# The Limits of Evolution/Essay 8

APPENDIX A
THE ESSAYS IN THEIR SYSTEMATIC CONNEXION
I purpose here to supply what many readers appear to have been at fault over — the clue to the parts played, severally, by the essays of this volume, in setting forth the system they illustrate. And I may well enough begin by reiterating the statement with which I first preceded them — that, disconnected as their topics seem, they are still all united by a single metaphysical aim. This is the establishment, chiefly upon Kant’s foundations, of a new idealistic philosophy, in extension and fulfilment of Kant’s own, though also taking impulse from the views of Aristotle and of Leibnitz. This new idealism seeks to rehabilitate the moral individual in his proper autonomy by seating him in the eternal world; that is, in the self-active, and therefore absolutely real, or noumenal, order of being. It thus stands opposed (1) to the current Monism, whether of Naturalism (Spencer, Haeckel, etc.) or of Absolute Idealism (Hegel and the Neo-Hegelians), and (2) to the older Monotheism, with its dualism (the eternal Creator, the temporal creation) of literal production out of nothing, by miracle. In confronting these older systems, the new idealism seeks to revindicate the Personal God, the Moral Immortality, and, above all, the Moral Freedom, which together formed the chief object of Kant’s philosophical concern. But while Kant ​sought to give these common objects of religion and philosophy a lasting foundation upon the practical as contrasted with the theoretical reason, these essays aim at restoring them to a theoretical basis. The purpose is, to exhibit the theoretical nature and functions of the moral consciousness itself, thus closing the chasm left by Kant between his noumenal world of morality and his phenomenal world of science. And whereas the idealistic systems that succeeded Kant all took refuge in an immanential and consequently monistic view of God’s relation to man and Nature, thus wrecking all autonomy and thence personality itself, the essays seek to restore the ruin by a return, on important points, to Kant’s view; namely, that God, relatively to all other minds, is transcendent — is a distinct centre of consciousness, not included in any of theirs, and not including them; that every mind, relatively to any other, is transcendent; and that the principle of moral autonomy thus involves a strict Pluralism, as the right account of the world of absolute reality, which is the world of minds. Hence (at this juncture passing beyond Kant) they conclude that the only causal principle operative in this noumenal world, linking God with the other minds, and all minds with each other, in an organic Real Logic of being and of purpose, must be Final Cause; which, consequently, henceforth reduces Efficient Cause to a place of derivation and subordination, making it hold only from minds to phenomena, and, in a secondary sense, from one phenomenon to another, or from one group of phenomena to another. Thus an immanential relation still obtains between the system of minds and the system of Nature, quite as in the transcendental idealism of Kant. But Subjective Idealism is hereby overcome, and Social Idealism, which finds objectivity in an a priori consensus of all minds, takes its place.
In Essay I, this result, so far as concerns man and Nature, is worked out by a critique (1) of Empirical Evolutionism ​(school of Spencer) and (2) of Pantheistic Idealism (Hegel and his later followers, English and American). The basis for this critique is secured by reaffirming Kant’s doctrine of a priori knowledge, and proving it afresh in face of the modern attempt to explain it away by acquired association, natural selection, and heredity. It results that the individual mind, being thus a system of the very conditions prerequisite to an evolving process, cannot be the product of such process, whether this be regarded as the effect of the omnipresent “energy” of an “Unknowable” or as the expression of the omnipresent “meaning” of an “Inclusive Self-consciousness.” On the contrary, it is now seen to be itself at the basis and origin of things, a member of the world of self-causes.
In the course of Essay II, this critique of Monistic Idealism is carried out with greater fulness, especially in exposing the fallacy of the frequent claim that modern science trends resistlessly to this type of monism.
In Essay III, idealism of the thoroughly plural and individual type — Personal Idealism — is reached, as the result of the dialectical self-dissolution of pessimism (Schopenhauer, Hartmann), materialism (Dühring), and agnosticism (Lange). In this self-supplanting of Lange’s view, the Kantian restriction of knowledge to the field of phenomena gets at length dissolved. The basis for moral autonomy is definitively established by this self-sublation of scepticism passing to its extreme; the freedom of the rational individual is assured in this settlement of the noumenal reality of his knowledge. The transcendent metaphysics of the essays, in opposition to the merely transcendental prevalent since Kant, is thus rested upon critical foundations, and Critical Idealism attains its proper fulfilment.
In Essay IV, we discover the essentially creative character of Art, the field par excellence of the triumphs of non-divine intelligences, and thus come, as if by a new and unexpected ​path, once more upon the intrinsic autonomy of the rational individual.
Essay V then deals with this autonomy in its profoundest form, as presented in the problem of religious belief. The issue between Authority and Conviction is argued out to its purest terms, and individual autonomy is established, first indirectly, by refuting the theory of Authority, on the ground (1) of its self-contradictions, (2) of its inability to produce its Divine Authentication, (3) of its antagonism to the essential drift in the historical development of religion, as this shows at full flood in the Christian Consciousness, measured by the teaching, not of Scripture or of Church, but of Jesus himself. Direct proof then follows, by showing that the tacit logic of science, though not indeed its results, — science, the field of the individual’s greatest triumphs as knower, — surely presupposes (1) the reality of a society of minds in rational consensus, and (2) the reality of a Perfect Mind, or God. Free intelligence thus means conscience and dutiful self-control; and vice versa.
In Essay VI, the unconditional reality of the individual and the essentially social (i.e. moral) nature of his primordial consciousness are proved by a still closer and fuller vindication of Kant’s arguments for the reality of our a priori knowledge. This, as rendering each mind causa sui, thus placing it in the world of absolute causes, is then applied to the proof of individual immortality. In the course of the argument a solution is offered, on the basis of the Kantian theory of Time, of the puzzle presented in the modern doctrine of “psychological parallelism.”
Finally, in Essay VII, the metaphysical significance of moral autonomy is still more clearly exhibited, and is carried out in its full bearing upon the nature of Divine causation. Determinism as extraneous predestination, Freedom as inner caprice, are alike set aside, and a new idealistic ​conception of both Freedom and Determinism is set forth, as the aspects, obverse and reverse, respectively, of the complex conception Self-determination, when this is seen to be simply the self-definition inseparable from self-consciousness. It is then shown that moral autonomy, as such self-definition by each mind, not only involves a contrast to others, and therefore a recognition of them (in fine, the essentially federal nature of a self, the presence of a public and universal phase in every conscious life), but also the distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the eternal and the temporal, aspects of being; hence, the seating of every moral agent in the eternal world. The consistency of this eternalising of the individual (1) with Theism, and (2) with a purified Monotheism, — in fact, rather, its necessity for both, — is then shown, by means of (a) a new argument for the reality of God, akin to the historic Ontologic Proof, but freed from its defects, and (b) a new and rational interpretation of “creation,” as a metaphor symbolising the eternal office of God as Final Cause (i.e. at once Conditioning Standard and Goal) in the entire world of minds. By the operation of this Final Causality, each mind other than God involves in its self-definition a contrast to God as well as an attraction toward him. Each non-divine mind thus gives contributory rise to the phenomenal world of changeful consciousness — the world of defect, of natural evil, of possible moral misdeed. Here Freedom, which in its eternal basis is simply spontaneity, the native response to the eternal vision of God and the other intelligences, takes on the added traits of (1) empirical alternative, and (2) power to decide this in favour of the eternal Good, by a resort to the changeless fountain of reason which every spirit is at core.
Thus the theme of Personal Idealism — of an eternal world of many rational beings, all self-active, all arbiters of their own destiny and so alike morally responsible, yet, in ​the vast round of their combinative being, all harmonised by their coexistence with God and their native attracting apprehension of God’s nature — grows from one to another of the ascending evidences for it, as the book advances from the first essay to the last. ​
APPENDIX B
THE SYSTEM IN ITS ETHICAL NECESSITY AND ITS PRACTICAL BEARINGS
I have called the system set forth in this book Personal Idealism because, as I undertake to show, it is alone consistent with the existence of a world of genuine persons, including a personal God. My object here is to give a brief summary of it, and then to point out whatever importance it may have for the aims of the higher ethical life.
