the moral ideal, that Kant left the human spirit at the close of his great labours. It was the only solution left COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOW I SON 125 him, after his thesis of the absolute limitation of knowledge to objects of sense. But surely that thesis has a strange sound, coming from the same lips that utter with equal emphasis the lesson of our really having cognitions that are independent of all experience. This is neither the place nor the time to expose the oversight and confusion by which Kant fell into this self-contradiction ; I must content myself with saying that the contradiction exists, and that I think the oversight is exactly designable, and entirely avoidable. There is a truth concealed in Kant's thesis of the immutable conjunction of thought and sense, but there is a greater falsehood conveyed by it. And there is a stranger contradiction still, between his two main philosophical doctrines — between his Primacy of the Practical Reason and his Transcen- dental Ideality of Reason as an account of Nature and of science. Let it be as true as it may — and I suppose it is demonstrably true — that a predictive science of Nature is impossible unless Nature is con- strued as strictly phenomenal to the cognising mind, and is consequently taken entirely out of the region of " things in themselves," it by no means follows that such a science becomes possible by that supposition alone. The withholding of the supposition prevents science ; but the greatest question is : Can the grant- ing of it establish science ? May not far other con- ditions have to be met, besides the required synthesis of sense with Space and Time and the Categories, before we can declare science to be a real possibility? Or, again, because a concentration of reason upon its pure sense-forms and their sense-contents is pre- 126 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD requisite to science, does it follow that this is suffi- cient for science ? May not the non-limited use of the Categories be requisite before science is made out, — requisite quite as unquestionably as their concen- tration upon perceptions, and even more significantly ? Suppose they do have to be "schematised" in Time, or else be useless for science : does it follow that they will produce science just by being schema- tised ? — may not a conjoined use of them in an utterly unrestricted meaning be needed, in order to estab- lish judgments of absolutely universal and necessary scope, over even the course of Nature ? But what are the Categories, taken thus without restriction, but just the elements of the moral and religious conscious- ness ? Kant himself can find no better name for the moral reason than " Causality with Freedom," nor any fitter name for primary creativeness. In short, the question really is : Can science be shown in secure possibility, can the logical consciousness ever reach objective reality even in the natural world, without the direct aid of the moral and religious consciousness ? — without this consciousness adding itself into the very circuit of logic, as the completing term by which alone the circuit becomes solid, self-sustaining, and incapable of disruption ? For if it can, then the as- serted primacy of moral reason is merely nominal, and only means that moral reason has an ideal prov- ince of its own, out of all organic connexion with any world determinably real. But if it cannot, then moral reason is really primate, the reality of the scientific thinker as a moral being becomes the supreme condi- tion and the demonstrating basis of science and of COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON 127 Nature itself, the world of the Vision Beatific be- comes the one inclusive all-grounding Fact, and a real God amid his realm of real Persons becomes the absolute reality. Kant, in his provisory " thing in itself," — set aside as a problem for, further determina- tion, on the solid psychological evidence that we have not within ourselves a complete explanation of sensa- tion, — left open the door for answering this question of the total conditions essential to science. But he did not use that door. Yet, of course, he could not aver that the reality of science was made out, and the order of Nature securely predictable, so long as the nature of that co-agent "thing in itself" was undeter- mined. He also warned the philosophical world that there was no secure path to the realm of religion, his Realm of Ends, the realm of God and souls, of free- dom and immortality, except by the way of the moral reason. But he made no further use of that warning than to declare the absolute autonomy of that reason. He should have followed the path he indicated, and he would have found in its course the solution for the unknown nature of his "thing in itself." This would have been found as soon as he had noted the gap still remaining in the logic of science, and had seen, as he might have seen, that nothing but filling the void of the "thing in itself" with the World of Spirits, the sum of the postulates of the Practical Reason, could close that gap. When we shall have gone back to where he paused, and completed the work which he left unfinished, then fealty will be translated into insight, our faith will have a logical support, our moral common-sense will 128 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD receive its philosophic confirmation, and the reality of the World of Persons, and of God as its eternal Fount and Ground and Light, will be made out. Then genuine and inspiring religion — the religion not of submission but of. aspiration, not of bondage but of freedom, of Love rather than of Faith and of Hope — will have passed from its present stage of anxious conjecture to the stage of settled fact, — Now abideth Faith, Hope, Love, these three ; but the greatest of these is Love. NOTE THE DISCUSSION RECAPITULATED IN QUESTIONS For the sake, particularly, of readers unfamiliar with philo- sophical technicalities, I may here recapitulate my criticisms of the evening's addresses, suggest a few others, and hint a little more fully at my own answers to the problems discussed, by means of the following questions : ON PROFESSOR ROYCE's ADDRESS 1. Does a Supreme Being, or Ultimate Reality, no matter how assuredly proved, deserve the name of God, simply by virtue of its Reality and Supremacy? Is simple Supremacy divine, even if made out in idealistic terms — in terms, say, of Omniscience ? 2. Can the attribute of Omniscience amount to a criterion of Deity until we determine the nature of the objects contained in the total sphere of its cognition, and find there real persons as the supreme and all-determining objects of its view ? COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOW I SON I2 g 3. To put the preceding question in another way, Can an Omniscient Being amount to a Divine Being unless the core and spring of this Omniscience be proved to be a Conscience ? 4. Does the argument to an Omniscient Reality from human ignorance, taken in its precise reach, provide for persons as the prime objects of Omniscience, or for Conscience as its central spring? — does this argument make Omniscience involve Love in any other sense than that of Content with its own action, and with its self-produced objects, merely as forms of that action? 5. Is it reasonable to speak of God as having an experience, even an absolute experience ? Or, if it is, what change in kind in the meaning of "experience" is involved? — is not "experience," thus taken, a name for the self-consciousness of pure Thought and pure Creative Imagination? In the natural and unforced sense of the words, can there be an absolute experience? — an absolute feeling one's may along tentatively, or any absolute, i.e. wholly self-supplied, contents received — facts of sense? 6. Is the reasoning to an Absolute Experience and an Abso- lute Thought by means of the implications inevitable in assert- ing our limitation to be real, capable (1) of making out an Ultimate Reality in any other sense than that of an Active Supreme Judgment as the grounding or inclusive being of the single thinker who frames the argument ; (2) of combining this ultimate reality of this single thinker with that of other thinkers equally real ? 7. To put the foregoing question in less cumbrous, though less explanatory terms : Can an argument like Professor Royce's prove an Absolute Mind distinct from each thinker's mind, or an Absolute Mind coexisting with other genuine minds, unquestion- ably as real as itself? What is the true test of reality? — and how alone can finitude coexist with unabated reality? Is not that test self-active intelligence? — and, in order to our being real notwithstanding our finitude, must not Nature be conceived as conditioned by human nature, instead of conditioning it ? 8. To put the question in still another way : Must not the convincing force of every such method of reasoning to the Abso- lute be necessarily confined to a monistic view of existence? That is, will not the method of proof confine us to a single and K 13° THE CONCEPTION OF GOD sole Infinite Inclusive Self, and reduce all particular so-called selves merely to modes of his omniscient Perceptive Concep- tion? Does the argument not require us to accept God, so called, as the one and only real agent — the vera causa sola? 9. Is such a view of existence compatible with the true per- sonalily of human beings, or with a true personality of God? 10. What is the real test of personality? Is it just self-con- sciousness, without further heightening of quality, or must it be self-consciousness as Conscience? What is Conscience? Is it not the immutable recognition of persons — the consciousness of self and of other selves as alike unconditional Ends, who thereby have (1) Rights, inalienable, and (2) Duties, absolutely binding ? ON PROFESSOR MEZES S CRITICISM 1. Is it true that the relativity of pastness and futurity must be taken to mean that they are illusions? Is Caesar really dead and turned to clay, and also really, in the one Eternal Moment, now conquering Gaul and Britain, and dominating the envious Senate? 2. Can Eternity be adequately stated in terms of time at all? Is there not an Eternal Order, and also a Temporal? — a Nou- menal and a Phenomenal? 3. Must the ideal being answering to the moral conception contain the trait of progressive improvement? Is not this the characteristic of minds marked with fniitude? — that is, having in their consciousness an aspect that is finite? ON PROFESSOR LE CONTE S REMARKS 1 . Does Dr. Le Conte's argument to God from the footing of science show that there is a Cosmic Consciousness, or only that there might well enough be such a Consciousness? 2. Is not a Cosmic Consciousness, reached by such an argu- ment {if reached by it), necessarily to be taken as having a mo- nistic relation to the Cosmos? Does not its Omnipresence, too, take the form of a universal pervasion of space as well as of COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON 131 time? — and is there any meaning in the statement, taken liter- ally, that a Mind pervades space, a.i\d fills time? Besides, in the strict sense, has Space any extent to be pervaded, or Time any duration to be filled? 3. Is such a doctrine of the " Divine Immanence in Nature " compatible with the real freedom of human beings ? If not, does it leave such beings truly real? Does it not make the so-called God the sole real agent? If so, does it not make a Moral Order impossible ? 4. Can a Being without a Moral Order and a moral govern- ment — that is, without associates indestructibly free — be a per- son at all? — much more, an Infinite Person, a God? 5. Can God, the Ideal of tlie Reason, the Being whose essence is moral perfection, be adequately conceived as being immanent in the creation, or as having the creation immanent in ///;;/, if this be taken to mean, in the one case, pervasively present and directly active within the entire creation, and, in the other case, directly embracing or enfolding it in his own life ? 6. In what sense, only, can God rightly be said to be im- manent in his creation? — is it not in this, that his Image, his nature or kind, not his own Person, is ever present there, as the effective result of his Creative Omniscience, so that his creation, too, in its inclusive unity, proceeds of itself, as well as he? 7. Can a process of evolution, through Nature and in time, possibly give rise to a being really free, and personally immor- tal ? — to a creation indeed self-active, and therefore indestruc- tible? 8. Is an evolutional origin of man, then, .compatible with a Divine creation? If so, in what sense, only, of the word " man " ? Is it not man the phenomenon merely — man the experience-con- tents, physical (governed by Space) on the one hand, and psy- chical (governed by Time) on the other, instead of man the noumenon — the completely real man who is the Inclusive Ac- tive Unit that embraces and grounds all its being in its own active self-consciousness? — in short, is not the field of human evolution just the human body and the human states of mind? 9. What can the fact be, that has caused so many of the prominent minds of our time to stumble at the notion of an In- 132 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD finite Person, as involving a self-contradiction? — is it not the difficulty of reaching the true conception of the Real Infinite? 10. Ought we not to discriminate between two vitally different meanings of this ancient word "infinite" ? — which is primary and determinative, and which only derivative? Is not every Person infinite in this first and profound sense? V THE ABSOLUTE AND THE INDIVIDUAL A SUPPLEMENTARY DISCUSSION, WITH REPLIES TO CRITICISMS BY PROFESSOR ROYCE THE ABSOLUTE AND THE INDIVIDUAL INTRODUCTION The public discussion at Berkeley, whose docu- ments the Philosophical Union published shortly after the event, in pamphlet form, was, as a fact, immediately succeeded by several more private meet- ings, 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 imprinted. More than a year has since passed. The Philosophi- cal 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 devel- opments 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 in- structive 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 '35 I3 6 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 Individual- ism, 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 anti- nomy 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 sub- ject 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 pos- sessed by ethical individuals has its place in the SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE x 37 development of an idealistic philosophy, and its place is in some ways well denned 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 vent- ured 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 sepa- rately 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 I3§ THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 pres- ent 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 phi- losophy. In this sense, and in this only, he seeks, as such a student, for self-consciousness. But other- wise, 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 be- fore 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 SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROEESSOR ROYCE i 39 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 de- fence, 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 sup- plementary and more private discussions of the Union at Berkeley, mentioned above, I shall endeavour to de- velope the relation of the notion of Will to the con- cept 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 con- cept 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 140 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD of the definition of human, i.e. self-conscious, Individu- ality in its metaphysical implications, referring espe- cially 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. PART I THE CONCEPTION OF REALITY The conception of Reality is one which philosophi- cal 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 some- thing that metaphysical dreaming can make out. It is something forced upon us by the irresistible com- pulsion of experience. We know regarding it, not its ultimate structure, but its appearances in our in- dividual 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 1 Throughout the whole following discussion the reader may notice, from time to time, the influence of various special discussions that occur in Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality. I acknowledge this influence the more readily in view of the fact that after all, as will appear, I often dissent from Mr. Bradley's conclusions. But there is space only for this general acknowledgment. 