Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/247

IN THE MATTER OF PERSONAL IDEALISM. 233 or " apeirotheism " urged against my proposition that all selves coexist with God in eternity. He thinks the argument assumes " that beings who are 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 per- fection 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 supraternporal 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 unwarrant- able conclusion about "superiority" and "inferiority" which he seems 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 is in this reference permanent, to answer my reviewer's question on this point. (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 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 my new interpretation of the name of God is the genuine fulfilment of the highest and profoundest prescience in the historic religious