Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/167

This page needs to be proofread.
130
THE CONCEPTION OF GOD

sole Infinite Inclusive Self, and reduce all particular so-called selves merely to modes of his omniscient Perceptive Conception? Does the argument not require us to accept God, so called, as the one and only real agent — the vera causa sola?

9. Is such a view of existence compatible with the true personality of human beings, or with a true personality of God?

10. What is the real test of personality? Is it just self-consciousness, without further heightening of quality, or must it be self-consciousness as Conscience? What is Conscience? Is it not the immutable recognition of persons — the consciousness of self and of other selves as alike unconditional Ends, who thereby have (1) Rights, inalienable, and (2) Duties, absolutely binding?


ON PROFESSOR MEZES’S CRITICISM

1. Is it true that the relativity of pastness and futurity must be taken to mean that they are illusions? Is Cæsar really dead and turned to clay, and also really, in the one Eternal Moment, now conquering Gaul and Britain, and dominating the envious Senate?

2. Can Eternity be adequately stated in terms of time at all? Is there not an Eternal Order, and also a Temporal? — a Noumenal and a Phenomenal?

3. Must the ideal being answering to the moral conception contain the trait of progressive improvement? Is not this the characteristic of minds marked with finitude? — that is, having in their consciousness an aspect that is finite?


ON PROFESSOR LE CONTE’S REMARKS

1. Does Dr. Le Conte’s argument to God from the footing of science show that there is a Cosmic Consciousness, or only that there might well enough be such a Consciousness?

2. Is not a Cosmic Consciousness, reached by such an argument (if reached by it), necessarily to be taken as having a monistic relation to the Cosmos? Does not its Omnipresence, too, take the form of a universal pervasion of space as well as of