Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/222

This page needs to be proofread.
SUPPLEMENTARY ESSAY BY PROFESSOR ROYCE
185

must unquestionably involve other aspects than those which are directly suggested by the word “experience.” And, in my original paper, I expressly observed that this must be the fact; or, in other words, that the divine Omniscience must involve other attributes than Omniscience alone.

The essential feature of the foregoing account may be expressed by saying that all facts, all thoughts, all fulfilments of thoughts, — in a word, all truth, — must be present to and in the unity of one Divine or Absolute Consciousness, precisely as, in one of our own moments, many data and many aspects are together in the unity of such a moment. But this concept of the “Eternal Now,” of the “One Moment,” as the character of the Absolute when viewed as the All-Knower, is so far an extremely abstract conception. One has every right to ask: Has the Absolute no other characters than this? Does the Absolute only know? Or does he also will? Is our Absolute a purely theoretical being? Or does perfect knowledge imply more than mere knowledge?

The purpose of this Second Part of my present paper is to answer in part this very question, by considering the relation of a conception, first carefully generalised from our concept of Will, to the now defined conception of the Absolute. The discussion will here consist of two subdivisions. In the first, I shall consider the general conception of Will, trying to distinguish therein the most essential from the more accidental features of our human experience of what we call Will. In the second, I shall reconsider the conception of an “Absolute Experi-