141 142 THE CONCEPTION OF COD "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 ithe details of its life. But in developing this argu- ment, 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 fash- ion 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 re- view, 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 con- trast 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 philoso- phy, refutation is never our whole business. Even SUPPLEMEMTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE ^3 the most unreflective and popular Realism embodies a i truth, which it is our duty as idealists to comprehend, and to include within a larger truth. Moreover, as I hold, that truth upon which realistic doctrines lay a falsely one-sided stress is intimately related to the very truth which Professor Howison seeks to bring into such prominence ; and Professor Howison him- self, in declaring that the concept of " things in themselves " must ultimately receive an ethical inter- pretation, has explicitly pointed out a deep relation between the realistic and the ethical theories of Being. In short, Professor Howison's thesis might be called an Ethical Realism quite as fairly as an Ethical Idealism. It becomes me, therefore, in the re-examination of the concept of Reality to give some of the fundamental conceptions of Realism the fairest scrutiny that space here permits. For of course no Idealism can in the end be acceptable which is not just both to those " external facts " upon which the realist usually lays such stress, and to those moral realities to which Professor Howison devotes his attention. And the thesis that the true basis of the so-called "external facts," the real meaning of the "things in themselves," lies in the moral world, is one that for me, as for Professor Howison, has great philosophical importance. I shall therefore, in the present part of my paper, first scrutinise some realistic interpretations of the meaning of the concept of Reality ; then, as I pro- ceed, I shall restate and defend my idealistic inter- pretation of this concept ; and thus I shall prepare the way for an effort, in the later parts of this paper, 144 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD so to develope Idealism that it may include the truth both of ordinary Realism and of the ethical interpre- tation of reality. THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF REALITY One sees, hears, touches, — in general, one experi- ences, — " 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 indepen- dence 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 real- ity, 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 ob- ject, needs, as such, not at all the plastic and submissive presence of me as subject. 1 As subject, I am, to be 1 Sigvvart, Logik, 2d ed., i, 90: "Was 'ist,' das ist nicht bloss von meiner Denkthatigkeit erzeugt, sondern unabhangig von derselben, bleibt dasselbe, ob ich es im Augenblick vorstelle oder nicht." Id., 1, 44 : " Der Satz : Kein Objekt ohne Subjekt, ist im demselben Sinne wie SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY BY PROFESSOR ROYCE j^ sure, in relation to an object; the real that I experi- ence 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. Know- ing 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 com- pulsion. 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 pre- supposition, 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 der Satz : Em Reiter kann nicht zu Fuss gehn." These are typical expressions of realistic presuppositions, taken from a representative modern book. 146 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 ques- tions 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 im- plications 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 evi- dence 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, SUPPLEMENTAL. Y ESS.4 Y BY PR OFESSOR R O YCE j 47 is superior to all reflection. One does not first reason towards any realistic result. One just feels the world to be independent, as one feels red to be red. Others teach that this evidence, although certain and un- questionable, is "mediate," or in other words is an evidence that comes by means of a certain process of interpreting facts in accordance with principles, or of reasoning from data. The teachers of this latter thesis, again, vary in their expressions. Some declare that the certainty of the independent reality of the object-world is mediated by a general and a priori "intuition" of some sort, a principle more or less obviously innate, whose deliverance is the unques- tionable assertion that there must be some external basis, some independent truth, behind the mere fact of consciousness. Others appeal to a character found each time afresh, in the individual data of perception, but experienced as having a mediate or indirect significance. This character is a certain tendency of the experienced facts to refer beyond themselves, not by virtue of any general intuition on the part of the knowing subject, but by virtue of a stamp or mark of " reference " which some of the data themselves empirically possess, just as one's desires are often said to be experienced as referring to their own, perhaps distant, fulfilment. One ex- periences the presence of this " reference " in each new fact of external experience. Others, still, declare that we first experience, within ourselves, the genuine though limited efficacy of our own active wills in directing some of our own states, and that, hereupon, perceiving that this efficacy is limited, that this inner I4 8 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD activity is held in check, by the presence of our ex- ternal 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 conscious- ness, namely, its essentially fragmentary, its immedi- ately unstable character, in so far as it is regarded with reference to its meaning. That our conscious- ness, 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 " indepen- dently real" world, which shall "transcend" all con- sciousness whatever, is due to manifold motives, and in part to relatively unphilosophical motives, whose origin I take to be largely social. 1 But no idealist can doubt the presence in consciousness of those pri- mary tendencies upon which realists of all types have laid such stress. The question is as to the interpreta- tion of such motives. In what sense is it that our consciousness is always pointing beyond itself ? 1 I may here refer to my paper on The External World and the Social Consciousness, in the Philosophical Review for September, 1894. SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY BY PROFESSOR ROYCE ^g II THE POSSIBILITIES OF EXPERIENCE The easiest way to begin a comprehensible answer to this question is, as I must forthwith insist, the way that I indicated in my first paper — the way upon which idealists have so often insisted. When any experience refers beyond itself, what it at the very least may refer to, what it may aim to grasp and tc know, what it may regard as valid independently ol its own contents, may well be, and in our lives often explicitly is, other possible experience not here pre\ sented. One has an experience of a blue object that seems to be "yonder on the horizon." One's experi- ence herewith undertakes to refer to a reality that exists independently of just this experience. But the reality in question may be explicitly regarded, not as any Ding an sich, but solely as other, " really possi- ble," experience. " If I approach," one may mean, " if I move towards yonder mountain, I shall cease to experience a mere patch of blue on the horizon. I shall erelong see bold outlines, the forms of crags, of valleys, of forests. In the end, if I approach near enough, I shall experience what I shall call the touch of the solid objects yonder. Now in saying this I at least may abstract from all reference to the "tran- scendent" objects of the realist. I may be meaning simply, that, whereas I now experience such or such visual contents, it is permanently possible that I should experience other contents, visual and tactile, if I performed certain acts. These permanent possi- ISO THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 con- sciousness not here realised, but regarded as perma- nently realisable. 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 ten- dency of consciousness to look for something inde- pendent of its own contents. This independent something may be the independent validity of a " permanent possibility of experience," in the sense of Kant's "mogliche 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 conscious- ness. 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 indepen- dent 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 experi- ence of growing old), have aspects which are viewed SUPPLEMENTARY ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE j 5 1 as quite independent of my present hopes and of my present regrets. The latter are experiences that im- ply a reference to what both transcends them and is true independently of them. But this transcendent and independent reality of past or of future is still not the realist's Ding an sich, but is a content of experience. Finally, when I converse with another man, and suppose myself to be comprehending what he says, my experiences refer beyond themselves to a reality supposed by me to have an aspect quite inde- pendent of my experience, but this independence is still only the independence belonging to an experience other than mine, 1 namely, my fellow's experience. When an experience refers beyond itself, it may, then, be referring to " other experience, actual and possible, not here presented." Mysterious as all such reference appears when first critically exam- ined, there can be no doubt of the presence and of the frequency of just such forms of appeal to the "transcendent." There can also be no doubt, that every such appeal from one moment of conscious- ness to other experience, actual and possible, pre- sents itself as a reference to a reality. The past and the future, my neighbour's mind, and the whole range of the "genuine possibilities" of experience, — these are, for any moment of experience that refers to any of them, as really "independent" real- ities, which one knows or does not know, truly 1 Concerning the concept of " experience not my own,'' compare discussions both in my article cited p. 148, note, and in an article entitled Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness, and Nature, which I printed in the Philosophical Review, July and September, 1895. 152 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD grasps or falsely reports, finds mysterious or regards as clear and certain, — as really independent reali- ties 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 assur- ance, 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 expe- rience. The problem therefore arises: "Can other types of objects than these be denned 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 con- sciousness immediately know what is by hypothesis immediately determined as not present to conscious- ness, 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. SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESS A Y BY PROFESSOR RO YCE 153 The existence of the object, xvhen it is not felt, is ipso facto something not felt. This existence, as for argu- ment's sake we may momentarily admit, may indeed be " known," that is, it may be believed in, from the start, it may be accepted as a " postulate," it may be concluded from signs, from intuitions, from reason- ings long or brief ; but, in any case, it cannot be a matter of merely immediate knowledge. For imme- diate knowledge, if it means anything, means know- ledge of what is present in feeling. One turns, then, to the other forms of Realism. Consciousness somehow, although not in a merely immediate way, bears witness to the presence of a transcendent object, which is independent of all con- sciousness. But, once more, How ? Amongst the numerous answers to this question attempted by philosophical realists, there are three which here especially concern us. They form the genuine basis of the more reflective sorts of Realism ; and together they actually express a truth. Ill THE FIRST ARGUMENT FOR REALISM The first of these three answers runs : The data of our experience, and in fact of all consciousness, viewed just as the data of consciousness, present themselves in such form as to call for explanation. The explanation called for cannot be furnished by other data of consciousness ; for these, again, being such data, would themselves require explanation. 154 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD Therefore, that which explains the data of conscious- ness 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 ex- planation 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 con- sciousness ? The first of these two answers, one says, would only postpone the problem. Conscious- ness 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 transcen- dent objects alone can be causally independent — the sources from which our data proceed. Other hardly less favourite ways of stating this in- sistence upon explanation demand either logical or teleological explanations of the conscious data, in such SUPPLEMEXTAR V ESS.4 V BY PR OFESSOR R YCE i 5 5 fashion as to lead to the assumption of the tran- scendent objects. Conscious data are " appearances." Appearances imply " Etivas das da erscheint." Where there is so much smoke, there must be fire. Experience is the smoke. Only what transcends con- sciousness could be the fire, i.e., here, the logically intelligible basis of the appearances. Again, were there nothing transcendent, experience would be a dream, without even a dreamer. These various ways of attempting to show that the denial of the tran- scendent would involve a denial of a "necessary logi- cal implication of the very existence of a world of appearance," thus gradually pass, through the meta- phor of the "dream," to a stage where the " explana- tion " called for, the " implication " insisted upon, is rather teleological than either causal or logical. To deny the transcendently real world would be to make experience "meaningless," by depriving it of "good sense," by leaving no true difference between dream and waking, between science and madness. " Eiu gesundcr Realismus,'' as some recent German writers love to call it, could alone so explain experiences as to give significance to our conscious data, which "amount to nothing" unless there are transcendent realities behind them. Hence, only the dreamy men of the closet can be idealists. Practical men, and men wide awake, believe in transcendent realities. In fact, it is more or less immoral not to believe in such transcendent realities. Thus in the end our realist may approach as nearly as you please to the arguments, and, as we shall see, to the theses, of Professor Howison. ! 56 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 sug- gested by the special canons and categories of human social intercommunication. This essentially conven- tional 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, a, b, c, etc. One says : " There is known to us some principle of explanation which declares that wherever any fact, />, of the type to which a, b, c, etc., belong, is presented, there must SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR RO YCE iS7 exist a fact behind or beyond/, namely x, such that x explains/ by standing to p in the known relation R, ■ — say, the relation of cause to effect, or of logical condition to consequent, or of teleological explainer to that whose sense or meaning it explains. And, in general, the relation R is such as to require x to be of another type than /. Now, in case a, b, c, etc., are data of experience, then the x which stands to any one of them in the relation R does not, by hypothesis, belong, in general, to the series a, b, c, etc. Hence, in general, it must be transcendent." I reply, in the usual idealistic fashion : What do you mean by this relation R ? I care not how you know that such a relation is necessary, or must exist. This your knowledge may be a human convention or a primal " intuition." That here concerns us not. What I ask is, how you express to your mind the nature of this relation R, whatever it is, and wherever it may exist or be known to exist. Do you or do you not mean, by this relation R, a relation which you at once conceive as capable of being presented to you in some possible experience ? You say : "The relation is real." You mean something by the assertion, and something said to be well known to you. For the relation R is by hypothesis especially clear to you. You are so sure of it that you use it to prove the presence of that otherwise unknowable and tran- scendent x; and you define x as that which stands in the relation R to any fact p of our experience. Is not, then, this relation R clear to you just because, however it is supposed to be realised, a possible ex- perience could present to you the known situation 158 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD that the relation expresses ? For instance, let the relation R be the causal relation. You know, by hypothesis, what causation means. Surely this im- plies that in your experience you have already met, or could meet, with cases of what you would recog- nise 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 experi- ence. 