Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/166

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COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON
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3. To put the preceding question in another way, Can an Omniscient Being amount to a Divine Being unless the core and spring of this Omniscience be proved to be a Conscience?

4. Does the argument to an Omniscient Reality from human ignorance, taken in its precise reach, provide for persons as the prime objects of Omniscience, or for Conscience as its central spring? — does this argument make Omniscience involve Love in any other sense than that of Content with its own action, and with its self-produced objects, merely as forms of that action?

5. Is it reasonable to speak of God as having an experience, even an absolute experience? Or, if it is, what change in kind in the meaning of “experience” is involved? — is not “experience,” thus taken, a name for the self-consciousness of pure Thought and pure Creative Imagination? In the natural and unforced sense of the words, can there be an absolute experience? — an absolute feeling one’s way along tentatively, or any absolute, i.e. wholly self-supplied, contents received — facts of sense?

6. Is the reasoning to an Absolute Experience and an Absolute Thought by means of the implications inevitable in asserting our limitation to be real, capable (1) of making out an Ultimate Reality in any other sense than that of an Active Supreme Judgment as the grounding or inclusive being of the single thinker who frames the argument; (2) of combining this ultimate reality of this single thinker with that of other thinkers equally real?

7. To put the foregoing question in less cumbrous, though less explanatory terms: Can an argument like Professor Royce’s prove an Absolute Mind distinct from each thinker’s mind, or an Absolute Mind coexisting with other genuine minds, unquestionably as real as itself? What is the true test of reality? — and how alone can finitude coexist with unabated reality? Is not that test self-active intelligence? — and, in order to our being real notwithstanding our finitude, must not Nature be conceived as conditioned by human nature, instead of conditioning it?

8. To put the question in still another way: Must not the convincing force of every such method of reasoning to the Absolute be necessarily confined to a monistic view of existence? That is, will not the method of proof confine us to a single and