The system is closely affiliated with another, advocated by the late Thomas Davidson, and called by him Apeiro-theism; that is, the doctrine of a divine nature, or ideal rationality, distributed in an indefinite number of individual minds. I mention this affiliation, because, although it is unmistakable, it came about from studies entirely independent, and without collusion or even conference. The agreement, so far as it exists (and it by no means exists throughout), must be explained as an encouraging coincidence, resting on a common connexion with the same foundations in the history of previous thought: two investigators, working quite apart upon a common problem, without any knowledge by either of what the other was doing, have come out upon a result in the main the same. And it is of great interest to note that a third thinker, remote from both of us, Mr. McTaggart, of the University of Cambridge, ​has reached a kindred view, closer to Mr. Davidson’s, in fact, than my own.
This common result is the doctrine that the world of absolute reality is a world of minds, each eternal in the sense of being immutably real, self-active, and self-determining; none of them is a derivative, or mere result, of the efficient causality of any other being whatever, though all coexist in a mutual recognition intrinsic to the nature of each. Thus, by their essential freedom, they constitute a moral order, in the profoundest and only proper meaning of that phrase.
But beyond this base-line of agreement, the system as it has developed in my own mind diverges in important ways from that reached by Mr. Davidson. In the first place, I have to dissent from the view recorded in his title of Apeirotheism: I am unable to regard as divine any of the individual minds that he took account of; they are, to me, all of a type which I should describe as human, in contrast to divine. In the second place, I find it necessary, in order to complete the logical circuit of the whole world of minds, to recognise in it a member to whom the name of God, as designating the absolutely realised perfection of Personality, is alone adequate. This supremely personal Being, this one and only God, my honored friend did not recognise, because, like so many of the members of the Ethical Societies who sympathised with his view or were directly influenced by his reasonings, he found neither necessity nor warrant for it: he could see no propriety in calling by the name of God any one of the eternal society of minds rather than another.
I must not burden the present pages with any argument upon the point of difference between myself and my lamented friend. Here I merely wish to set the difference forth, and to call attention to it as vital to the view I name Personal Idealism. Readers who care to follow up the ​subject, I must refer to the full discussion of the matter in my fifth and seventh essays.
In accordance with this difference, I aim to show that the eternal world is a world of minds falling under the two heads of (1) God, and (2) non-divine consciousnesses who yet in their eternal aspect constitute with God and with each other an indivisibly harmonious whole. The characteristic difference between God and all the other minds, I find to lie in the possession by the latter, and by them only, of a sensuous consciousness, rising everlastingly, through a serial being in time and in space, toward a complete harmony with the eternal ideal that is the changeless central essence of each mind, and whose proper and only real object is God. In short, the new system refers the entire being and linkage of Nature to the minds other than God, so far as concerns its efficient causation. God is not the creator, in the sense of the literal producer, or First Cause, of any mind as such, nor even of that aspect in the conscious life of other minds which we know as their merely natural being, whether of psychic states or of physical processes. It is here that the system parts company with such an idealism as Berkeley’s, and takes part with that of Kant, or, still more closely in some regards, with the earlier theory of Aristotle.
As Final Cause, however, or attracting Ideal, God has, according to this view, absolute and immutable living relations to the being of all other minds (as these also, reciprocally, have to God's own being), and likewise to the being even of Nature; so that Nature takes its supreme law, the law of Evolution, from God’s existence as the eternally-realised Ideal of every mind. Hence, as Final Cause, God is at once (1) the Logical Ground apart from which, as Defining Standard, no consciousness can define itself as I, nor, consequently, can exist at all; and (2) the Ideal Goal toward which each consciousness in its eternal freedom ​moves its merely natural and shifting being, in its effort after complete accord between the two phases of its nature, the eternal and the temporal, the rational and the sensuous.
Thus the system teaches that the two supreme Divine Offices celebrated in historic theology, Creation and Regeneration, have alike a most real meaning, though indeed not a literal but only a metaphorical one. It invites theology to realise the pressing need of now revising and correcting the conception of Creation, in a similar metaphorical sense to that in which the conception of Regeneration has now for some time been reformed: as the latter is now by leading theologians interpreted as the influence of a consciously apprehended ideal truth, the purely final causation by which the Holy Spirit gains its ends, so let the former be for the future read in the corresponding sense of a final causation alone. Between mind and mind, between God and all other minds, there is no causation but Final Cause; the sole realm of Efficient Cause is the realm of Nature, whether physical or psychic, objective or subjective; efficient causation operates from the non-divine minds to their natural (or phenomenal) and sensuous contents, or else, in a secondary manner, between the serial terms of these. Hence God is in no wise responsible for the evil, either natural or moral, that we find in the world of experience, but only for the good that gradually arises in it; and even for this good, only in chief, and not solely; for to every mind that promotes the good and helps to check the evil belongs indefeasibly the credit of his part in the increase of good and the decrease of evil. The evil in the world is the product of the non-divine minds themselves: the natural evil, of their very nature; the moral, the only real evil, of their failure to answer to their reason with their will.
This brief sketch of the view must suffice as preparation for the main task which I here have in hand; namely, to ​exhibit, with some convincing detail, any advantages the system affords to the aims of moral life. To do this I must proceed from the foregoing outline in two directions: (1) I must clearly show the moral need for the system, by exposing the moral inadequacy of all the other current philosophical schemes, even of the many current idealisms, thus bringing out more exactly, on the way, the precise and pertinent points in which the system is new; and (2) I must then collect the several items in which the system displays its worth for those who care supremely for moral endeavour.
I
That the historic systems of philosophy, not only those which have been directly influenced by the historic systems of religion and theology, but also those which have originated more or less in opposition to these, or in correction of them, are unequal to meeting the conditions essential to the existence of a moral order and to the possibility of a moral life in individuals, will appear plainly upon a brief analysis of their leading conceptions.
They are every one of them (with the single exception named below) coloured through and through with creationism, — at least tacit, and generally conscious and deliberate, — a term by which, taken literally, I conveniently designate the reference of all realities to a single First Cause, conceived as explaining existence by being their efficient, or originating, or producing Source. In other words, from the fourfold system of causes set forth by Aristotle — Material, Formal, Efficient, and Final — they all select Efficient Cause as the category which is to be primordial in their scheme of explanation; then they have this Efficient Cause produce the Material, and mould and change it by the Formal, in answer to the Final as its purpose. In proceeding so, they no doubt follow a universal historic impulse of the human mind, unpurified by sufficient self-criticism; for this impulse ​displays itself in all the various systems of religion and their accordant theologies.
This theme of literal creation is so inwrought into the structure of historic thinking, that it will recjuire a long struggle on the part of criticism to get rid of it. Through the influence of the Church and the philosophical schools, it may be said to have become in fact institutional, so that combating it is like fighting organised civilisation itself. Yet one can make the truth clear, that only by the dislodgment of it is the success of the deeper principle possible which is the real soul of civilisation, — I mean the principle of moral life, the life of duty freely followed.
If we examine the great historic systems, we see that with reference to this creationism they may be thrown into the following four main groups:
First, those that are either (1) the direct theological expressions of the post-exilic Hebraism which, taking occasion from the Eternal Dualism of the Parsees, and correcting it by a modified recognition of the Supreme Being of the older Orientalisms, taught a dualism of a monarchotheistic sort — of a Creator, and a creation summoned into existence at a certain date by his sheer fiat (e.g., the systems of Augustine, Aquinas, and Scotus), or else are (2) philosophical enterprises, undertaken in all rational good-faith, but silently engendered by the influence of this Hebraic doctrine even when they greatly modify it (e.g., the systems of Descartes, Leibnitz, Locke, Berkeley, the Deists, and, with all his protests, at the last pinch even Kant).
Second, those that for this dualistic and miraculous exercise of efficient causation, for creation ex nihilo, substitute the older but more rationally continuous view of the immanence of the creation in a monistic Creator or Eternal Source, and thus carry us back into the current of pantheistic emanationism dating from primeval times. E.g., the systems of Erigena, Nicolas Cusanus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Fichte, ​Schelling, Hegel; with such later offshoots as in Spencer, Fiske, T. H. Green, the two Cairds, Bradley, and Royce, — all tracing back, in the last resort, to the great Oriental philosophies of which the Vedanta is the type. Here, upon the whole, critical interpretation must place the general views of Plato and of Aristotle, the great fountain-heads of the manifold idealisms of the West. In this group belong, too, unless I quite misunderstand them, the systems of Dr. W. T. Harris, Professor Kedney, and Professor Macbride Sterrett.