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 stand- ing in a certain relation R (which also is, by hypothe- sis, 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 transcen- dent ? This is as if you should say : " I know quanti- ties, a, 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 quan- . tity at all." This would be absurd. It is precisely \ as absurd to say : Contents of experience stand in a j known and clear relation, that itself is, as such, an ob- j ject of possible experience, to something that is to be j expressly defined as no object of any possible experi- 'j ence whatever. If the relation is, as such, an object < of a possible experience, then its terms are so too. SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR R YCE 159 But a realist may try to escape this consequence. He may say : " No, the relation R is itself, to my mind, something sure, indeed, but transcendent. I do not regard causality in itself, or explanation in itself, as capable of being presented to the mind in any possible experience. What I say is, that the facts of the type exemplified by p are known to stand in a transcendent relation A'toa transcendent basis x. This is sure. But R is as transcendent as x." I reply : Thus you but open the door to a fatal in- finite progress. One asks you, again : What evidence can you give for this transcendent and unexperienced existence, beyond consciousness, of R, — say, of causa- tion, or of some other form of explanatory relation ? Afresh you must answer, if you still cling to the present line of argument : " Because the facts of ex- perience demand, for their explanation, the existence of some such transcendent relation to transcendent realities." But this new demand for explanation in- troduces a new relation, R' , between the facts of experience, a, b, c, etc., and the first relation R, which was to be that relation to x whereby they were ex- plained. All our questions as to R now recur as to R', the new mediator that is to bring us to the as- sumption of R. For instance, if you first had said : "The data of experience need causation to explain them," one has now asked you, as above : What sort of causation?- — the sort of causation known within experience, and, by its very definition, known as a datum of possible experience ? Our realist is now supposed to have replied : " Not so. The causation whereby I explain the data of experience is itself a 160 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD transcendent sort of causation, that, as a relation existent outside of experience, links us to the tran- scendent 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 causal- ity. 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 assur- ance 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. IV THE SECOND ARGUMENT FOR REALISM, AND ITS IDEALISTIC INTERPRETATION 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- S UPPLEMEN1 W A' Y ESS A Y BY PR OFESSOR li O YCE i g 7 sible experience " has already included and denned. If, by saying that an experience, p, needs an explanation in the existence of some fact x , which stands to p in the relation R, one refers to a relation R identical with an already known and experienced relation, one inevitably implies the assertion : " If the fact p were properly known, it would be experienced as in the relation R to x" ; and hereupon x, as well as /, must be viewed as the object or content of a possible experience. Thus x ceases to be anything that we have so far regarded as a transcendent object. But if one re- gards the relation R itself as a transcendent relation, a new mediating relation, R', is needed to make valid any argument for the transcendent reality of the first relation R ; and an infinite regress becomes necessary. The first argument of the realist accordingly fails. But he has ready a second and more cogent con- sideration. Instead of permitting this x to become essentially a fact of experience as before, by virtue of the conception of the real as the " content of pos- sible experience," he now directly undertakes to use this latter conception as an argument for his own, and to absorb whatever is implied by a "content of possible experience '' in his own notion. This second and more cogent realistic argument funs as follows : It has been admitted by the sup- posed opponent of Realism that he himself is unable to state in terms of experience that is altogether concrete and actual, or that, in other words, is the experience of somebody in particular, the whole con- stitution of the truth to which he appeals. He is lQ 2 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 expe- rience. 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 Real- ism, 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 illu- sions, 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, SUPPLEMENTARY ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR RO YCE iQ$ I expressly pointed out that the " possibilities of ex- perience," in so far as they remained bare possibili- ties, are as unintelligible as the realist's "things in themselves." Idealism cannot pause half-way with- out falling a helpless prey to the counter-dialectics of the realists. Our Idealism, as we first stated it, both in the original paper and in the earlier portion of the present review, is just such a half-way Idealism. In presence of the realistic counter-arguments, it is helpless to defend its positive assertion. It is only able continually to reassert its own kind of objection to the positive thesis of the realist. But it is indeed fair to say, that the objection of the half-idealist to the positive realistic thesis in question is precisely as cogent as the realistic rejoinder. Each theory, as a fact, is, so far, helpless to defend its positive asser- tions against an opponent's criticism. The realist asserts : " Beyond all our experience, there is some- thing wholly unlike experience, the 'thing in itself.' " To this thesis our half-idealist always rejoins: " What do you mean by your ' thing in itself,' — by the reality, and by the nature, that you ascribe to it? And in what relation do you mean it to stand to experience ? As soon as you tell, you interpret your supposed reality wKolIy in terms of experience. You never define that transcendent beyond, of which you speak. You say, only : ' If we looked further into the nature of what our present experience implies, we should get other experiences in addition to those that we now have.' Into such possibilities of experience your 'thing in itself,' as well as all its relations, causal and other, to our present experience, is transformed, in 1 64 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 hy- pothesis, 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 ex- perienced, 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 conten- tion. For within the range of what individuals do experience you admit that we cannot remain. You admit the possibilities of experience as somehow gen- uine. You cannot do without them. Yet, as soon as you admit them, you admit an element transcend- ing concrete experience. You admit something whose presence you cannot escape, but whose nat- ure 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 recog- nises, even in trying to conceal the fact of the recog- nition. 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 SUPPLEMENTARY ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE Y ^ maintain. I should indeed prefer to say that what you call ' possibilities ' exist beyond experience as grounds of possibility, unknown natures of things, which determine in advance what our experience shall be when it comes. Such a fashion of state- ment appears to me a franker admission of the in- evitable transcendence." And our half-idealist can now only retort once more : " But what do you mean by the beyond, whether of the possibility or of its ground, known or unknown ? Tell what you mean, and this beyond becomes no longer unknown, no longer transcendent. It becomes content of experi- ence." And thus the endless conflict may go on. Now, what possible way of escape is there from this dilemma ? I submit : The half-idealist must be- come a thoroughgoing idealist or nothing. He must assert : " Beyond experience there is, if anything, further experience." ""And this further experience, so he must assert, is just as concrete, just as definite, as our own, and is real in the same sense in which our own is real. The proof that such experience exists.' beyond our own must rest, for the true idealist, in thej first place, upon just the considerations that lead] both half-idealist and realist to assert that our owni experience, as something fragmentary, cannot be) accepted alone, but implies its own complement.! More deeply stated, the thesis of the idealist must be : — That our experience, as essentially imperfect, that is, as not fulfilling the very ideas which we ourselves have acquired in presence of this experience, de- mands from us statements as to whether these ideas arejtruly fulfilled or not. For instance, we have an t 66 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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" {Tlie Reli- gions 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 ad- mit, 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 ex- perience " which, if presented, would throw light upon the meaninglessness of our questions concern- ing actual experience beyond our own. A fortiori, if our questions admit of definite answer, there is now SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY BY PROFESSOR ROYCE \Qy "possible experience" that, if attained, would throw light upon the question as to what contents are actual beyond the now presented contents. Still more certainly can we say that either a true or a false answer to our questions, if now given, would be true or false by virtue of its agreement with contents that, if presented, would confirm or refute the sup- posed answer. Just so as regards the question con- cerning the present fulfilment of any other idea, such as the idea of the completeness of the world of ex- perience, or the idea of a whole world of facts. All such questions, whether just now a definite answer for any one of them is true or false, or whether any one of them is a meaningless question, imply beyond our own experience a present " possibility of experi- ence," such as even now warrants the truth of some assertion in reply to each question. It is in this sense that our experience implies a beyond, and a beyond that, in the first place, appears as a world of definite "possible experience," having a determi- nate, and in the end inevitably a true, total constitu- tion. This total constitution it is impossible, however, to leave finally in the shape just given to it, without recognising, first, that our realist is right in demand- ing that all possibility shall have its ground in some- thing beyond the mere feeling or assertion of the possibility itself; and, secondly, that the idealist is right in maintaining that nothing viewed as being beyond experience, in its wholeness, can be rationally asserted as a reality. The inevitable result is that the total constitution of the world of fact must be pre- sented to a concrete whole of actual experience, of 1 !58 the conception of god which ours is a fragment. The intimacy of the rela- tion of our fragmentary experience to this total ex- perience is indicated by the way in which our experience implies that total. Thus the second argument of our realist is of act- ual 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 fragmen- tary experience that is here and now present, and be- yond 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 rela- tion 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 interpre- tation, their just confirmation, or their refutation, — in a word, their fulfilment. SUPPLEMENT.! R Y ESS A Y BY PR OFESSOR R YCE T fig It must be observed that what is here said about the interpretation of experience in general, must inev- itably apply to the ethical experiences and ideas upon which Professor Howison lays so much stress. An ethical fact, qua fact, possesses no advantage in logic over any other fact. When I assert the real variety, the moral independence, or any other sort of relative separation of the individuals of the moral world, I assert a fact which, whatever be the reasons for its assertion, must, as fact, be viewed either as beyond anybody's experience or else as present to some ex- perience ; say, to the Absolute Experience. The former hypothesis leads me once more through all the stages of the foregoing argument. The latter hypothesis alone solves the logical problem of the real facts in question. However diverse, or separate, the moral individuals may be, the reality of their very separation itself is a fact which must be present in and for the unity of the Absolute Experience. This their separation is only relative. When Professor Howison asserts that, for any moral individual, his fellow, namely, any other moral individual, is a be- yond, and as such inaccessible, he asserts precisely what an ordinary realist asserts concerning the nat- ure of every fact not presented in concrete human experience. As against a half-idealist, who should attempt to reduce the contents of his neighbour's inner life to mere possibilities of his own personal and pri- vate experience, Professor Howison is unquestionably right. But as against an Absolute Idealism, which admits that fact transcends the bare assertion of any real possibility of experience, but which recognises, 170 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD for that very reason, that all fact, as such, has to be present to an Absolute Experience, Professor Howi- son's ethical enthusiasm is logically defenceless. I agree that Individuality is a fact. I agree that it is an ethical fact. I agree that the fact of other indi- viduality than mine is to me, in my private capacity, something transcendent. But such transcendence has many other examples, doubtless not so important, but nevertheless logically instructive. What happened last year, now has a reality which entirely transcends any moment of present experience, — inaccessibly transcends it, so that one in vain tries to state the true essence of the real past by converting it into mere present possibilities of experience ; as, for ex- ample, by saying that the past means that if I were back there now, I should experience so and so. Such possibilities of experience do not express what the past as such is, and always henceforth will be, namely, essentially irrevocable. Even so, no at- tempt to transmute my neighbour's real inner life into possibilities of my own experience is or can be suc- cessful, in so far as I am taken in my own finite and individual selfhood. But just as past and present, from an idealistic point of view, are fragments of the eternal Now, — of the Absolute Experience, — so the fact of the relative finite isolation of individuals is a real fact in so far as the Absolute Experience finds it to be such. What the source and ultimate nature of Individuality is, and whether the whole truth of Indi- viduality is well expressed by calling it merely a fact present in the content of the Absolute Experience, is a question to be later considered. I agree with Pro- SUPPLEMENTARY ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE I ^ I fessor Howison that there is