Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/382

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PROFESSOR ROYCE ON HIS CRITICS
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it to be. While, then, you may and do misread your social and moral relations in many ways, your real relations are concrete, are social, are moral, and of the types which your experience now suggests to you. And the world-order which contains you is more “spiritual” than your brightest finite dream of spirituality, more social than your closest human intimacy, and infinitely more wealthy than your largest society of human individuals.

The second main objection of Professor Mezes brings into view the general relation between the Absolute and the time-process. Moral significance, he pleads, is essentially bound up with the real time-process as such. In the world of the eternal Now, as far as I defined this world, there is no progress of the whole, the time-process, by hypothesis, being transcended by means of some higher type of inclusive consciousness. Hence, from the point of view of the eternal, nothing morally significant appears to happen. Professor Mezes finds this aspect of my conception ethically unsatisfactory.

A complete reply would involve that elaborate discussion of the metaphysics of the time-process which has already been declined, as beyond the scope of the present paper. In dealing with the problem of Immortality, I have already indicated the kind of answer that I should undertake to develope, did space permit. Here, if you will, is another antinomy, of the same general type as the one discussed with reference to the problem of Individuality. Theory demands that the eternal world should be a finished whole. Morality, as essentially a temporal process,