Third, those that abandon every sort of consciousness as a First Principle, drop Final Cause from the list of causes, and so make Matter the producing source of every one of its forms, through the force supposed to be inherent in it or commanent with it. These are the manifold materialisms, atomic or other, from Democritus to Büchner, Vogt, or Dühring.
Fourth, those that repudiate the search into causes as baseless and futile. They demand that philosophy, to be sound, shall drop metaphysics as well as theology, and confine itself rigidly to observational and experimental science, merely describing with precision, though as comprehensively as possible, the facts of history and experience. This view is known as positivism, and bears but one noted name, that of Comte, though all the strictly sceptical systems have contributed to it, from the Later Academy down to Hume. In its own way, it frees itself from creationism utterly. But this way is the way of confessed and open atheism.
Considering these four groups with reference to their bearing on the possibility of moral action, we at once throw out the third and the fourth, as systems of confessed necessarianism, which do not even pretend to furnish any basis for individual freedom or for the pursuit of a rational aim (such as fulness of life in the whole spirit) from conviction and choice. On the ground either of positivism or of ​materialism, ethics can never, properly speaking, be morals. If it escapes fatalism of the hardest sort, with all the consequent hopelessness for most, it cannot avoid hedonism, nor, in the logical end, an egoistic and utterly transient and trivial hedonism.
We have to confine ourselves, then, in any hope of finding conditions adequate for morality — conditions adequate, that is, for the life of serious duty — to the first and second of our groups. But from the second, — the systems of efficient causation construed in terms of monism and immanence, — the self-determining individual is necessarily cancelled. All the particular beings involved in the being of the monistic Whole are but modes or expressions of the sole self-activity of the Whole; they have no activity really their own, but only a derivative operation, determined by the One. This is either openly confessed by the supporters of these systems, or, if they attempt to evade it, they are compelled to end in more or less concealed confessions of it, despite all their efforts. If anybody doubts this, let him attentively read Hegel on this question, or T. H. Green, the brothers Caird, and Professor Royce.
The first group of systems, the dualistic (or literal) creationisms, have, to first impression, a certain appearance of providing for the possibility of freedom, and therefore of a genuine morality. For it seems nominally possible that a Creator by fiat might yet say: “Be, thou! — a nature with power to perceive and to judge, and with will to choose, unpredestined; I create thee rational, and leave thee untrammelled.” But not to mention the complete contradiction of this which the usual theologies and other schemes of predestination introduce, from the need of organising the ​world-plan consistently with their monarchotheistic First Principle, it soon appears that creationism itself, even in this dualistic form (which does to some degree extricate, or appear to extricate, the creature from the embrace of the Creator), must logically exclude the possibility of freedom. For the Creator cannot, of course, create except by exactly and precisely conceiving; otherwise his product would not differ from nonentity. The created nature must therefore inevitably register the will and the plan of the Creator; and there is really no more escaping this under the dualistic scheme than under the monistic, where the consequence has been fearlessly drawn for us all, for all time, in the classic illustration of Spinoza concerning the moving stone, flung from the sling and coming to consciousness after the impulse. Aware only of its unimpeded movement, and not at all of the impelling start, this would of course imagine itself self-moving and free. But those who see whence that unhindered movement really comes, know better. They know how utterly predetermined are both its direction and its rate, by the One who gave it to be.
So much for the problem of Freedom. There is another, the solution of which is also essential to the working fulfilment of a moral life, — I mean the problem of Evil. This, our third and fourth groups are clearly unequal to coping with. They indeed have alike no conscious World-Author to blame for evil, but they alike reduce all evil to natural evil, since their necessarian systems provide no room for blamable wrong in men. Thus they furnish no field for the compensation of even natural evil (to say nothing of moral) by voluntary good, and therefore they both force the unreserved acceptance of “things as they are.”
Nor is this result escaped by a resort to the second group of our systems. Neither Spencerian Agnosticism nor the higher forms of evolutional philosophy known as Cosmic Theism or Idealistic Monism can avoid making the One ​Ground of Things, whether conceived of as conscious or as unknowable, responsible for all that is in life, the evil as well as the good. And the utterly intimate intermingling of the First Cause with all of its effects soever, which these monistic systems all imply, and which some of them frankly maintain, renders this responsibility so direct and complete as to shock all our ideal sensibilities and make reverence for such a Being, vast and mighty as the Being may be, quite impossible, — even reverence, not to speak of adoring devotion. How can we revere that which consciously produces or permits uncontrolled evil, even on the pretence that it is done for eventual good? How worship that which sins in and with us, even if this sinning be for ultimate universal penitence and amendment? Or how can we commit our guidance, devoutly, to that of which we cannot say whether it is conscious or unconscious, and into whose counsels, or whose drift, if perchance it have any, we cannot possibly penetrate? It is condemnation, not recommendation of these systems, to any moral mind, when their advocates declare, as sometimes they do, that “the God of things as they are is the God of things as they ought to be.” A mind heartily moral knows better, when the poet, however plausibly, declares that “whatever is is right.” As moral beings, we know that much which is is wrong, and is in no way palliable, or even to be tolerated, by a good being; yes, that our whole business with it is simply to get rid of it, and to bring on a state of the world in which it shall no longer have room to exist.
This same responsibility for evil, even for sin, is also carried back upon God by the systems in our first group. The predestinating Sovereign, the universal Maker, cannot escape the contagion of the evil and the wickedness that pervades the world which he creates and from moment to moment sustains. Even the natural evil in the world, however regarded as a means of greater good, is so extensively administered with a reckless hand, absolutely regardless of the ​suffering of conscious beings, as to revolt minds even as little developed in goodness as ours. How dare we say that such things are wrought even by the consent of divine Justice and Love? Still less, surely, dare we say that they are wrought by a God's predestinating edict.
II
Under such lights as these, which are shed from what the vast majority of thinking men agree is the profoundest and best that is in us, all such systems as we have described display their final moral incompetency. Let us turn now to the new view, the view that abandons both monism and monarchotheism, that abandons creationism in both its forms, takes resort to Final Cause as the primary and only explanatory principle, and holds to an Eternal Pluralism of causal minds, each self-active, though all recognisant of all others, and thus all in their central essence possessed of moral autonomy, the very soul of all really moral being. How will this view adjust itself to the primary conditions of moral life ? In answering this, I must avoid all practical detail, and confine myself to the universal conditions of moral activity.
(1) The first of these conditions is the reality of moral freedom. Upon this the new system is clear, absolutely clear, and alone is so. It alone founds the real and the phenomenal world in the unqualified reality of a world of individual minds, each of them individual in the only sufficing sense — the sense of self-active intelligence as well as of complete particular identity. It establishes this as a fact in the only way in which such establishment is possible; that is, by proving for each mind a system of a priori cognition, here following and at the same time clarifying the argumentation of Kant, and taking care to note, and to refute, the counter-argumentation founded on the theory of natural evolution. It provides, too, for freedom in both ​senses: that of spontaneous decision and action, eternally and unchangeably adhering to the cause of Right alone; and that of choice in alternatives, as these continually present themselves in time, — the ever recurring alternative between the one eternal choice of Right and the manifold and ever varying forms of temporal defect and wrong.
Not a single one of these causally real individuals is determined to his acts by any extraneous efficient causation, not even God’s, but each is led wholly by ideal influences, by final causation purely, as these ideal influences are by each apprehended and interpreted. The responsibility of each goes back, in the last resort, to his responsibility for right knowledge and right judgment, the sources of which he possesses in his essence, as knowing a priori.
The complete reality of freedom is found, however, in the possibility of realising a moral order in the world of experience. By this I do not mean the mere maybe-so of such an order, but the real power of bringing it about; and the new system provides for this, and alone provides for it, first, by the objective aspect of its theory of Freedom, and secondly, by its supplying a thorough proof for the doctrine of Immortality. But these two matters carry us into further conditions of the moral life, and require separate treatment.