another aspect to the world, in addition to the aspect upon which I have so far laid stress in this review. That the Absolute Ex- perience is organically linked with an absolute Will and Love ; that the contents of this Experience are not only facts, but chosen fulfilments of ideals ; and that individuals are not only facts of the Absolute Experi- ence, but expressions, embodiments, cases, — forms, if you will, — of the Absolute Love itself; all this I shall hereafter have occasion to consider. But here I am considering the world of fact in so far as it is fact, not in so far as it has value, or expresses the divine Will. And I insist that, viewed merely as fact, Individuality logically resembles any other fact, and that the real va- riety of individuals logically presupposes and depends upon the unity of the Absolute Experience, precisely as does any other real fact. Ethical Realism must stand or fall, just like other Realism ; namely, as a rel- atively true, but fragmentary, expression of what an Absolute Idealism alone can express in truth. V THE THIRD ARGUMENT FOR REALISM : TRANSITION TO ABSOLUTE IDEALISM I now pass to the last of the realist's three argu- ments. Ignoring both the contents of the foregoing discussion and the conclusions which we have drawn from it, the realist may now insist upon another aspect of our ordinary experience, as implying the existence of transcendent objects beyond experience. Y-J2 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD " The most characteristic feature of our conscious- ness," he may say, " in so far as our consciousness is rational, appears in our tendency to refer again and again, in our various successive thoughts, to what we call the 'same' object. To-day I see a house. I leave it, and to-morrow I return to the ' same ' house. My friend whom I meet to-day is the 'same' man whom I met yesterday. I myself am the ' same ' per- son at various times. These are ordinary assump- tions of common-sense. Nor is it possible to deal at all with our experience without making such assump- tions. One may be a sceptic, and may assert that possibly what I call the ' same ' house or the ' same ' man, on various occasions, is only in seeming the same. Notoriously more difficult it is to suppose, even in a sceptical mood, that I myself am not the same self as I was. But scepticism often can and does extend to at least a formal doubt or denial of some aspect of the ' unity of apperception ' in vari- ous successive thoughts. Yet even such scepticism must come to a limit somewhere. When I say 'A given proposition is now true,' even if it be only the proposition that ' I feel warm,' or that ' rain falls,' I am able to assert that this proposition will always be true of that moment in which its truth was experi- enced. And this implies at least the possibility that, whether or no memory ever afterwards accurately serves me, an assertion should later be made which shall have this moment for its object ; so that many assertions are thenceforth possible which shall refer to this same moment, although the assertions them- selves may be made at very various times. Now," SUPPLEMENTAL. Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 1 73 as one may continue, " there is nothing about the later judgments and their contents which of itself contains or explains this relation of reference of the later judg- ments to the same object. The object may, by hy- pothesis, be one that, in its time, was a presented content of experience. But neither the original ob- ject or content, nor the later judgments about it, can be said to contain, as parts, — that is, as facts of experience, — that relation of reference which makes them all judgments about the same facts. Still more impossible is it to reduce to any mere contents of human experience the relation that we have in mind when we say, or conceive, that, as a fact, many peo- ple can at the same time refer to the same objects, or, at various times, can think of the same objects. An idealist may undertake to say, as much as he pleases, that what, in its time, was called the Battle of Mara- thon was a mere mass of contents of experience in the minds of the Greeks and Persians concerned. He may try to deny that the swords, javelins, and horses present were in any sense transcendently real objects, external to anybody's experience. But what the idealist cannot explain, or even express in his terms, is how various schoolboys to-day, various poets and orators in successive ages, various historians, scholars, archaeologists, can all think, read, learn, dispute, about the same event, namely, the Battle of Marathon itself. For the battle, when now thought of, is no longer pre- sented experience for anybody. Nor (and this is of special importance) is one man's inner thought or ex- perience, which in him represents the Battle of Mara- thon, in the faintest degree identical with the thought 174 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 experi- ence 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 Mara- thon 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 con- tent 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 experi- ence, 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 SUPPLEMENTARY ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE US to which reference is made, should transcend the stream of experience itself, and should be really ex- ternal to it. Into the stream of experience, as into the flux of Heraclitus, nobody descends twice at the same point. If, however, the sameness of reference is still possible, whereby many experiences bear upon, many thoughts portray, the same content of fact, existent beyond them all, then the relations of reference, if not the facts referred to, must be real beyond all experience." Our realist might combine the present line of argu- ment with the one which, in the foregoing discussion, he used to expound his second consideration. He might insist that whoever speaks of an object of pos- sible experience not now presented, implies that this object is such that, were it converted into presenta- tion, this presentation would somehow be knowable as identical with, as the same as, the object defined before presentation. If I see the light yonder on the horizon, and guess that it is a fire, the half-idealist of the foregoing discussion defines my object as my possible further experience of flame or heat in case I should approach the light. But, as our realist may now maintain, the experience which I should have if I approached the fire would not fulfil the defined possibility of experience, asserted by one who sees the light upon the horizon, unless one could say that, upon approach, he found the same light gradually expanding into the expected experience of fire, and unless he found that the fire later experienced was somehow the same as the fire expected. Without the category of Sameness, in the objects of concrete ex- 176 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD perience, and in the objects of our thoughts about possible experience at various times, the whole theory about possibilities of experience would be meaning- less. Yet nowhere in our flowing experience does the sameness, which the half-idealist also presup- poses, ever get adequately and finally presented. Nor could it be presented to any temporal experience similar to our own. Thus afresh may the realist maintain that the sameness of our objects logically jinvolv.es their transcendence. This argument from the sameness of the objects of various experiences and thoughts — a sameness required indeed by all rationality — is probably the strongest, and, properly viewed, the most enlighten- ing, of realistic arguments. It is not, like the earli- est arguments mentioned in the foregoing discussion, a mere appeal to common-sense prejudices. It is an appeal to something that the utmost scepticism, if articulate, not only admits, but asserts ; namely, that various judgments and moments of experience can mean the same objects. Without this assertion, no criticism of a thesis, no sceptical rejection of a theory, no doubt about the power of our thought to know truth, can be seriously stated or definitely main- tained. If one wants the ultimate truth regarding what motive it is that forces us to transcend our frag- mentary experience, in idea if not in fact, and to seek in the beyond for something missing in the stream of consciousness, nowhere can one better satisfy one's curiosity than in taking account of this aspect of ex- perience and of this motive in favour of transcen- dence. On the other hand, no one of the realistic SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 177 arguments is more adapted for an immediate trans- formation into the form, not of the half-idealism above considered, but of the Absolute Idealism maintained in my original paper, and in the immediately previous section of the present argument. The situation is this : Moments or persons, experiences or thoughts, them- selves numerically different, can refer to and mean the same object external to them all. Now, wherein consists this sameness of reference ? Is it conceiv- ably a fact that can transcend all experience ? By hypothesis it does transcend our experience, as such. But is ours all ? The moments in question have, in themselves, by hypothesis, only a fragment of a mean- ing present to them. The rest of this meaning, and (be it noted) of their own meaning, is beyond them. But a meaning, as the meaning of a thought referring to an object, is a sort of fact that, by definition, can have no meaning, cannot be this sort of fact, except for consciousness, i.e. except when it is experienced as a meaning. A fact supposed to be transcendent to all consciousness might well be an x, but could not well be that unique and definite relationship which is presented to us whenever the meaning, or objective reference of our thoughts, is not fragmentary, but is, relatively speaking, within our own range of experi- ence. Moments, or persons, or thoughts, a, b, and c, mean, let us say, — that is, refer to, — the same object 0. That is, in nature, a perfectly obvious kind of relation. For if a, b, and c are present with the ob- ject O as moments or factors in the same whole unity of consciousness, then indeed we are aware what the relation is. In our own experience we are sufficiently N 178 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD accustomed to such cases. Thus, for example, in one conscious moment I may observe two thoughts of mine referring to the same object ; as when, in logic, I compare two judgments, or, in a considerate mood, balance two opinions relating to the same sub- ject-matter. What the relation that thus constitutes the common meaning of two thoughts is, I in such cases directly observe. But, now, how could such a relation exist, unobserved by any consciousness, and forming no content of any experience ? Here surely, if anywhere, is a sort of fact whose esse is percipi, whose nature it is to be known. If it is the universal presupposition of rationality that just such a relation may, and in practice constantly does, bind many moments in my own flowing experience to the same object, not presented in any one of those moments, then the only way in which this relation can be inter- preted is to suppose that all these moments are really fragments of one Unity of Consciousness, of a Unity not bound to the limitations of our own flow of successive and numerically separate experiences, al- though inclusive, both of this flow, and of these various experiences themselves, — in their very frag- mentary ess, — but also in their relationships. It is indeed common enough for the realist to con- ceive his transcendent objects as remaining the same objects through a long series of moments of time. Time flows, and they, he says, persist as the same "things in themselves." This view is indeed, in any of its forms, a hopeless abstraction so long as the objects are mere "things in themselves." But its abstractness becomes peculiarly manifest when this SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESS A Y BY PROFESSOR RO YCE 179 so-called same object is explicitly defined as being the same for many thinkers or knowers ; that is, as being the same just in so far forth as many moments stand to it in the relation of meaning it, despite their own supposed mutual separateness, and their isolation from this their common object. For the relation of meanl ing, or referring to, an object is confessedly unique: It is a relation whereof one fragment is presented as a fact of experience in the very inner intent of the moment that knows or refers to the object. This, so to speak, is the moment which possesses the empiri- cally conscious end, or aspect, of the supposed mean- ing. And the relation of reference or meaning is such, in its objective capacity, and in its wholeness, as to fulfil that subjective intent of the moment. But how ? Answer : In precisely stick wise as such an intent is fulfilled when, in an empirical unity of consciousness, a moment that means an object is found present together with the object meant, and is found to be related thereto in the well-known fashion that exemplifies this unique relation of refer- ence itself. To suppose such a relation objectively realised without a transcendent objective unity of consciousness in which it is realised, is to suppose a question answered without an answer being given, a wish fulfilled without any concrete fact of fulfil- ment. In brief, an objective relation of meaning or reference, existing apart from any unity of conscious- ness, is precisely like an unfelt pain or an undesired object of desire. The value of the realist's argument is here once more the fact that its consideration forces Idealism l8o THE CONCEPTION OF GOD to become absolute. Nor is the present argument without application to the considerations suggested by such an Ethical Realism as Professor Howison's. In the definition of the ethical significance of the in- dependent individuals that constitute Professor Howi- son's " City of God," it is evident that much stress must be laid upon the fact that any ethical individual remains, as to his independence and as to his rights, logically the same eternal object for all the various other beings that constitute his fellow-citizens. In Professor Howison's account, moreover, the " City of God " itself, to which the various subjects, rejecting all monistic frivolity, retain what Professor Howison calls a "stainless allegiance," is obviously, both as ideal and as eternal ethical reality, the same for all, being both their object, to whose laws they mean to conform, and the reality wherein their moral aims are fulfilled. Now this, as it stands, is Realism. The ethical dignity of the contents of the real objects, whose independence and sameness is presupposed, does not alter in the least the logical character of the category involved. Logic is not ethics, but the ethical categories must be logical. And the logical status of the foregoing concept is obvious. One in- dependent moral agent is, by virtue of his indepen- dence, no mere object in the experience of any other agent. The " City of God," as such, is nobody's ex- perience, not even God's. But, in the moral world, various free-agents can and should unite in recognis- ing the rights of any one moral agent as the same for them all. And the " City of God," as reality, is the same for all, gods and men. The consequence 5 UPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PR OFESSOR R YCE j g i is, that the objects so far referred to in this statement of Professor Howison's Ethical Realism are essen- tially transcendent objects. The free-agents, and the constitution of their "City," belong to the realm of "things in themselves." The "stainless allegiance" aforesaid is, logically speaking, nothing but an ordi- nary Realism. The ordinary materialist has his own kind of "stainless allegiance" to "matter in motion." Spencer entertains similarly devout sentiments towards the "Unknowable," and all such thinkers show in common with Professor Howison a tardiness in de- fining what they mean by their ultimate relation to that very object which, as they aver, they above all do mean. To be "unstained" by reflective definition may be an ethical virtue, but cannot be a logical recommendation of a fundamental philosophical con- cept. 1 As a fact, all this Realism, when duly con- sidered, becomes either Absolute Idealism or nothing. The "things in themselves," whether they are atoms, or Unknowables, or free-agents, or the " City of God,", must be in one unity of consciousness with the thoughts/ that mean them, with the acts of devotion that offer! allegiance to them, with the ideals that strive after) them, with the agents that undertake to serve them.l For if not, the concept of Reality has no meaning, philosophy has served us no whit, and we are yet in our sins. 1 [Professor Howison heartily accepts this principle, but rejects its applicability to his position. He has not the least wish to have alle- giance to the City of God unstained " by reflective definition." His use of this allegiance (see pp. 123-125 above) is simply as a stubborn Warning that any logical system which fails to satisfy it is defective, and requires revision. — Ed.] PART II THE CONCEPTION OF WILL AND ITS RELATION TO THE ABSOLUTE In the foregoing discussion, as well as in my origi- nal paper, a theory of the Absolute has been defined whose essence can now be briefly restated thus : Our experience, as it comes, is essentially fragmen- tary. 