Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/376

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PROFESSOR ROYCE ON HIS CRITICS
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than are many individuals taken together. Social life, as one sees, is richer than isolated life, — an organism of co-operating moral agents is worth more than is the private experience and aspiration of any lonely self. The fulness of spirituality is more dignified in grade of being than is a world where one finite thinker, “tucked away in a corner,” has his aspirations fulfilled, and where he and the abstract Absolute are together all in all. This, I say, is somehow known as a truth, to one in the position of Professor Mezes. How, otherwise, should his questions be formulated? Unless he somehow knows all this, he finds and states no lack, no difficulty, in my conception. But if he knows this, then what does his knowledge imply? He has an idea, and, by hypothesis, a valid idea, of the possible spirituality which, as he affirms, the Absolute of my conception lacks, so far as I have developed the conception. Unless this idea is known to Professor Mezes as valid, the objection fails. But if it is known as valid, then the needed supplement is furnished by the very meaning of the question. This idea, — this valid idea, — what relation has it to the Absolute as explicitly, although abstractly, defined by my original theory? As valid idea, it is one of the ideas that the Absolute finds fulfilled in his experience. Escape from this conclusion there is none for one who, like Professor Mezes, accepts my theory as far as it goes, and who then observes this lack as an obvious lack, and who, in doing so, asserts as valid this idea of a higher spiritual perfection than my statement had explicitly defined. I had not expressly mentioned, in my original paper, the special forms