(2) The objective nature of the self-active consciousness, — objective by virtue of its intrifisically social and federal character. Without this, the moral ideal would be nothing but an empty egoism, incapable of transcending solipsism, and leading only to a self-centred culture. Justice and benevolence would have no place in such a life, but only aesthetic self-refinement and self-poise — what the Greeks called σωφροσύνη, which we try quite in vain to translate by temperance, moderation, self-control, sobriety, modesty, and what not. But the new theory puts altruism into the very being of each spontaneous self, and lodges his ​necessary recognition of others in the very primal intelligent act whereby he defines himself and gives intelligible meaning to his saying I. The spontaneous logical form of this first certainty for each, is thus primordially social. By this the system reveals the fact that Kant’s “categorical imperative,” in its final and fully significant form, So act as to regard humanity, whether thine own or that of another, as an End withal, and never merely as a means, is in reality the very first principle of knowledge. Hence the moral principle gets the desired warrant from intelligence which past systems have all failed to give it. The interrupting Kantian gap between morality and intelligence is closed; morality itself becomes intellectual — at once itself objective, inclusive of others equally real with the self, and conferring objectivity, that is, universally intelligible value, upon the individual intelligence. The sources of objective moral judgment in the world of time and circumstance are also thus laid open to the experience of each mind, in the power to consult the public judgment and to verify or correct the private judgment by it.
(3) Fulfilled freedom, however, as the experimental realisation of a moral life, founded in autonomous judgment, depends upon the Immortality of the Individual, in the sense of the everlastingness of his process of experience. On no other terms, as Kant has well shown, can the moral person fulfil his task to win the realisation of his divine ideal, the reduction of his transitional life under the dominance of his eternal choice of the image of God — the image of perfect Holiness, Justice, and Love. Now the new idealism, the organic Rational Pluralism, furnishes the only clear proofs of individual immortality, in the sense of an everlasting personal continuance in a world of perceptions organised by the presence of eternal ideals, supplying power for their eventual victory. But lack of space forbids me from here rehearsing these proofs. I must refer the ​interested reader to the form of them presented in my sixth essay.
(4) The hope of the real and lasting improvement of this present world by our moral endeavour. With lack of this, there would be moral discouragement, and the chief use of this life would be merely to find the means of departing out of it; righteousness could only be “in heaven,” — in “the hereafter.” This added essential to moral effort Personal Idealism supplies, with assurance of hope, in its indivisible union of the eternal and the temporal worlds; a union in which the eternal is the unitary and governing whole, and the temporal the potentially governed part. More than this, indeed much more, and of higher interest, might be said; but more I must here for lack of room forbear to say, and must again refer readers to the fuller exposition in my first and seventh essays.
(5) The validity of the belief in the solvability of the enigma of Evil. We can have no hope in moral endeavour in a world whose Source and Controller we cannot clear of the suspicion of intending or causing evil, or of being in collusion with it, or even of conniving at it. We have seen, above, how all the systems that work from a single Efficient Cause hopelessly fail to attain this clearance of the Cause. I have already hinted at the contrasted success of the new Pluralism. Its God has no part whatever in the causation of evil, but the whole of evil, both natural and moral, falls into the causation, either natural or moral, that belongs to the minds other than God. They alone carry in their being the world of sense, wherein alone evil occurs or wrong-doing can be made real. This evil pertaining to the non-divine is moreover capable of cure, through the immanence of each being’s eternal principle of good and the presence to it of the divine Friend and Saviour. So we pass to the concluding condition.
(6) The validity of the belief in God. That is, the belief ​in a real absolutely perfect Person, transcendent of every other, immanent in none, except by the presence eternally of his Image, or Ideal, before each mind; a real Being, not an Ideal simply; complete in Holiness, Justice, and Love, changelessly attentive to every other mind, rationally sympathetic with all its experiences, and bent on its spiritual success; its inexorable Judge, but also its eternal Inspirer, by his omnipresent reality and his ever-present Image in the conscience.
The absence of objective reality from such an ideal Being, its reduction to a subjective ideal simply, as some modern philosophers caught in an agnostic snare have proposed, would strip moral life of the main support for its struggle against wrong. Amid the manifold disappointments and discouragements of the long battle with defect and wrong, the merely subjective ideal would tend to fade out, to decline both in vividness and in character, and so cease to attract and adequately guide effort. The only adequate support — and it is adequate — is the reality of God, the heavenly Judge, the unfailing Beholder and Sympathiser. To him, the one Absolute Conscience, in every moral disaster our conscience turns for assured refuge and certain renewal of moral courage and strength. That is the real act and infallible function of Prayer.
I think it may justly be said that the new Harmonic Pluralism furnishes the only valid proofs for the reality of such a Being. What these proofs are, I must again spare space by avoiding here to recite. For one form they take, let me again refer to the preceding volume, in its concluding essay, and also, in a somewhat simpler expression, in its fifth. I would point out the fact, however, that all other systems professedly theistic either draw their intended proofs for the being of God from naturalistic considerations that must fall short of all attributes properly divine, while at the same time unavoidably staining the image of the Most High with direct ​or indirect responsibility for all evil; or they rest their case on that fallacious form of the Ontologic Proof which fails to carry us beyond subjective ideality; or else, as in the moral method of Kant, they lose all hold on known reality, and leave God’s being, for its sole support, to our fealty towards our moral calling. ​
APPENDIX C
THE SYSTEM vs. THE VIEW OF THE OXFORD ESSAYISTS
The present writing takes its occasion from the publication, in the autumn of 1902, of the volume entitled Personal Idealism, by eight members of the University of Oxford. By this noticeable event I am moved to express what I must frankly admit are “very mingled feelings” indeed.
One whose fortune it had been to put before the public, some fifteen months earlier, a theory bearing the same title of Personal Idealism, might naturally be expected to greet with lively interest the announcement of a second book under that rubric, especially a book issuing from the English seat of philosophy justly most venerated. This lively interest I have certainly felt; and I have accordingly turned upon the contents of the new volume, not merely with curiosity, but rather with the earnest hope of finding weighty auxiliaries for views which I count to be so inwrought with our greatest human concerns. I come back from the reading, in part fortified and encouraged, but in part also — I fear in greater part — surprised and disappointed. I had supposed, of course, that the cardinal features of the system of Personal Idealism would be agreed about and accepted, if the title was accepted which had been chosen for it by its author. It is the adoption of the title in spite of rejecting ​essentials in the system, that surprises and in some measure discomposes me; and all the more when one finds his own lines of division for the discussion, and even his own topical titles, running through the book. It is because I hope to prevent misunderstandings on the part of the public, and to forestall a confusion of ideas in presence of an identical name used to cover very different conceptions, — dealt with, above all, by very different methods, — that I am prompted to comment on the Oxford volume, and to point out some of the more important divergences between its metaphysical view and that which I would call Personal Idealism.
That the book has great worth of matter, and will have much weight in the doctrinal controversy that is now upon us, follows of course from the known training and culture of its writers. In many regards, those who are in earnest about a polemic against the current anti-personal philosophies, monisms of one sort or another, may unquestionably rejoice in its uncompromising pluralism, and in its courageous, outspoken, and resourceful assault upon Naturalism and Absolutism alike. And if one were to decide upon the philosophical meaning of a movement solely by the general aim of it, in disregard of its method, there would be little or nothing in the programme set forth by the Oxford Eight to which any idealist could demur. “The reality of human freedom, the limitations of the evolutionary hypothesis, the validity of the moral valuation, and the justification of that working enthusiasm for ideals which Naturalism . . . must deride as a generous illusion” — this unquestionably sums up well a cause for which every idealist works; nor could anything much better express one object with which my own volume was prepared. But one doesn’t become an idealist simply by attachment to ideals, or by opposition to those aspects of Naturalism which assail the credit of ideals; otherwise, many an empiricist, many a positivist even, might be called an idealist, and such a persistent railer at idealism ​and all its ways as Professor James might still rank as an idealist of idealists. Idealism is constituted by the metaphysical value it sets upon ideals, not by the æsthetic or the ethical, and rather by its method of putting them on the throne of things than by the mere intent to have them there. It is always distinct from mysticism (which at the core is simply emotionalism), and still more so from voluntarism. Its method is, at bottom, to vindicate the human ideals by showing them to be not merely ideals but realities, and to effect this by exhibiting conscious being as the only absolute reality; this, again, it aims to accomplish by setting the reality of conscious being in the only trans-subjective aspect thereof, namely, intelligence.