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 hypothe- sis 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 SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR RO YCE j 83 has thought of the beyond, or has meant to mean — that is, to refer to — that very sort of object which he sceptically calls in question. If the sceptic re- torts : " One may imagine that one is referring to the real beyond, but in fact one can only refer to contents immediately presented in consciousness," then we reply that the very admission of the sceptic is fatal to his own thesis ; for if one can imagine that one means what one does not really mean, the incon- gruity between an imagined meaning, present to consciousness, and one's real meaning, which is not present to consciousness so long as the imaginary meaning takes its place, already implies the reality of meanings when they are not present to this single mo- ment of consciousness ; and this implication already involves the sceptic in the admission both that the beyond can be, and that it can be meant even while it is beyond. If the sceptic hereupon admits that one may really mean the beyond, but may not know whether in truth there is a beyond, this reference to what is in truth is itself an admission of a real beyond ; namely, precisely that which is in truth. The beyond, .then, is logically implied in the pre- sented, and so far the realist is right. As we have seen, the half-idealist of our earlier statement is equally right in insisting that whatever beyond you admit or define must be interpreted in terms of possible experience. Now the beyond that we are actually forced to define as the content of reality has appeared in the foregoing discussion (1) as that which, if presented in experience, would answer truly all rational questions. It has appeared (2) as that t g4 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD whose constitution, as a true constitution, must fur- nish an object which is ultimately the same for all points of view, and which fulfils the meaning of all assertions that may be made regarding reality. We have seen that both these definitions of the beyond require that its contents and character and meaning should be present in one unity of consciousness with all the moments and contents of finite thought and experience. Reality thus, so far, appears as Abso- lute Experience, together with all that content and constitution which shall prove to be necessary for the definition of an Absolute Experience. The concept of an Absolute Experience, thus gen- erally defined, has been further sketched, although briefly, in my original paper. It is a conception as inevitable from one point of view as it is naturally open to inquiry and more or less plausible objection from another point of view. The problem how to conceive an Experience sufficient unto itself, involving and including not only such experiences as ours, such thoughts as we frame, " but a complete system of finished thought, a wealth of contents such as to fulfil this system of ideas in the completest manner logically conceivable, — this problem is obviously an extremely difficult one. It is one thing to show the necessity of such a conception, another to develope positively its implications. As a fact, it will not be surprising if in this development new aspects, besides those of thought and experience, prove to be neces- sary in order to complete the very conception of an Absolute Experience conceived as a concrete whole. In fact an Absolute Experience, in order to be such, SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY BY PROFESSOR ROYCE ^5 must unquestionably involve other aspects than those which are directly suggested by the word " experi- ence." And, in my original paper, I expressly ob- served that this must be the fact ; or, in other words, that the divine Omniscience must involve other attri- butes than Omniscience alone. The essential feature of the foregoing account may be expressed by saying that all facts, all thoughts, all fulfilments of thoughts, — in a word, all truth, — must be present to and in the unity of one Divine or Absolute Consciousness, precisely as, in one of our own moments, many data and many aspects are together in the unity of such a moment. But this concept of the " Eternal Now," of the " One Mo- ment," as the character of the Absolute when viewed as the All-Knower, is so far an extremely abstract conception. One has every right to ask : Has the Absolute no other characters than this ? Does the Absolute only know ? Or does he also will ? Is our Absolute a purely theoretical being ? Or does per- fect knowledge imply more than mere knowledge ? The purpose of this Second Part of my present paper is to answer in part this very question, by considering the relation of a conception, first care- fully generalised from our concept of Will, to the now defined conception of the Absolute. The dis- cussion will here consist of two subdivisions. In the first, I shall consider the general conception of Will, trying to distinguish therein the most essential from the more accidental features of our human experi- ence of what we call Will. In the second, I shall reconsider the conception of an "Absolute Experi- 1 86 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD ence," or of "a complete knowledge of all truth in the unity of a single moment," in order to discover whether such a conception does not involve the pres- ence of some generalised form of Will as a factor in the Absolute Experience itself. To define the Absolute as the Omniscient Being, or as the All-knowing Moment, or Instant, is, as I hold, the best beginning for an idealistic doctrine. But I do not regard such a definition as other than a beginning. Our mode of progress must, however, be as follows : We must develope our already at- tained conception of the Absolute, not by arbitrary external additions, but by essentially immanent methods. As the implications of ordinary experi- ence led us to the conception of an Absolute Experi- ence, so the implications of this latter conception must lead us to look for factors or moments whereby we may complete the purely theoretical definition. As a fact, the conception of an experience wherein an absolute system of ideas gets a fulfilment, and wherein all truth forms the content of a single whole moment, demands, for its own completion, the pres- ence of a factor whereby the Individual Whole of the Absolute Moment gets a more positive definition than we have yet given it. This new factor, whereby the unity of the Absolute Consciousness gets its positive definition and its individuality, we shall see reason to call the Absolute Will. SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESS A Y BY PR OFESSOR R YCE j 8 7 THE ESSENTIAL AND THE NON-ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF THE WILL The popular conception of Will, derived from our inner experience, contains, amongst others, three groups of elements that I here wish merely to men- tion at the outset. The relation of these elements is a matter about which our ordinary consciousness is not very clear, and people differ a great deal as to what element they regard as essential to the con- ception of the will. These elements are respec- tively : Desire, Choice, and Efficacious Effort. Desire is a name for feelings that can arise in our minds with very various degrees of vigour and clear- ness. I can desire without knowing what it is that I desire. I can have contradictory desires. I can desire without the least hope of being able to satisfy my desire. I can desire unreasonably. I can desire capriciously. On the other hand, unless I first de- sire, I shall never get any of the more complex and rational processes of the will. Desire is related to developed will in rational agents as sense-data are related to perceptions. Choice is a name for a much more rational and de- rivative mental process. Plainly, we must learn to choose, and that, too, very slowly. When I choose, I must have desires. I must, however, already know something about what I call the worth, the rational relations, the significance, of these desires. Only through experience do I get the data for such know- r 88 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD ledge. And so my choice is never identical with any primary desire as such. Choice is a mental process that involves the presence of plans for the satisfac- tion of desires, a foreknowledge of relatively objective ends that constitute the conscious aims of these de- sires, a more or less reasonable estimate of the value of these aims, and then some process which involves the survival of some, the subordination, or perhaps the suppression, of other desires. So much for the second element of the human will. For some writers, choice has seemed the essential element of the will. The Effectiveness of one's choice such writers have regarded as a fact rela- tively external to the will. Kant's " man of the good will" would be a being of rational choices, but he would remain just as reasonable, and so just as much a man of good will, if Nature were henceforth always to thwart his intents. But many others have re- garded the will's actual Effectiveness, our third ele- ment, as belonging, in a measure, to the essence, rather than to the accidents, of the voluntary pro- cess. Those countless writers who have regarded our voluntary bodily acts as the primal instances, in our experience, of the true relation of cause and ef- fect, seem to regard the will as primarily a phenom- enon of Efficacious Effort. And as a fact, in normal cases, to will and to observe that our efforts are to a certain degree efficacious, at least in controlling bodily movements, or in directing the course of our inner life, are actually very closely related processes. Thus, for instance, I cannot now will to celebrate next Christmas, since I cannot by present deeds SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESS A Y BY PROFESSOR RO YCE j 8g transport myself to next Christmas. That I can only desire. But I can will to begin planning and prepar- ing for Christmas. And just so I can now will to express myself in these words, and behold, in one popular sense of the word "will," the will is the deed. Here is no place for a psychological analysis of these three aspects of what is popularly regarded as volition. But one may say, at once, that all three aspects come to us, primarily, as facts of human experience, coloured through and through by the special conditions of our human mental life. For instance, the_ phenomena felt by us as the phenom- ena of efficacious effort are, as is now known, not the phenomena that cause our voluntary acts, so much as the mere effects of conduct. The sense of efficacious effort is very largely, if not wholly, due to kinesthetic sensory states, of widely varied periphe- ral origin, — muscle, joint, skin sensations, visual ex- periences, sensations of breathing, of general bodily movement, etc. ; states which really result either from the acts that they seem to produce or from our mere memories of the results of former deeds. Such states no more throw light upon any metaphysical effica- ciousness of the will than the sense of smell informs us as to the doings of the archangels. But the nu- merous writers who have conceived our experiences of efficacious effort as in themselves apt to reveal the very essence of the relation of cause and effect have too readily applied these same human experiences to the purpose of conceiving even the very essence of the Divine Will, and the relation between the Creator's act and the world's processes, as seen from Igo THE CONCEPTION OF GOD the Divine point of view. For such writers, God's Will, through an unconscious misuse of the psycho- logical facts, actually often gets predominantly de- fined in terms of our muscle and joint sensations, — a process as enlightening as if you should attribute to the All-seeing Eye the possession of our systems of after-images. In brief, then, while it is perfectly true that our conceptions of an Absolute Thought and Experience, as well as the conception which we now seek to de- fine, are all attained through a process of generalis- ing from the types of thought and experience and will that we know, it is necessary to be careful in finding the motives that can warrant any such gen- eralisation. Our right to our earlier generalisations in this paper has been as follows : Of the character- istics of our own inner life, there are two which pri- marily lend themselves to generalisation when we try to form the conception of some experience more inclusive or exalted than our own. These character- istics are the possession of thought, and the pres- ence of contents or of data such as fulfil the ideas of thought, and give them concreteness. A being higher than ourselves in conscious grade must know, — of that we seem at once sure. And to know, is, on the other hand, to find ideas expressed in contents. For truth means idea fulfilled in fact. And one who knows, knows truth. But while such a formal gen- eralisation of the essence of our own experience is common to all efforts to define the Absolute as above us in conscious grade, it is much harder to generalise accurately the phenomena of such a complex and SUPPLEMENTARY ESSA V BY PROFESSOR ROYCE \q\ human a structure as is our will, — this labyrinth of desires, lighted by choice, and illustrated by a con- stantly accompanying language of bodily deeds, which in their turn are coloured by a normal, but in us cer- tainly largely illusory, sense of power and of free control. Surely, if any being above our grade is to be conceived as having Will, we must not expect to find his will as confused an affair as is our own, and we must know why we attribute to him any such at- tribute at all. As a fact, however, no one of these three aspects, as such, makes clear to us the deeper essence of the will. Another aspect, the frequent topic of a now pretty familiar psychological analysis, will be still more useful to us when we proceed to an effort to re-examine the conception of the Absolute with an ultimate reference to its possession of Will. Despite the complexity of the product that we call "the will," there is still one element of it which is constantly present in all grades of volition, and which has a cen- tral significance in our voluntary experience. And this is the element which we call Attention. Our voluntary processes, as we may here take in- terest in observing, are, in all their grades, selective rather than inventive. You can will nothing original, — no novel act, — nothing except what you have already and involuntarily learned to do ; and that, however much you may desire or wish to be original, You can will to do, I say, what you have already some- how learned to do, before your will acts. I am indeed popularly said to be able to will to commit an abso- lutely new act ; as when a lover first wills to win his I 9 2 THE CONCEPTION OF COD beloved, or a man in despair wills to commit suicide. But in such cases one really wills an already familiar deed, — such as jumping into the water, or making to a lady such pretty speeches as one already knows how to make. In these cases, it is the situation that is novel, not the act really willed. I repeat, the will is wholly unoriginal. But, on the other hand, when you will, you turn possibility into actuality by dwell- ing upon one or another various already known and abstractly conceivable possibilities. The essence of the will is here not inventiveness, but attention. Choice is explicitly an attentive selection of one con- ceived