Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/142

compatibility of Self-Completeness, as Professor Royce by his argument has to conceive of this, with the Goodness that he would vindicate for his Absolute. In short, I agree with Professor Mezes again, in his second criticism, — that the Self-Completeness reached by this argument cannot amount to Goodness; though I may say, in passing, that I would not argue this on that fascinating but dreamy ground of the illusion declared inherent in time, the validity of which I very much doubt, but on the ground, once more, that such Self-Completeness fails to provide for any manifold of selves either phenomenal or noumenal, and that the very meaning of Goodness, if Goodness is moral, depends on the reality of such a public of selves. While I should dissent, too, from Professor Mezes in his implication that absolute Goodness must have the trait of progressive improvement, I hold that its very meaning is lost unless there is a society of selves, to every one of whom Goodness, to be Divine, must allot an unconditional reality and maintain it with all the resources of infinite wisdom. I repeat: My point against Professor Royce’s argument, and against the whole post-Kantian method of construing Idealism, summed up by Hegel and supplied by him with organising logic, is this: By the argument, — as by many another form of stating Hegel’s view, — reading off its result as Idealistic Monism (or Cosmic Theism, if that name be preferred) rather than as Solipsism, is left without logical justification. The preference for the more imposing reading, it seems to me, rests on no principle that the argument can furnish, but on an instinc-