So the fact comes about that idealism gets its essential character from its discovery that intelligent certainty depends on such an interpretation of reality as makes the knowledge of reality by the spontaneous light of intelligence conceivable; in short, that idealism is necessarily rationalism, that is, implies an apriorist theory of knowledge. No sort of experientialism, so far as it is consistent, can rightly be called idealism. Voluntarism or emotive mysticism it readily may be, but then it is simply subjectivism; and if it be taken in cognitive terms, it cannot get beyond sensationism, unable as it is to provide for any changeless and universal ideas with which to organise experiences into objects that are inalterably the same for all subjects and therefore abidingly real. Not even such a theory as Berkeley’s (to which one of the eight essayists appears to hold, with some added helps from Kant) can be consistently called idealism; for though it teaches that there is an immutable principle at the basis of our experiences, namely, the operation of the eternal ideas in the Divine intelligence, controlling God’s communication of sensations to us, yet the assumption of this Divine Mind is unwarranted by the strict experientialism from which the theory takes its departure. ​
One might have supposed that all this was settled beforehand, from the time of Locke. But in spite of its title, we find in the Oxford volume experientialism running at large and everywhere; we find, in fact, (1) empiristic epistemology, (2) an organised new assault upon a priori cognitions, (3) a voluntarism of the most pronounced order, (4) an ethical mysticism combating the mysticism of the intellect, and finally (5) a quasi-personalism resting upon the wholly experiential and purely temporal existence of conscious “individuals” added as a society to his own eternal being by the creative fiat of God. In short, not a single trait of systematic idealism is present; the heart of real individuality, of real personality, is not reached — nay, even the serious attempt to reach it is foregone; yet the whole is brought under the name of Personal Idealism. The force of misnomer could hardly farther go.
One good, however, we shall in all probability reap out of the issuance from Oxford of a coöperative book with this title and with the contents embraced: the attention of all the thoughtful in the English-speaking world, and even far beyond it, will now surely be drawn to the vital questions involved. Thence it may be hoped that the genuinely idealistic implications of freedom, of evolutional limits, of valid moral valuation, and of justified enthusiasm for the ideal, will more and more clearly come into view. Not until this occurs, certainly, shall we get finally rid of those plausible makeshifts in the way of philosophy that leave our chief ideal interests still at risk, and so only serve to prolong the weary procession of philosophic disputes. ​
APPENDIX D
REPLY TO A REVIEW IN THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE
To the Editor of the Tribune: I am of course much gratified at finding in your issue of February 13 so full and careful a notice of the philosophical views presented in my recent volume. The reviewer shows great candour, sufficient learning, and an unusual hospitality to new ideas in serious regions. I am indeed glad to have any work of mine the object of a criticism marked by so many qualities of the true and enlightening judge. But the one duty of a reviewer that precedes all others is to apprehend his author correctly; and as, with the best intentions, your contributor has somehow managed to misapprehend me in several essential matters, I must beg enough space in your columns to put myself right.
I THE SYSTEM INDEED PLURALISM, BUT NOT CHAOTIC INDIVIDUALISM
First of all, though I cannot imagine why, the reviewer sets out with the statement, to me simply astounding so far as it concerns myself, that “both Dr. Royce and Dr. Howison are monists and idealists.” (The italics are mine.) I should have supposed that if any one thing blazed out more than another in my book, it would be the ​fact that it assails all monism, of every sort and fashion, and takes for its task the supplanting of it by a system of pluralism. Idealist, indeed, I am; monist, not at all — not in any sense, until one comes to the very subordinate question. Are there two kinds of substantive reality, mind and matter? — is there a dualism of worlds, physical and mental, each existing independently of the other, or is all reality translatable on the contrary into the existence of conscious selves and the derivative existence of their “contained” experiences? In answer to this question, I do indeed say there is but one kind of substantive being, and that mental. But this is one of the characteristic tenets common to all systems of idealism; in the historic nomenclature of philosophy it has never borne the name of monism. The contrast between monism and pluralism is concerned with the theory of ultimate (or primary) reality. A pluralist does not in the least believe (as the reviewer apparently does) that “the ultimate interest of philosophy is to find the One Reality that lies behind the innumerable diverse phenomena of the world.” Pluralism is precisely the stubborn denial that the ultimate reality is any such One and Sole Being, in which every other being is but a component and fragmentary factor, with none but a derivative reality. The pluralist maintains, on the contrary, that this pretender, “The Absolute,” this asserted “One and All,” is an illusion of false speculation, arising from confounding the Real with the empty and meaningless result of persistent higher and higher abstraction. The fundamental issue in philosophy is just this: Is that which is ultimately real One, or is it Many? — or, still less ambiguously. Are there many primary and underived real beings, or is there only one? Here it is that the pluralist divides from the monist; and he divides implacably. The issue is at core the issue between a moral order (which cannot be unless there are many independent agents, the ​true and spontaneous causes of their own acts) and an order simply natural, dominated by the determinism issuing from an all-encompassing Sole Efficiency.
Of course, pluralism, simply as such, might mean universal chaos, disorder, and unreason. It has not infrequently been so interpreted by its advocates. But it has no necessary character of this unruly sort. Idealistic pluralism is distinguished from this pluralism of mere caprice, of pure self-will, by the doctrine that the many Primary Realities, when we discover them in their undermost foundations, are all rational intelligences, and that they therefore spontaneously constitute, not indeed any Unit, in which their freedom would be swamped and crushed, but a rational Union, or Harmony, which is therefore as indestructible as they are. This is the conception at the basis of our American ideal of the state as a Federal Nation, and it might well be represented by our national motto, not plures ab uno, but e pluribus unum. It is just here that I part from Dr. Royce and from the large and justly famous historic company of thinkers from whose lines he sets forth his theoretic array — from Plato, from Aristotle, from Aquinas, from Spinoza, and, above all, from Hegel. Monists of one degree or another all these celebrated minds have been; monist with them is Dr. Royce. They are a proud and weighty company, in fact of a resistless weight if you grant them their fundamental assumption — that the highest and controlling category of true thought is the category of Cause construed as Efficient Causation.
But how the reviewer should have lodged me in their camp — even in any quarter of it — is a mystery I must leave him to explain, if he can. I had supposed that my Preface had put my opposition to every sort of monism beyond the chance of mistake, and that I had rendered my position as a rational (or harmonic) pluralist as clear ​as language could make it. Your readers will surely see that I have done so, if they will take the trouble to read my pages viii-xii, where they can hardly be so inattentive as to miss the words, “Instead of any monism, these essays put forward a Pluralism: they advocate an eternal or metaphysical world of many minds, all alike possessing personal initiative, real self-direction, instead of an all-predestinating single Mind that alone has real free-agency.”
II THE SYSTEM NOT THE THEORY OF PREËXISTENCE
In the second place, the reviewer, in spite of his evidently wide reading in philosophy, has quite misapprehended the meaning of the phrase “the eternal reality of the individual.” His mistake in this connexion I can readily understand, for it is one common even among readers whose philosophical training ought to make it impossible. Unluckily, popular language employs “eternal” to denote the total compass of time, meaning by it “everlasting, both backward and forward.” We are fond of hitting this off in the phrase “from all eternity,” that is, “from a past date infinitely remote.” In this sense people, however wrongly, are in the habit of fancying even the being of God as essentially a temporal existence, only differenced from our transient life of the senses, hemmed in betwixt birth and death, by lasting from forever in the past to forever in the future. But not so does the philosopher understand “eternal.” To him the word must either mean something that “temporal” does not and cannot, or else it must be discarded from his vocabulary as superfluous. And inasmuch as the temporal and the eternal are even by common usage contrasted, he justly says that the word “eternal” must by him be taken to stand for what “temporal” does not and cannot stand for; namely, ​the unchangeable Ground presupposed by the changing temporal; the necessary as against the contingent; the independent as against the dependent; the primary as against the derivative; the self-existent as against that which exists in and through it; the genuine cause, the causa sui, as against that which is after all nothing but effect, however it may be tied, by the causa sui, in an unrupturable chain of antecedent and consequent. Or we may say it means the noumenon as against the phenomenon; or, in fine, the thing in itself as against the thing in other. That is, the relation between the eternal and the temporal is not, and cannot be, only another case of the temporal relation. The relation is just one of pure reason, and is, in fact, sui generis: the eternal does not precede the temporal by date, but only in logic; it is the sine qua non without which the temporal cannot exist, nor is even conceivable. In brief, throughout my book I mean by the “eternal” simply the Real as contrasted with the apparent; the world of self-active causes as contrasted with the world of derivative effects, in so far passive.