possibility as that upon which you dwell, as against opposing possibilities. Even Desire, in its least rational forms, involves this element of atten- tive favouring of one conscious content as against a more or less dimly recognised background of other contents. In case of efficacious bodily efforts, you always attend closely to the deed that you most try to perform. Surely if one defined Will, apart from its endless human complications, as a process involving attention to one conscious content rather than to another, or, on higher levels, as the preference of a datum at- tended to, as over against data that remain, relatively speaking, merely ideal or possible objects of attention, — one would have a preliminary definition that would promise most as a basis for wider generalisation. Our conception of Will thus once generalised, it remains to re-examine our conception of the Abso- lute, in order to see whether the conception of a com- plete Whole of Experience does not involve, as one of its moments, a factor worthy of the name " Will." SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESS A Y BY PR OFESSOR R YCE 1 93 II THE RELATION OF THE WILL TO THE ABSOLUTE Our finite experience, as it comes, is theoretically incomplete in two senses : (1) in that it does not con- tain the contents which would be needed to meet the ideas and ideal questions that it arouses in us ; anc (2) in that the contents which it already contain! are not, in general, sufficiently clear to our judging! thought. On the one side, then, in our experience the contents are not enough to satisfy the ideas which they actually arouse, and we ask : What else is needed in order to complete this collection of con- tents ? On the other side, our ideas are not yet ade- quate to the present contents, and we ask : What else is needed in order to give us a complete account of what is presented? Now the World-Consciousness, which, in our fore- going account, we have defined as inevitably actual, cannot be incomplete in the second of these senses. For it experiences, so we have said, all that is real regarding its own contents ; in other words, it must know its own contents through and through. Its ideas must be adequate to its presentations. But one may still ask : Is it not inevitably incomplete in the first sense ? Must it not have ideas of possible con- tents that it does not possess ? Must not its ideas go beyond its contents ? At a first glance, this would seem indeed logically inevitable. It is of the nature of pure or abstract, thinking to deal with endless possibilities, with ideas !Q4 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD which transcend all finite actuality of presentation and which so remain bare possibilities. Of this char- acter of abstract thought the higher mathematical sciences are one long series of examples. Let a line be given ; abstract thought can define in this line points as places where the line would be broken, mere positions without magnitude. The presented continuity of the line often seems to threaten to disappear into the endless multitude of these points. How many such points are there on a line ? No pos- sible presentation could exhaust this number. The mathematical ideal limits, of the type well known in higher mathematics, are other examples of the way in which thought can define the infinitely remote goal of a process which can never be constructively pre- sented as a complete whole. Experience always de- termines the infinite universals of thought to concrete individual examples. Thought, on the other hand, even when it defines the contents of experience, al- ways does so by viewing them as individual cases of an infinite series of possible cases. So then, apparently, thought would transcend any possible whole of experience. There could be no experience to which was presented the concrete reali- sation of all that thought could and would regard as possible. For such an experience would have, for instance, to view a line as an infinite aggregate of points, adequately composing, despite their discrete- ness, that continuity of the line in which thought now declares that they could always possibly be found, as filling every place in it. Such an experience, ex- hausting all thought's possibilities, would have to SUPPLEMENTAL. Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 195 experience all the consequences that would have fol- lowed had the Persians won at Marathon, or had the Turks overrun Europe. Endless would be the enumerations of even the possible types of possibility that thought would seem to be capable of presenting to an experience which undertook the task of tracing out every infinite regress, every chasing of an ideal limit, every altering of a variable of experience such as thought can declare to be possible. No, surely, there can be no concrete experiences capable of exhausting thought's possibilities. On the contrary ,Tibwever, one may indeed argue, as we have already done, that a true thought, even about a bare possibility, is simply an expression, in thought's terms, of something which, just so far as it is true, must be somewhere presented to a concrete experience. This result is in fact inevitable unless, indeed, one is prepared to abandon the fundamental propositions: (i) that experience is an eternally real aspect of truth, and the highest court of appeal when ideas seek for facts, and (2) the accompanying propo- sition, that whatever is, is somewhere presented. Here, then, are two views of the relation of thought to experience in the unity of a World-Experience. Are they reconcilable ? The one asserts that a World- Experience, since it would inevitably think of possi- bilities that were not realised in its presentations, would transcend its own content by virtue of its own ideas, and so would be, from an ideal point of view, a relatively incomplete experience. The other asserts that, since bare possibilities are as good as impossi- bilities, and since true thoughts are true because they 196 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD express the nature of something that experience real- ises, and since even a possibility, if it is genuine, must be represented in experience, an Absolute Experience would have concretely to fulfil all possibilities whose essence was not illusory. Here is a new antinomy in our concept of the Absolute. How shall we deal with it? The actual reconciliation of these two abstractly opposed points of view is rendered easier by the fact that our experience already, in its measure, exempli- fies their reconciliation. And first, here, let us note that a truth manifest in experience can often have its very essence expressed by a hypothetical judg- ment whose hypothesis is contrary to the fact ex- pressed. " If wishes were horses, beggars might ride." This is not an idle speculation, but a quaint expression, in relatively abstract terms, of the experi- enced fact that to desire a horse is one thing, to have a horse is quite another. Two facts of experience, m and n, stand before us in sharp contrast. We want to express the contrast. But the facts, as given, are com- plex. We analyse their structure, and thoughtfully dis- cover that while m contains the elements p and q, 11 contains the related but contrasting elements/' and q'. We also observe that/ and q, p' and q' , are couples, whose respective members are closely linked by some law. We express our discovery by the hypothetical proposition that if /, in m, were transformed into/', then of necessity q would be transformed into q', and our experience would contain not the contrast between m and n, but a pair of ;/'s, very much alike. The hypothesis is contrary to fact; but the nature of the SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 197 actual contrast has been expressed by its assertion. The hypothetical judgment is now experienced as true, although the possibility that it asserts is experienced as unreal. Still more obvious is the matter, when we treat of an intention. " If you ask me no questions, I will tell you no lies," says a person more concerned to be dis- creet than to be truthful. Here, in experience, the possibility suggested may or may not be realised. But in either case the hypothetical judgment may express the essence of this person's intent. " I could not do that," says a conscientious man in presence of a rejected temptation; "that, if I did it, would be a crime." Here is the very contrast between what the intent expresses, as the purpose of this man, and the actions, perhaps common enough in other men, with which he contrasts his intent, — it is this very con- trast, I say, which is expressed by an hypothesis whose possible reality, if given, would destroy this contrast. In general, if I am describing situations or other really experienced data, whose characters are rela- tively individual, that is, unique, and are sundered out from a background, so that the individual objects that I am describing are to be contrasted definitely with other individuals, then I can and do express one aspect, at least, of the very nature of this individual- ity, of this contrast, by making hypotheses contrary to fact concerning the way in which this contrast might be reduced or annulled, and this individuality lost in the mere background of universality from which it is differentiated. And the more completely 198 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD unique the individuals in question are, the more I may be limited, in my thinking, to this negative method of characterising them. In fact, the hypothe- sis contrary to fact might be called, logically, the judgment of differentiation, or of at least one aspect of definite individuation. For how can I better ex- press at least one aspect of the contrast, the sunder- ing, between individuals of the same species, than by showing that, if such and such discoverable charac- ters of these individuals were varied so and so, the sundering of these individuals would tend to disap- pear, and their present individuality would tend to lapse into a merely specific resemblance? If " Dorothy Q." had said No on a certain occasion, the poet would have been, at best, just such and such a frac- tion different from what he now is. But what he now is, his individuality, is involved in the world in which " Dorothy Q." said Yes. If the Persians had won at Marathon, then, as far as we can see, Europe might have become politically less distinguishable from Asia. But the individuality of European civilisation involves, as one differentiating feature, the fact that the Greeks won at Marathon. If, then, hypotheses contrary to fact can be present as expressions of concrete truth to an experience that faces truth, the presence of such hypotheses contrary to fact is not excluded from an Absolute Experience, even in so far as it is absolute. And now the pres- ence of such hypotheses as elements of an Absolute Experience would, in the next place, reconcile our two conflicting views as to the relation of idea and content in such an Absolute Experience. Ideas must SUPPLEMENTAL Y ESS A Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 199 always transcend content, even in an Absolute Ex- perience ? Yes, as abstract or unreal ideas, for the reason before pointed out. No actual experience could adequately fulfil, or present contents ade- quately expressing, the infinite regresses, the in- finitely infinite groups of possible examples of every universal, whose abstract possibility a merely abstract thought demands. Ideas, then, must indeed in one sense transcend data even in an Absolute Experience. But how ? Answer : As hypotheses contrary to fact, not as expressions of genuine and unfulfilled truth. But what sort of Absolute Experience would that be, in which there were ideas present as hypotheses con- trary to fact, as bare or unreal possibilities ? I answer, it would be an experience of fact as indi- vidual cases, exemplifying universal types in such a fashion as to embody a knowledge of the essence both of these facts and of their types. So far, it would then be an experience of a concrete and indi- vidual fulfilment of all genuine ideas. On the other hand, this fulfilment would embody universals, not in all abstractly or barely possible cases, — since that would be, concretely speaking, impossible, — but in contents sharply differentiated from one another, and thereby preserved from lapsing into the bare conti- nuity which would link together the series of ab- stractly possible contents such as could be defined through mere ideas. To exemplify : You know the nature of a geometrical line only when you know that it does contain series of points. This you can only concretely know in so far as you construct actual points on the line. But the points that you actually 200 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD construct are a few only of the infinitely infinite series of abstractly possible points. Your idea of these pos- sible points transcends any actual series. Yet the actually constructed series of points (i) exemplifies or embodies the nature common to all the abstractly possible points, and (2) furnishes to your experience a discrete series of points, between which other points would be possible in idea, while in concrete fact they are not experienced. Now an Absolute Experience of the points on the line could in the end do nothing but exemplify, on some level, just this same process of experience. So, then, an Absolute Experience could and would at once find its ideas adequately fulfilled in concrete fact, and also find this fulfilment as an individual col- lection of individuals exemplifying these ideas, while, as to other abstractly possible fulfilments of the same ideas, the Absolute Experience would find them as hypothetical or ideal entities, contrary to fact. But to say this is to attribute to the Absolute Ex- perience a character apparently identical in essence, not with the psychological accidents of our volitional experience, or even of our attention, but with one of the aspects that make our attention rationally signifi- cant. To attend involves, apart from the psychologi- cal accidents of the process, this rationally significant act, viz., the act of finding a universal type, or idea, exemplified by a datum of experience, while other possible data, that might exemplify this general type, are, relatively speaking, ignored. The idea of seeing is exemplified in seeing this object at the centre of the field of vision. The better one sees this individ- SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 2 0I ual object, the better is one's general power of vision. "In der Beschrankiing zeigt sick erst dcr Mcistcr." In general, attention, in one aspect of its signifi- cance, is an ignoring of possible experiences for the sake of fulfilling, in sharply differentiated individual experiences, ideas that could not be fulfilled except through the ignoring of such possibilities. Attention is thus sacrifice of ideal possibilities for the sake of realising ideas. It is losing to win — losing bare ab- stractions to find concrete life. But the concrete life found is a life full of contrasting individuals, of sharply differentiated fact, of discrete realities. To the Absolute Experience, then, we should at- tribute just such a generalised form of the process that in us appears, clouded by countless psychologi- cal accidents, as the process of attention ; just such an individuation of its contents, just such an attentive precision, whereby its universal types get discrete expression. Yet one comment is still needed in this connexion. This generalised form of attention, which we attribute to the Absolute Experience, is now conceived by us as that aspect of this Absolute which, in the total movement of the world's unity, determines the ideas to find this concrete realisation which they do find. It follows, that, while the atten- tive process or aspect of this Whole Experience has to be conceived as fulfilling ideas, and so as counter to no idea, — and therefore as in this aspect absolutely rational, — on the other hand, this attentive aspect cannot be conceived as determined by any of the ideas, or by the thought-aspect of the Absolute in its wholeness, or as necessitated by thought, to attend 202 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD thus or so. In this sense the attentive aspect of the Absolute Experience appears as itself possessed of absolute Freedom. That it shall realise or ade- quately fulfil the ideas, is, from our point of view, when we define it, necessary. Nor can it leave un- fulfilled any