resolved me back into the infinite Vague of the Cosmic Mind, as this might, perchance, be fancied to be in itself, apart from Nature and creation, —
“that which came from out the boundless Deep
Turns again home.”
Shall I ever issue forth again from that Inane? Will that unfathomable Void ever create again? — ever again enfold an embosomed Nature, to repeat again through her fertility the stupendous drama of evolution? To ask such questions is to realise how utterly we have left the native regions of our occidental thinking; how lost we are among the most shadowy conceptions of the Orient. And no matter which alternative we take; no matter whether we maintain Nature everlastingly, and as parts of Nature win an endless continuance, but remain forever destitute of freedom, mere aggregates of “inherited tendency” organised and moved by some new and heightened touch from the ever-immanent God; or, on the other hand, by severance from Nature win the empty name of freedom, and vanish in a nominal immortality that only means absorption into the Eternal Inane; — in either case the so-called God is not a Personal God, since in neither does he stand in any relations of mutual responsibility and duty with other real agents. Thus I cannot see that this Evolutional Idealism makes any secure advance beyond the Monism which it seeks to amend. We appear to be left to that, after all; and for proof of it, to some such argument as that of our evening’s chief speaker. Let us return, then, to that argument once more.