I have surely taken every pains to make this plain, even to the inexpert reader; one would hardly have supposed my accomplished critic could fail to take it in. Yet he has failed: he expressly construes the “eternal reality of the individual” as meaning an everlasting preëxistence of each soul. He considers the organising relation which I show the soul has toward Nature to be good ground, to be sure, for a hope of its everlasting continuance beyond the grave, but he says, “One finds it hard to take the jump from the inference of an existence that may be endless to that of an eternal preëxistence [italics mine] of such persons as distinct individuals; or, . . . ‘the coexistence of all souls in eternity with God.’” Again, in expressing his acceptance of “such a coexistence of some souls,” on the ground that “the conception of a lonely God may well be discarded for ​that of social Deity,” he gives even this a purely temporal colouring by speaking of this social God as “never [italics mine again] without filial spirits reflecting the glory of the Eternal Reason.” But, I repeat, I have taken every precaution to prevent the reader from supposing me to mean by “eternal” this popular error; I have expressly warned everybody that I do not intend by the " eternal reality " of the individual his everlasting preëxistence, nor any mere preëxistence at all. Let me ask readers to consult what I have printed on my pp. 351, 352 seq., and to compare with this the statements on pp. 338, 339.
Ill REAL PROOFS OF THE SYSTEM, AND TRUE ROLE IN IT OF FINAL CAUSE
Misled no doubt, at least in part, by the preceding misconception, the reviewer next asks what “ladder we are offered for a climb to this position” of individual eternity, to affirm which “of all souls, of every individual member of the human race,” he says, “seems stupendously audacious.” This “audacity,” like the other “audacity” of making out all minds to be co-creators with God, he appears to infer from his sense of the insignificance of most human lives, as exhibited in their temporal history; a sense that, of late, it seems a good deal the fashion to feel, and in regard to which, and its real baselessness, I think it sufficient here to refer readers to the telling exposure of it, though in another connexion, that Professor James has made on pp. 36-41 of his Ingersoll lecture, Human Immortality.
When the reviewer attempts to answer this question about the ladder I offer for climbing to this audacious height, he goes astray again. He thinks the ladder is my substitution of Final Cause for the time-honored Efficient Cause, as the true mode of the causal relationship between ​soul and soul, and between God and all other spirits; and he therefore declares it is too short to reach the object. Doubtless in this last point he is right: to say that the true and only causal relation between spirits is that of Final Cause, is of course but another way of saying that all spirits are causæ sui, or eternal, and hence is, instead of the proof, the proposition to be proved. But the proposal of this view of Final Cause as the ladder is no proposal of mine. I was quite amazed to read the reviewer’s words. It never occurred to me, in thinking out the system, nor in writing the essays, that this very important step of putting Final Causation at the root of the causal system was any part of the positive argument for the belonging of the individual to the eternal order. Doubtless it is an indispensable precursor of the proof, in the way of showing just what is to be proved; for if the relation of God to souls is that of their Efficient Cause, or literal Maker, they cannot be possessed of a real freedom, cannot be the genuine causes of their own acts and character; cannot belong, that is, to the eternal order at all. But to be an indispensable condition of a thing is far fro.n being the sufficient ground for it.
What, then, is the proof offered for this “stupendously audacious” proposition? Have I really offered none? The reviewer declares, that, despite the sundry improvements upon the monadology of Leibnitz which he is so kind as to say I have made, I have still “not cleared the essential objection to Leibnitz’s scheme” — the objection that it is “an indemonstrable speculation, motived, indeed, by a noble interest, but a cathedral in the clouds.” Is this in fact the case?
It certainly is not. It would be strange indeed, if, com​ing before the public with a theory somewhat startling in its departure from the ruling opinion, I had indulged the mere desire to stir up a sensation, and had omitted even an attempt to prove my main proposition. I have not been guilty of this negligence. On the contrary, I have argued the proposition of the eternity of each individual mind — that is, its genuinely self-active reality — in the most careful way, and in the only way that I can conceive of its being proved in. This I have done, in some sense, in every essay in the volume, but chiefly, of course, in the first, in the third, in the latter part of the fifth, and especially in the sixth. The argument, in brief, is simply that of taking up the problem of the reality and the source of knowledge, and, in face of the supposed evolutionary explaining of all a priori knowledge away by the cumulative force of hereditary habit massed through ages, proving with exact care that every human mind, and therefore by analogy every individual mind as such, does have and exercise this a priori knowledge. Supposing this to have been done (and I must refer readers to the book to test my proofs), the unavoidable meaning of the fact is that every mind possesses a spontaneous objective cognition, and is therefore a case of what, quoting the ever memorable expression used by the writer of the Fourth Gospel, I have called the possession of “life in itself.” This, I maintain, is the only intelligible meaning which anybody can attach to self-existence, independent being, and real freedom; as also it is the only intelligible meaning of knowing a priori.
My readers, I fear, have like my reviewer been somewhat misled by looking into my concluding essay for the most important proofs of my main position. But there I am dealing with a problem, or with problems, important and intricate, indeed, but still subordinate to this main one, and only auxiliary to my principal aim. I am there chiefly concerned with showing that if we are to have a moral ​order in the world of ultimate reality — an order necessarily based upon the autonomy of the individual mind — we must abandon what may be called “creationism”; must abandon it in all its forms, and preeminently in the two forms which have coine into such serious conflict since the middle of the nineteenth century — I mean, of course, (1) the old dualistic (or transcendent) creationism of Hebraic theology, and (2) the later monistic (or immanential) creationism of Hegelianism and the evolutionary philosophy. If freedom is to be saved, I show it must be saved through such an idealism as replaces this “efficient” view of causation by a view purely final, or ideal, as the principle by which God sustains and rules the world. But, supposing this established, how do we know that a free world is a fact? If freedom requires that the soul shall be coexistent with God ill eternity, — that is, in the world of spontaneous first causes, — how are we to prove that freedom and such a world of coexistent self-active beings are both realities?
I answer here as I have answered in the book: By proving the reality of a priori knowledge in the individual. And for the detail of this proof I again refer readers to the first, to the third, and to the sixth essay.
IV THE SYSTEM NOT A SUBJECTIVE BUT AN OBJECTIVE IDEALISM
The reviewer’s own habitual way of philosophising has led him, finally, into misconceiving my form of idealism as one-sided and merely subjective. “It remains to note,” he says, “what seems a confusion of ideas, reappearing from point to point of the argument, in a failure to recognise the distinction between a subjective and an objective view of the universe. It is human thought which organises the motley phenomena presented to the senses into the majestic order called Nature. And this is reasonable ​ground for viewing Nature objectively as the manifestation of a creative Divine mind, akin to the human mind that re-creates it in thought. But this our logical construction of Nature is transformed by the author into the real object of which it is but the shadow. Souls are affirmed not only to be coexistent with God, but also co-creators with him.”
Now it is just this last point, however, that shows the universally social (that is, the public and objective) aspect of my idealistic interpretation of Nature. I no more teach a merely subjective basis for Nature than my reviewer does. The difference is, that he is in the habit, whether consciously so or not, of finding the objective aspect of the world in the efficient causality of God alone, while I find it in the harmonious cooperation of all the eternal minds, including God as the Final Cause, or Supreme Ideal, to which all are rationally attracted. But let readers consult my pages xx-xxii, and compare them with my pages 361-369. I no more explain Nature without the moral world of all spirits, nor without God, than my reviewer does, nor than traditional theology and past philosophy have done. The difference is that I introduce these by the new principle of Final Causation instead of by the old one of Efficient, and thus at once secure a consistent and pure idealism, avoid the impasse of Natural Dualism, and clear the problem of the anti-moral burdens involved in monism on the one hand and in dualistic monotheism — monarchotheism — on the other.
In fine, the reviewer's closing criticism arises from his failure to take in my total view. Perhaps it is too much to expect, that, with its many unaccustomed elements, this view should at once be grasped. I ought to say, too, that the objective aspect of my form of idealism, shown in its principle of social recognition and harmony, is the aspect least worked out in the book; the entire doctrine of the ​system concerning Space, as a principle expressive of this public or objective side of being, in contrast with Time, the principle of subjective privacy, though alluded to in passing, in fact still stands in need of its full and proper treatment. ​
APPENDIX E
REPLY TO CRITICISMS BY MR. J. M. E. McTAGGART
I am much indebted to my reviewer for the care and the penetration with which he has considered my theory; and yet I notice some important respects in which he has failed to take my meaning. These I must set forth with all possible clearness, in the hope of preventing further misunderstanding; and then I shall have to reply to the objections which he raises (or, perhaps rather, the difficulties which he suggests) in connexion with my view.
