more for a time in this contemplation of the Eternal Truth. Hic breve plangitur. But not so is it in God's life. Our problems may be hard, but there all is solved. Our lives may be poor and contemptible, but there all is wealth and fullness of worth. Our efforts may often prove vain, but there naught exists that is vanity. For the imperfection of the finite is but the fragment of the Infinite Whole where there is no true imperfection. Is it not a Religion to feel this? And we shall then turn from such a contemplation once again as we do now, to look with fresher courage at this boundless, tossing sea of human life about us. This is not itself the Divine, but over it all God's winds are blowing. And to our eyes it is boundless. Let us go down into this great sea and toil, fearing no storm, but seeking to find there treasures that shall be copies, however faint, of that which is Eternal. EPILOGUE. YET some reader, to whom, as to the author, philosophic questions are directly matters of vocation, may possibly linger. To him are due one or two statements more, to set at rest certain of his doubts about our meaning. Perhaps he will ask the very natural, yet, after all, not very fruitful, question, "Is the foregoing theory of things Theism or Pantheism? Has it been your purpose to defend the essential portions of the older Theistic doctrines, or to alter them in favor of some newer faith?" This question expresses a difficulty that some plain people must feel when they read, not merely this book, but( also many recent discussions. There are writers who have undertaken to defend Theism, and who have actually in all sincerity argued for the necessity of the Universal Thought. The plain people have reason to suspect such of trying to substitute for the "God of our Fathers" something else, to be called by the same name, and so to be passed off for the same thing. We therefore answer very plainly that we desire to do nothing of the sort. If in the foregoing we have on occasion used the word God, no reader is obliged to suppose that our idea agrees with his idea, for we have fully explained what our idea means. We repeat: As my thought at any time, and however engaged, combines several fragmentary ( thoughts into the unity of one conscious moment, so, we affirm, does the Universal Thought combine the thoughts of all of us into an absolute unity of thought, together with all the objects and all the thoughts about these objects that are, or have been, or will be, or can be, in the Universe. This Universal Thought is what we have ventured, for the sake of convenience, to call God. It is not the God of very much of the traditional theology. It is the God of the idealistic tradition from Plato downwards. Our proof for it is wholly different from those baseless figments of the apologetic books, the design - argument, and the general argument from causality. Since Kant, those arguments must be abandoned by all critical philosophers, and we have indicated something of their weakness. They have been aptly compared to mediæval artillery on a modern battle-field. We accept the comparison. Kant gave to modern philosophy new instruments, and these it is our duty to apply as we can to the old questions that the whole history of thought has been trying to understand. Our special proof for the existence of an Universal Thought has been based, in the foregoing, upon an analysis of the nature of truth and error as necessary conceptions. We do not regard the Universal Thought as in any commonly recognized sense a Creator. A creator would be finite, and his existence would have to be learned from experience. The Universal Thought is infinite, and its existence is proved independently of experiFor the rest, we have insisted that experience furnishes no evidence of single creative powers that are at once unlimited and good. We have however shown how all the Powers that be exist as necessary facts in the Infinite Thought, and how, apart from this thought, nothing is that is. Such is our conception. It is no new one in philosophy. We have tried with no small labor, and after tedious doubting, to make it our own. We have independently given our own reasons for it. And we have asserted that here is an object of infinite religious worth. ence. And now we must add that we are quite indifferent whether anybody calls all this Theism or Pantheism. It differs from the commoner traditional forms of both. Both usually consider God as a Power, and either leave him off on one side to push things occasionally, or to set them going at the outset, or else identify him with his products. The former way of conceiving God is never more than halfphilosophic. The latter way is apt to degenerate into wholly poetical rhapsodies. We take neither of these ways. For us Causation is a very subordi nate idea in philosophy. It expresses only one form of the rational unity of things, and that an imperfect form. The world of the Powers is not yet an universe. Thought must be truer than Power, comprehending all the Powers, and much more besides, in its infinite unity. God as Power would be nothing, or finite. God as Thought can be and is all in all. And if this is philosophy, traditional Theism can do what it wishes to do about the matter. In short, the present doctrine is the doctrine that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. So far, said St. Augustine, Plato had gone. So far we have gone. Beyond that, said St. Augustine, the truth was not revealed to human wisdom, but only to humble faith. Beyond that, with the rational consequences that we have been able to draw from it in the foregoing, we are frankly agnostic. If any man knows more about the Powers in the world than science has found out by patient examination of the facts, let him rejoice in his knowledge. We are not in possession of such knowledge. We believe in the Conservation of the physical forces, in the Law of Evolution as it is at present and for a limited past time found to express the facts of nature, and in the fact of the Dissipation of Energy. All this we believe as the scientifically probable view, and we do so on the authority of certain students of physical science, who, having examined the facts, seem to agree upon so much as capable of popular exposition. We believe in such other results of science as are known to us. But beyond this nothing as to the Powers in the world is clear to us. We know nothing about individual immortality, nothing about any endless future progress of our species, nothing about the certainty that what men call from without goodness must empirically triumph just here in this little world about us. All that is dark. We know only that the highest Truth is already attained from all eternity in the Infinite Thought, and that in and for that Thought the victory that overcometh the world is once for all won. Whatever happens to our poor selves, we know that the Whole is perfect. And this knowledge gives us peace. We know that our moral Vindicator liv |