true idea. But on the other hand, what individual fulfilment it gives these ideas, the ideas themselves cannot predestinate. In this sense, the individuality, the concrete reality, of the contents of the Absolute Experience must be conceived as on the one hand fulfilling ideas, but as on the other hand freely, unconstrainedly, — if you will, capri- ciously, — embodying their universality in the very fact of the presence of this life, this experience, this world. In this completion of our conception of the Abso- lute Experience, we now see sufficient reason to speak, in a generalised sense, of a World-Will, as absolutely free, and still as absolutely rational. This Will we can regard, if you choose sufficiently to spir- itualise your term, as the World-Creator, but not as if the creation were an abstractly separable act, existent apart from the world's existence, and not as if this creation were, properly speaking, a causal process. The Divine Will is simply that aspect of the Absolute which is expressed in the concrete and differentiated individuality of the world. Hereby the world ap- pears, not as a barely abstract world of pure ideas, but as a world of manifested individuals, known in the unity of the one transcendent moment of the Absolute Experience, but there known as a discrete and clearly contrasted collection of beings, whose SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 203 presence everywhere expresses, amid all the wealth of meaning which the whole embodies, an element of transcendent Freedom. Ill GENERAL REVIEW OF THE ARGUMENT Our proposed supplement to our conception of the Absolute invites a fresh review of the whole argu- ment in a somewhat new light. For the foregoing effort to introduce into our conception of the Abso- lute the element of Will differs from the customary effort in several noteworthy ways. No stress is laid, for instance, in this deduction, upon the ordinary forms of the category of Causation. That is, we do not regard the Absolute Will as primarily something that is required in order to explain the causal source or origin of the world of fact. All conceptions of source, of origin, and of causation are relative con- ceptions, which apply only to specified regions or spheres within the whole of reality. The conception of causation does not apply to the whole of reality itself. The same thing could be remarked as to the question whether the element of Will is an objectively necessary factor in the Absolute, i.e. whether the Absolute must will. For, from an absolute point of view, necessity, causation, determination, and all other forms of relative dependence appear as partial facts within the whole. In the last analysis, in fact, one] cannot say : The world, or reality, or the Absolute/ must be ; but only : The reality, the Absolute, the? world, is. Fact is always superior to necessity, and" 204 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD the highest expression of truth in terms of thought is inevitably the categorical judgment rather than the hypothetical, the assertory judgment rather than the apodictic. For that very reason all assertions such as "A requires for its explanation, or for its cause, something else, namely, B," must be subordinate to the ultimate assertion, "The whole world of given fact is." When, in the first section of this paper, we interpreted the implications of finite experience, and found that, in order to avoid contradiction, all finite experience must be regarded as a fragment of a whole, whose content is present in the unity of conscious- ness of one absolute moment, — in all this we did not assert that the contents of finite experience need an external cause, or that the Absolute is the cause of the relative. ( We declared that the Absolute is the whole system of which the finite experience is a moment or a fragment. Therefore, our Absolute in no sense explains the world as a cause, but possesses the world of fact, precisely as fact. In this sense, the constitution of reality is indeed, from the absolute point of view, something that, despite all the media- tions, the relationships, the dependencies present in the world, is in its wholeness immediate — a datum, underived from anything external to itself. In this sense, then, we are not arguing that the Absolute must will, but only that it does will. For it is, and its being includes Will. In general, it is characteristic of the idealistic point of view, first, that you are able to say of any finite fragment of experience, that, in order to be fact, it must stand in a certain more or less definable relation SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR SO YCE 205 to other finite facts ; and, secondly, that, in conse- quence of the presence of such mediation and rela- tionship amongst the finite facts, the reality, as the Absolute sees it, simply has a definable but imme- diately actual constitution. In other words, the must of our mediate reasoning holds primarily of the finite in its relation to other unites, and not, except indi- rectly, of the Absolute itself. "Since the finite must be related thus or thus to other finites in order to be a part of the real, therefore, as we must conceive, the Absolute has a given constitution " : such is our reasoning. Now our must, in such reasoning, ex- presses precisely the finite point of view, not the absolute point of view, as such. Our must defines primarily the relation of our finite experience to other finite facts, as for instance to that "experience other than ours " to which we appealed in our former dis- cussion. We apply, indeed, formally, our must to the Absolute, in so far as the Absolute is viewed as the object of our conception ; that is, precisely, not yet as the Absolute for itself, but as the Absolute defined from our finite point of view. But the Abso- lute finds fact in its wholeness, where we find only mediation, or where we appeal from our experience to "experience other than ours," and so see necessity and not immediacy. Therefore, it is indeed true that every conception of the Absolute is, when you take it barely as thought, inadequate to its object. What we say is : " The whole of experience has precisely the sort of unity that any moment of our own con- scious life inadequately presents to us." But such unity is the unity of fact, not of our must, not of any 206 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 argu- ment 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 meta- physics which defined God as the " absolutely neces- sary 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 pro- duced, and, by itself, such as to have a necessary con- stitution ; as, for instance, a necessary efficaciousness, frequently called Omnipotence. Our own theory de- SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 207 pends, 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 ulti- mately 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 pres- ent 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 tran- scended the data, they were ipso facto his transcendent "things in themselves,'' wholly beyond experience. The realist, however, could himself give no consist- ent 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 defin- able 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 fragmen- 208 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD tary. 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 pos- sible ideas, since they refer, consciously or uncon- sciously, 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 pres- ent 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 mathe- matics, precisely corresponds, in particular instances, to the idealist's conception of the Total System of pos- sible 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 construc- tive process of the nature indicated, would be called a Zahlkorpcr, or Body of Numbers, in the terminol- ogy of certain mathematicians. Well, just so, for the Idealist, all the logically possible ideas form such a Group, a system of interrelated members, all refer- ring to the one Ultimate Object, viz., the Whole of SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR RO YCE 209 Experience, and exhaustively definable, in all their relations, by one constructive process, which, if you knew it, would enable you from any one to construct all the rest. It is to such a system, and to its inter- relationships, that the conception of "necessity " pri- marily applies. Plato first conceived of such a sys- tem of ideally definable contents, although his Ideas are not identical with those of the modern idealist. Hegel's Logic was an effort to define just such an absolute Group of ideas, a closed circle of categories, although the effort indeed was imperfect enough. The idealist's thesis is that such an absolute Group is de- : finable, and, from the absolute point of view, is defined.? On the other hand, our thesis maintains that the Absolute Experience, viewed in its wholeness, ful- fils this System, or Group, of ideas. This fulfilment, as we have said, is for the Absolute immediate fact. We define this fact, to be sure, in terms of our neces- sity. Our necessity means merely that we must be consistent, else we shall have asserted nothing. But the whoie experience of the Absolute, in its whole- ness, is above that necessity. And our proof, once more, goes back to that brute finite experience : "Something is real." Yet, to use once more the inevitable formula of our finite thinking, we must assert that the Absolute Experience has such con- stitution as is implied in its fulfilment of the system of ideas. Hence the Absolute Experience, so we assert, is no chaos. Since perfection, worth, sig- nificance, fulness of life, organisation, are ideas, the Absolute Experience must present, that is, must be asserted by us as presenting, or, viewed in itself, simply p 2IO THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 them- selves 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 Experi- ence appears precisely as the aspect whereby the Thought gets fulfilled. The best expression, so far, might be : " The Absolute experiences that its sys- tem of Thought is fulfilled in and through the con- stitution 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. SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR RO YCE 2 1 1 Yet neither as barely abstract thought nor as mere contents of experience is the Absolute yet definable as a positive Whole. On the contrary, although the ideas form a Group, there is nothing as yet about the nature of this Group, when abstractly viewed, which defines, so far, how often, or in what cases, it shall find realisation or fulfilment. On the other hand, the contents of experience, in so far as they are im- mediate data, simply serve to present the fulfilment of the system of ideas, and not to limit their fulfil- ment to a single case. In other words, one may so far declare, if one prefers, that there is one Idea which ipso facto does not belong to the original Group of ideas, as abstractly defined ; namely, the very Idea of the wholeness of the system of ex- perience in which that Group is to find its fulfilment. Once more, then, an antinomy has presented itself. The Absolute Experience, on the one hand, is that system in which the Group of ideas is realised, and, as absolute experience, forms one Whole. On the other hand, as mere fulfilment of ideas in contents, it is not yet a Whole at all, since other fulfilments so far appear as abstractly possible. The solution of the antinomy must lie in the incompleteness of our account as thus far rendered ; namely, of the account in terms of mere thought and mere imme- diacy of contents. A new element must be added — not that, from the absolute point of view, the new element is an element that embodies an objective necessity, but that, from the absolute point of view, the whole world of facts actually has another aspect, a third aspect, in addition to the immediacy of the 2I2 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD data and the completeness of the system of ideas. This new aspect may be denned as an aspect of Arrest, of fulfilment by free limitation. That fulfil- ment 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 indefi- nite (or infinite) series of abstractly possible worlds, which, by virtue of this choice, are not actually possi- ble. 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, atten- tively 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 ex- ternal 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 Con- sciousness involves immediate data, fulfilment of ideas in these data, consciousness of the adequacy SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR RO YCE 213 of this fulfilment, and Will, whereby not merely this I adequacy is secured in general, but also the adequacy I is concretely secured in one whole and single content! of the total experience." One might again illustrate our conception by sup- posing any one of us to ask himself : " What would be my state were my conscious aims to be completely fulfilled, and, above all, were my knowledge to become absolute ? " The natural answer would be : " In that case, (1) my thoughts would form one whole system, with no uncomprehended ideas beyond the system. The contents or data of my experience would then (2) fulfil these ideas, so that there would be no object that I thought of without possessing it as present, — for instance, no wish ungratified, no ideal unfulfilled. But hereupon a difficulty would arise. For I should still be able, however many objects of experience ex- emplified my ideas, to think always of other logically possible fulfilments of any or of all once defined ideas. For such abstract limitlessness is of the essential, the logically necessary, nature of bare thought as such. However much experience gave me, I could think of more, since that would be the very nature of my thinking process. How, then, would the supposed Wholeness of experience be logically possible ? To this difficulty I should rightly answer, that an incom- pleteness for which, not the poverty of my experience, but the abstract endlessness of my demand as thinker was responsible, could readily be supposed to cease if I added one element more to my experience, or at all events to the type of consciousness which I now possessed. This new element would be added when- 2i 4 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD ever I said that, my ideas being fulfilled in their es- sence 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 hope- less 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 arresf 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 SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESS A Y BY PR OFESSOR R YCE 2 1 5 attribute called the Divine Love, which it has op- posed, on occasion, to the Divine Wisdom. Now just as Will may be generalised as the process, or aspect, of selective attention in consciousness, so Love also may be generalised as an affection or colouring of consciousness which involves a selection of some con- tent as valuable for reasons which can no longer be abstractly defined in terms of this content, or in terms of its mere contrast to the contents to which it is pre- ferred, be these contents actual or possible. A be- loved object, as such, is experienced as a datum, is known as embodying ideas, but is preferred by virtue of characters that remain, despite all knowledge, undefined and, in some respects, undefmable. What is clear, to the loving consciousness, is that no other object fills just the place, or could fill just the place, occupied by the beloved object. Now, in viewing the world as the object of the love of an absolute being, one supposes the Absolute Consciousness to contain a moment or aspect that conforms to and exemplifies this generalised definition of Love. This world has a value from the absolute point of view such as no other world, conceived as an abstract pos- sibility, would have. And while this value is, up to a certain point, explained and defined by the fact that the world fulfils these and these specific ideals, one aspect of the matter remains always unexplained, namely, why some other world, with a different sequence of data, might not fulfil, just as well, the same ideas. The selection of this world as the one fulfilment of absolute ideas and ideals would involve, then, an un- explained element. This element is precisely the 2I 6 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 at- tains wholeness and complete self-possession, and its further character as an element irreducible to the terms of mere thought and mere content of experi- ence, — 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 under- stood 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. PART III THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUATION The question : What is an individual ? and the re- lated question : What principle is the source of Indi- viduation, 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 uni- versals. 