I FREEDOM, PERFECTION, GOD, AND THE PROOF OF GOD, IN THE SYSTEM
Judging by his other published writings, as well as by his review, I may fairly assume that Mr. McTaggart is in agreement with me in holding to an idealistic pluralism, the theory of an Eternal Society of many minds, each absolutely real. It is well to note, in setting out to comment on his criticisms, that there is a head under which his views and mine might correctly be brought into collocation with the views of our Oxford colleagues, with those of Professor James, with those of the late Thomas Davidson, and even with those of more pronounced individualists, — I mean the head of pluralism: in one way or another, we all hold out for manifold realities that are all alike indis​putable. But only some of us set this pluralism forth by an idealistic method, and hence arrive at what we call the “eternity” of the many minds. By this we mean simply their absolute reality, or the self-based, self-active nature of their being, — nothing else at all, except as something else may be implied by this absoluteness; least of all, do we mean merely their everlastingness, their existence “from all eternity,” as the common saying is. Our doctrine has nothing whatever to do with the superstition, born of fancy, about preëxistence. In this matter I suppose Mr. McTaggart to be in entire accord with me, and I am therefore somewhat surprised to note in his review certain misapprehensions of my position. These I will now specify.
(1) He speaks of my doctrine that only an eternal being can really be free, as a “remark.” This language is seriously misleading; the reader must surely get from it the impression that my statement of this view is merely incidental and by the way. On the contrary, it is in fact basic and central to the whole theory of my book, is developed with emphatic prominence, and is argued out with much detail. (See my pp. 326-343.)
(2) A more important misapprehension is this: “It [the system of Personal Idealism] offers a God of whom personality, morality, and affection can reasonably be predicated, since, though perfect, he is finite. (I am not sure if the author would accept the word ‘finite,’ but in effect, it seems to me, he holds God to be finite, since he makes him one of a community of spirits, each of whom has ‘a reality as inexpugnable as his own.’)”
Indeed I do not accept the word, nor can. I am surprised that my real view in this matter should have escaped Mr, McTaggart. So far from holding God to be finite, I hold, and in the book clearly teach, that all minds are infinite (in the true qualitative sense of the word), and God ​preëminently so. (See my pp. 330 seq., 363, and 373). Eternity, self-existence, self-activity, freedom, and infinity are to me all interchangeable terms, and are so treated wherever they turn up in the course of the book. My reviewer falls into a non sequitur when he concludes that I make God finite because I make him one of a community of spirits, each absolutely real; not God’s finitude, but his definiteness, is what follows from that. This confusion of the definite with the finite is very comm.on, and is the explanation of two tendencies in sceptical thinking — the tendency to deny the personality of God, whose infinity is supposed to mean his utter indefiniteness, and the tendency, in recoil from the former, to assert God's finitude in order to save his personality, which of course must be definite. But the true infinite, as distinguished from the pseudo-infinite, the infinite of quality in contrast to the infinite of quantity, is entirely definite; more definite, indeed, than any finite can be.
(3) Mr. McTaggart misconstrues my various statements about the imperfection in all spirits other than God. He supposes me to hold this imperfection to be incompatible with their being perfect in any sense whatever, and he mildly blames me for overlooking the classic distinction between the view sub specie æterni and the view sub specie temporis, whereby the seeming contradiction involved in an imperfect-perfect might be reconciled. But my actual doctrine about the spirits other than God is exactly his own. “Sub specie æternitatis, every self is perfect; sub specie temporis, it is progressing towards a perfection as yet unattained,” he says. And the very quotation from me on which he bases his criticism (see my p. 363) expresses this, almost in open words: “The personality of every soul lies precisely in the relation . . . between that genuine infinity (self-activity) which marks its organising essence, and the finitude . . . to which the infinity [only ​another name for perfection] subjects itself in defining itself from God.” So, too, though more explicitly, when (p. 374) I say: “The perfection of the ‘creature’ lies just in this never ending process of victory. . . . Thus its life shows its peculiar perfection by the mode in which . . . it surely, though slowly and with heavy toil, heals its own inherent wound.” And, yet again: “The infinity of the ‘creature,’ the infinity that embosoms finitude and evermore raises this toward likeness with the eternal.”
There are sundry other passages in my concluding essay that affirm the distinction drawn by Mr. McTaggart between the complete self-adequacy of the spirit as a whole in eternity and the inadequacy of it as broken up in a time-process and engaged in a perpetual struggle to attain conformity with that eternal wholeness. In fact, this distinction furnishes the whole basis for my reply in that essay to Professor James’s “Dilemma of Determinism.” I am really quite at one with Mr. McTaggart in what he says about the perfection of all eternal beings, in so far as they are eternal. I have usually avoided the explicit use of the word, because it is in many contexts misleading, and also because the too free use of it would engender prejudice in most readers, thus preventing the proper appreciation of the arguments offered for the world of real freedom. That world as I intend it, and habitually think it, answers to the principles of unity and harmony quite as Mr. McTaggart suggests.
Accordingly, my argument for the existence of God is not reached by those of his suggested objections which are founded on his assumption that I hold all minds but God to be utterly and totally imperfect, without any aspect of perfection at all. On the contrary, I hold, with him, that all eternal beings are perfect, each in its own way. But the way of God, I maintain, is the way of absolute perfection, which eternally excludes defect; whereas the way of every other mind is the way that includes defect, conies (or ​may come) to include sin, and only exhibits its perfection in its power to return to wholeness through the process of time.
That I have chiefly dwelt on perfection and imperfection as respectively the attributes of God and of the non-divine minds, without entering into the subtle distinction between kinds of perfection, is indeed a fact, but it should be regarded as a rhetorical rather than a philosophical procedure. That is to say, my book was aimed at readers of general cultivation rather than at metaphysical experts, and so I thought I should carry my new argument for the reality of God more surely home if I kept out of the region of the supersubtile, and relied upon those aspects of the difference between God and other minds which are the most obvious. The point of my argument, in this connexion, is that in God there is a perfection in which there is no imperfection at all, while in every other mind imperfection is present, though undergoing an endless process of cancellation. Of course, subtly analysed, this last means a species of perfection. But again my point is, that the sole possible basis for species in perfection is, primarily, the contrast between absolute perfection (excludent of imperfection) and perfection that embraces and proceeds to reduce imperfection; and, next, the manifold modes of which this second species is susceptible, resting on what I have called (see my pp. 363, 374) the “rate” of adjustment between the infinite (or perfect) and the finite (or defective) aspects of the mental being.
(4) In connexion with my argument for the existence of God, Mr. McTaggart makes this statement: “Among the different grades [of intelligent beings] which . . . are really possible . . . the author assumes that the highest grade of all — that of the ideal Type — is one, and consequently that a being exists who realises the Type. So far as I can see, he does not attempt to prove this.” Just what Mr. McTaggart means by his word “this,” I am in some doubt — whether ​he is referring to my “assuming” that the ideal Type is one of the different grades of being that are really possible, or to my taking as a direct consequence of this the actual existence of the ideal Type.
As for the first of these matters, it is not true that I assume the ideal Type to be one of the really possible intelligences; on the contrary, I show (see my pp. 353-355) that this Supreme Instance of the intelligent nature present in all possible minds is the one salient certainty in our conception of the whole series, when we view the series as conceivable simply: whatever we can not tell about the series, or the numbers in it, what we do see, and see clearly, is that it must contain, as a possibility, this Type; this I treat as the implication in the entire process of definition by which other members in the series are determined.
And as for the second point, I do not conclude to the actual existence of the divine Type directly from its ascertained possibility; that would be merely repeating the thrice-buried Ontologic Proof over again, and the futility of that I have dwelt upon in my pp. 357-358. The identification of the divine Type as a necessary member of the conceivable series proves only this: that there is a necessary connexion between the idea of every mind and the idea of God, — no mind can define itself except in terms of God. The argument to the actual reality of God is then completed by resorting to each mind's certainty of its own actual existence through dialectic verification: the attempt to posit the contrary, only ends in positing the self again. From this the actual existence of God follows, because the actual existence of the self must carry the existence of whatever the idea of the self synthetically involves. I can hardly imagine how my reviewer can have read my pp. 356-359 and still say that I make no attempt to prove the actual existence of God as the ideal Type of all the really possible spirits; nor how he can still set it down that I assume the ideal ​Type to be one of the series of really possible beings, “and consequently that a being exists who realises the Type.”
