Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/353

THK ABSOLUTE OK HKliKLIAMSM. 839 and we have still to ask whether the position for which it stands that the sole reality which we can say anything about, and which, therefore, we must identify with the Absolute, is the reality of human experience ' can rationally be maintained. And here we have to meet at once the ob- jection to a, growing God. Apparently we have a God who starts from the barest minimum, and who gradually comes to a more and more complete consciousness of his own nature ; and the difficulties in this are so obvious that I hardly think it necessary to enlarge upon them. As a growth in perfection, common sense would be quite ready to admit a gradual development of the human realisation of God's nature, but not, surely, of God's consciousness of himself, as it must do if human development and God are identical. To anything which has the appearance of making reality dwindle away, as we go back in time, to a mere nominal existence, philosophy and common sense alike have an in- superable objection. And if we were to go on, and sum up God's absolute nature in human development at the present stage which it has reached, as Hegel shows at least a tend- ency to do, we should have a reductio ad absurdum which would hardly need further discussion. This latter conclusion, however, it would be unfair to insist upon ; in reality it is excluded by a right understanding of the conception. For of course if reality is a process, it does not come to an end now, but is still going on, and Absolute reality is still to be revealed more completely. And this may seem .to open a way for the solution of the difficulty we are considering. It is not simply the present and the past that is real ; the future is real also. A thing was what it has become, and so it is what it will become. 2 Accordingly, if we ask what the truth of nature is, we are not bound down to the obviously untenable position that it is what mankind already knows about the world. Since reality is the process as a whole, the new part which nature is still to play in human life in the future is to be included in the conception of reality, and of nature. The fact that in our time reality has only reached a certain stage, does not make it necessary to define reality absolutely by this particular stage. And it may be admitted that this contention has a degree of force. But I do not see that it meets the real point at issue. The 1 Not of course the reality mrali'd in human experience, for it is the essence of the common sense position, and its central point of difference with Hegelianism, that realities can be knon'ii in Imtnun experience which yet have an existence beyond it. 2 Eastwood, MIND, vol i., p. 485 ; Jones, Lutzr, >. H74.