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 ques- tions : 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. I DEFINITION OF THE PROBLEM As to the general interest of the problem, even outside of technical philosophy, there can be no 217 2I 8 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD doubt. When one reflects upon the social and ethi- cal 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 Chris- tianity has always involved assertions about the in- dividual as such. In natural science, moreover, a vast collection of problems, especially of biological problems, centre about the definition and the consti- tution 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 neg- lected, especially in the history of modern philoso- phy. Leibnitz is almost the only modern thinker who has given it a place correspondent to its dignity. The logical, psychological, and metaphysical prob- lems of universality, of law and of truth and know- ledge 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 impor- tance of the individual have been tacitly assumed as SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 219 obvious. When every logic text-book discusses the theory of the general concept, and easily passes by, with a mere mention, the knowledge of the individual, this is because your knowledge of the individual is supposed to be something relatively so clear and familiar to you that the logician need analyse hardly at all what you mean by that knowledge. " Does not everybody know ? Why, you yourself are an individual ! " It is of the universal that the logician must speak, because that seems to be something arti- ficial, abstract, an invention of language and of sci- ence. Any man of sense has only to open his eyes, or to observe himself within, to appreciate how all original knowledge is of the concrete, the definite, the individual. This, I say, is what the traditional method in logic seems to imply. One fails to com- ment lengthily upon our knowledge of the individual, because that knowledge is felt to be somehow pri- mary, common, and of central significance in daily life. Just so, too, when in metaphysics one deals with the universal principles, with Reality, with Finite and Infinite, with Law and with Cause, with Knowledge and Illusion, one does all this feeling that it is the concrete world of individuality that is to be explained, to be justified, or to be saved by the truth. One says little about individuality, as such, because one presupposes it. Yet philosophical neglect is always a misfortune. We can never comprehend until we have learned to reflect ; and to presuppose individuals is not to reflect upon what one means by them. So soon as the questions are put : What is an individual ? and, 2 20 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 differ- ence that appears to exist between Professor Howi- son'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 essen- tially an expression of the divine Will. Then at SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 2 2I once it would appear that the very claims of theory involve giving the world a practically significant aspect. Suppose that it should then further appear that the category of Individuality, as already indi- cated, demands and secures differentiation of indi- viduals within the unity of the whole consciousness which we have defined as the Absolute. It might well prove, that, since by hypothesis the individuals would then exist not merely as brute facts but as differentiated expressions and cases of significant Will, their significant separation as ethical beings would not, when it existed, involve their mutual iso- lation as brute facts. In that case all the variety, all the individuation, all the mutual independence that ethical theory demanded might be perfectly consist- ent with, and even essentially implied by, that very unity of consciousness in which and by virtue of which the individuals were real. Thus the solution of the antinomy might appear by virtue of the defini- tion of the category of Individuality. On the other hand, this definition could not well be attempted without a consideration of very general logical problems. We should be able to discuss the ethical individual, only when we had first considered the logical individual of any grade, as he appears in ordinary regions of knowledge. Our present discus- sion will therefore, for the time, lay aside our ideal- istic presuppositions, take the world of thought as we ordinarily find it, and treat of Individuality as if it were a category of no ethical significance. This method we shall pursue until the discussion of itself leads us back to the point where the meaning of our 222 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 mean- ing 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 cate- gory. 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 diffi- culty 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 uni- versality 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. SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 223 II THE THOMISTIC THEORY OF INDIVIDUATION Our problem, then, has been too much neglected. Yet it has indeed had a history. Although Plato considered the matter, Aristotle was the first philoso- pher who possessed the technical means for fully defining the problem, in all its main aspects, — logi- cal, psychological, and metaphysical. He did define it, — and left it unsolved. The schoolmen, long afterwards, resumed the unfinished task. As the preclassical period of scholasticism was especially busied with the problem of the universal, so the classical and postclassical periods of scholasticism gave great attention to the problem of the individual. Controversy existed, both as to the interpretation of Aristotle's authority, and as to the independent treat- ment of those elements of the question which Aris- totle had left undecided. In theology, the problem of the Trinity, the problem of the individuality of the "active intelligence" in man, and of the individual- ity of the human soul itself, in view of its possession of the " active intelligence," and, finally, the prob- lems of angelology, gave special significance to these scholastic discussions of the Principle of Individuation. St. Thomas, one of the two principal scholastic students of our problem, decided that form as such, in the Aristotelian sense, is " not to be communicated to various individuals unless by the aid of matter." This holds, at all events, for the entire created world. In consequence, matter, and in particular 224 TtIE CONCEPTION OF GOD 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 individua- tion. 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 fol- lows : An individual {Summa Theol., P. i, Q. XXX, Art. IV) possesses a certain characteristic modus exist endi, 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 sub- stances " 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 individ- uals of this grade are properly called persons, or "hypostases in the proper sense." Every person is an individual, since actions. are "in singula ribus'' (loe. cit. ). On the other hand, not every individual is a person. If one speaks of the rational individuals, or per- sons, one observes, then, that their individuality need not be dependent, in any sense, upon material condi- tions. Thus, according to Thomas (Q. Ill, Art. II), a form such as that of God, self-subsistent and not " receivable in matter," is individuated by the very SUPPLEMENTARY ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 2 2$ fact that it " cannot be received in another." Thus, too, the persons of the Trinity are, for Thomas, indi- viduals. " The word ' individual,' " says Thomas, in another passage, " cannot belong to God in so far forth as matter is the principle of individuation, but only in so far as the word ' individual ' implies incom- municability " (Q. XXIX, Art. III). In this sense (Q. XXIX, Art. IV), an individual is something in- distinctum, or unseparated within itself, but ab aliis distinctum, that is, set apart, by reason of its sub- sistence, from other individuals. The principle of individuation in case of the Trinity is the unique character of the rclatio which distinguishes, for Thomas, the three persons. In God, each person is a relatio subsistens, that is, not merely an abstract relation as such, dependent upon its terms, but an individual and concrete term that subsists or is dis- tinguished solely by its relational function. " As Deitas or Godhead is God, so the divine Paternity is God the Father." A divine person, or person of the Trinity, signifies therefore a relation as subsistent. Thus Thomas states the case in the Summa (Q. XXIX, Art. IV): "In the comprehension of the individual substance, that is, of the distinct or incommunicable substance, one understands, in the Divine, a relation." So far, then, one has distinction of " subsistent relations " as the principle of individ- uation within God. But this case is unique. No- where else is relation, as such, the principle of individuation. Amongst the created rational beings, the problem of individuality becomes important in two cases. Q 22 6 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD Coming downwards from God, the first case is that of the angels. They (Q. L, Art. II) are not "com- posites of matter and form." "It is impossible," says Thomas, " that a substantia intellectualis (such as is an angel) should have any kind of matter what- ever." 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) fcmna subsistentes. " It is impos- sible 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 indi- vidual angel is no mere abstraction, like whiteness or humanity, but has those other characters of the rational individual before enumerated. Within him- self, 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 rela- tion 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 some- what difficult sense. The soul itself is not a com- posite of form and matter. It is immaterial. Yet its S UPPLEMENTAR Y ESS A Y BY PR OFESSOR R O YCE 227 function is, to be the form of the human body ; and this it is, even in its intellectual operations. All human souls are of the same species. But we learned in case of the angels that immaterial substances can have no individuation within any one species. How then are the immaterial souls of men, intellectual entities as they are, preserved from flowing together into one intellectual soul ? The answer is : They are first individuated by the bodies to which they are joined. In Thomas's words : " Although the intellect- ual soul has no matter from which it is constituted, just as an angel has none, yet it is form of a certain matter, as an angel is not. And so, according to the division of the matter, there are many souls of one species, whereas there cannot be many angels of one species" (Q. LXXVI, Art. II). Hereupon, however, one would suppose that this diversity of the souls of the one human species would cease with their separation from the body. This, of course, Thomas denies. His reason is, that since the soul is, secundum suum esse, or naturally, joined to a body, and since the multiplicity of any type of enti- ties depends upon their esse, the accident of the sepa- ration of soul and body between death and judgment cannot destroy the essential individuality of the sepa- rated souls. An inclinatio to an individuated body ex- ists in the separated soul, and individuates the latter. In sum, then, the human individual is such, first of all, by the fact that his soul is naturally the form of this individual body, and Socrates, for instance, is defined, in this aspect, as the being who possesses "this flesh and these bones." On the other hand, in 22 8 THE CONCEPTION OF GOD the composite called man, the body exists for the sake of the soul, and not vice versa. The being thus primarily individuated exists in order that his intellect may attain self-possession, a knowledge of the truth, and the right ultimate relation to God. But in the ideal condition of ultimate perfection thus defined, the intellectual individual, whose character as this man has its material basis in the body, attains, as his completed individuality, to an exercise of free will and of reason which will assimilate him to the angels. Separated from the body at death, the soul will be reunited thereto at the end ; and the completed indi- vidual in his final state will be subsistent both materi- ally and formally, — tJirongJi matter, yet not merely as matter. If we finally pass to the world of the individuals below the human level, namely, to animals and to inanimate objects, we reach the realm where matter, as the true principle of individuation, becomes at last paramount. To be sure, even here, matter of itself causes no individuality, since form is everywhere the final cause, and since every individual is a composite of form and matter, in which the matter exists for the sake of the form. Only matter, as the materia sig- nata, or matter of "determinate dimensions," is the conditio sine qua uou of individuation. The fact that whiteness, cold, crystallisation, etc., as these accidents, here inform the particular materia signata whose sub- stantial form is water, and whose place is in yonder cloud, — this gives you, as result, this individual snow- flake. To be sure, there are many hints, in Thomas, that the sensuous, immediate, and, in so far, appar- SUPPLEMENTAR Y ESSA Y BY PROFESSOR ROYCE 229 ently unideal or unintelligible basis of individuation which seems to be implied in this account is not any absolute, but only a humanly distorted truth. One's first impression of the doctrine is, indeed, that it makes the individual a mere brute fact of sense, and in so far incomprehensible. For the materia signata of the Thomistic account is not mere matter in the strict Aristotelian sense, viz., matter as mere potentia. On the contrary, the materia signata is sensuous matter, the brute fact of the world of perception ; and the meaning of the doctrine seems, in so far, to be that corporeal individuals are essentially sensuous and immediate, and not intellectually intelligible be- ings, just in so far forth as they are corporeal indi- viduals. The intellect knows universals ; the senses show us individuals ; and, so far, the old Aristotelian difficulty returns, but, on the other hand, this is not the end. The same Triomas who makes the corporeal individual thus wholly indefinable for our intellect, by reason of its sensuous materiality, also asserts that not only God (O. XIV, Art. II), but also the angels (Q. LVII, Art. II), must know corporeal individuals. But the angels know truth in purely intellectual, not in sensuous forms. " By one intellectual virtue," de- clares Thomas, "the angels know both universal and immaterial, singular and corporeal objects." If this be true, then the material opaqueness, the sensuous and indefinable immediacy, of the corporeal individual, as we view it, must to an angelic intelligence possess the same sort of clearness and of ideal and definable intelligibility that is possessed, for us, by universal principles. Our opaque material individual of the 2 go THE CONCEPTION OF GOD world of sense cannot, then, be the individual as God and the angels know individuality. So much for St. Thomas's doctrine of Individua- tion. It sums itself up in the assertion, that, whereas the higher forms of conscious and rational individual- ity 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 ulti- mate facts, known to us only in so far as a communi- cable form gets embodied in one spatially determined ; and sensuously observable matter, so that the result- ling composite nature is "singular and incommuni- cable." There can be little doubt that this doctrine of indi- viduality is at once skilful and vulnerable. It formed a favourite object for attack in later scholastic dis- cussion. 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. Ill THE SCOTISTIC THEORY OF INDIVIDUATION The chief discussion of individuality in Duns Scotus occurs in the Angelology of the second part of the Subtle Doctor's commentary upon the Sen- tenti