II RELATIONS TO KANT, CATEGORIES vs. SENSE-FORMS, MONOTHEISM, MISUSE OF THE NAME GOD
But enough of these misapprehensions. I must now turn to sundry difficulties that Mr. McTaggart finds with some of the cardinal conceptions in my theory, or else with my method of advocating them.
(1) He complains that after going closely with Kant to a certain point, I then suddenly separate myself, — “abruptly,” as he says. By this he appears to mean my rejection of Kant's restriction of all our cognition to phenomena and denial of our power to know noumena. He implies that I nowhere give any reasons for rejecting Kant’s criticisms on the Paralogism of Pure Reason, but go on to maintain that pure reason can know' that the self exists, and exists eternally, — simply ignoring these celebrated criticisms. It is a fact, of course, that I have not felt it needful to reply in detail to the various branches of Kant’s agnostic doctrine, and especially not to his assault upon the possibility of proving theoretically the freedom and the immortality of the self. I have chosen to rely, rather, on a general refutation of the agnostic motif, which I have supplied in my first essay; and I have relied more especially on the self-refutation of Kantian agnosticism by its own inner dialectical dissolution, which I have traced out in the fourth part of my third essay. These very essential parts of my general argumentation, my reviewer appears to have quite overlooked. No reader who omits them will properly understand the argumentative procedure on which I rest my case in the seven essays taken together. ​
Besides, I have throughout assumed readers will see that Kant's agnostic restrictions are anticipated, provided for, and rendered inapplicable, by the plain implications of the fact of a priori cognition itself, when that is once clearly established and clearly understood; and this fact I have explicitly argued out, in two different places in the volume — in the first essay, and again in the sixth. Then, too, I have relied on the plain power of the essentially social nature of the self-defining consciousness to lead my readers to see how irrelevant Kant’s agnostic tenets are. (See, particularly, my pp. 351-353, and cf. pp. 173-175) That is to say, the Kantian agnosticism is annulled, so far at least as concerns the certainty of the existence, even the noumenal or eternal existence, of the self. In fact, however, my reviewer is a trifle out in saying I depart from Kant on this point, for Kant himself never supposed that this was unknown or unknowable: what was unknowable was not the existence, but the nature of the noumenon. If nowhere else, then at all events in the Prolegomena, Kant declares unmistakably that the existence of selves as Dinge an sich is a known certainty. “That there are no Dinge an sich,” he says in substance, “is absurd.” (Cf. the Prolegomena, passim, but especially in §57.)
(2) A more serious complaint is that which Mr. McTaggart makes that my reasons for treating the Categories as applicable to the self, when I refuse to describe it in terms of the Sense-Forms, are “not brought out anywhere in the book.’ This fault, if it is a fault, I shall have to admit. Within the limits of the brief volume I could not compress everything pertaining to a complete vindication of my general view. In particular, Mr. McTaggart’s centrally pertinent question — Why are not the Categories in exactly the same position as Time, as to being necessarily transcended by the noumenal self? — could only be answered after a complete reexamination, going to the foundations of the ​whole problem of epistemology. This would need to be taken up along Kant’s own lines, and followed to the point where (at the end of the Transcendental Analytic) one gets into the position to show that Kant has failed to establish the objective character of even natural science, and just why he has failed. It would then appear that in order to give really objective value to a priori syntheses in Space and Time, we must combine a pure use of the Categories — a use unmixed with the Sense-Forms — with their use as “schematised” with the help of these Forms. Thus we should learn that there is no possible escape from the transcendent use of the Categories, even when we attempt to employ them only transcendentally.
But not only did I feel that this epistemological inquiry was at once too long and too subtle for the public to which I chiefly addressed my book; I was also, in the case of more expert readers, relying upon a previous warning as to the general path the inquiry must follow, which I had given in my contribution to the volume entitled The Conception of God, at pp. 124-127. Still, Mr. McTaggart is quite right in pointing out that all this needs to be done in full detail before one can claim to have made a proof of Personal Idealism clear of all queries. And this I hope some day yet to accomplish.
(3) My reviewer finds a “weakness” in that part of my argument concerning the existence of God which aims at showing God’s soleness (monotheism), in opposition to the charge of “polytheism” or “apeirotheism” urged against my proposition that all selves coexist with God in eternity. He thinks the argument assumes “that beings who were equally perfect could not be different from one another.” But it does not assume this, as I have already shown above, when clearing up the misapprehension about perfection and imperfection as applicable to the selves other than God. It does assume, however, that no beings who are absolutely ​perfect can be different, that is, none that are perfect without immixture of imperfection, and that are wholly supra-temporal in their being. The conjunction of this unmixed perfection with eternity is what constitutes the proof for the soleness of God. Mr. McTaggart fails to get the force of it, I think, because he silently omits this divine differentia before the word “perfect” as I use it of God. And thus, contrasting God and other selves as the Perfect and the unrelieved imperfect, he draws the unwarrantable conclusion about “superiority” and “inferiority” which he seems so much to dislike. But I intend no relation of this sort between God and the souls. They are different, and unchangeably different; they are even different in species, God being perfection eternally fulfilled, the other selves having a time-world of unfulfilment and having to carry it on toward the goal of fulfilment evermore. Thus the difference between them, in this reference, is permanent, — to answer my reviewer’s question on this point. But I do not teach that it is a difference of ”inferior” and ”superior”; quite the contrary is the fact, as any one who rightly reads my pp. 243-256 will know beyond question.
(4) Finally, Mr. McTaggart objects to my calling this sole mind possessing absolute and eternal perfection, God. He insists that the traditional usage shall be absolutely venerated, which makes God the name of the one only self-existent Being, who brings all other beings into existence by creation ex nihilo. Here I am quite unable to agree with him. I not only do not think that this solitude of self-existence, conjoined with this universal efficient causality, is the central and essential thing in the traditional religious thought of Christendom, but I am sure that the most spiritually-minded Christians would at once declare that it is not such; they would say, on the contrary, that the essential thing in the being of God is his holiness, justice, and infinite love. Now, what I point out is, not only that the ​function of creation, taken literally, is unessential to this moral perfection of God, but that it is in hopeless contradiction with it; and that the obscurely felt fact of this contradiction, a feeling growing ever more clear as the Christian consciousness grows more sure of itself, is at the bottom of all that restlessness in the region of Christian theology which we all know so well, and which is the characteristic fact in the later Christian world.
To remove the name of God from the clarified and purified conception of the eternal Ideal Type would be to do violence, inexcusable affront, to the deepest and truest element in the historic religious consciousness. I feel the strongest assurance that ray new interpretation of the name of God is the genuine fulfilment of the highest and profoundest prescience in the historic religious life. What offends us in the Spinozistic or other monistic appropriations of the name “God” is the evident absence from their Absolute of all the essential moral qualities. In these it is that true Deity lies, and all God’s metaphysical attributes must be keyed up to them; not one of these “natural” attributes dare be construed in any way that conflicts with the eternal moral essence. If they have been so construed historically (as indeed they have), genuine theology requires that the conception of God shall be relieved of these errors, in order that God's nature may stand revealed as it is in its own reality.
* ↑ Reprinted, with slight changes and some additions, from Kant-studien. Band viii, Heft 2-3.
* ↑ Reprinted, with omissions and minor alterations, from the International Journal of Ethics, July, 1903.
* ↑ Let the interested reader consult, particularly, Professor Royce’s “Supplementary Essay” in the volume entitled The Conception of God (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1897), in the chapter where he undertakes to deal with the question of the freedom of the individual.
* ↑ Extracted, with some changes not material, from an article in Mind, April, 1903, with the heading, “In the Matter of Personal Idealism.”
* ↑ Reprinted, with omissions and immaterial changes, from the Daily Tribune, March 5, 1902.
* ↑ Undemonstrated, I suppose is meant; to call the speculation indemonstrable, is of course to beg the question.
* ↑ See pp. xiii and xxii, and cf. p. 352, note, and p. 353.
* ↑ Reprinted, with some trifling changes, from Mind, April, 1903. Mr. McTaggart’s review may be found in Mind, July, 1902.