Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/340

326 J. S. MACKENZIE : Look not thou down but up ! To uses of a cup, The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal, The new wine's foaming flow, The Master's Lips a-glow ! Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel ? There is no real paradox, as I conceive, in such a view of the universe. But if we are to avoid a fatal paradox, we must be careful to understand it in the objective, and not in the subjective sense ; and this is what our new realism may help us to do. We must not say, as Berkeley does, that cups and saucers and stars and planets exist in people's mind, or even in some hypothetical divine mind. 1 We must not even say, as Kant does, that time and space are only forms of our con- sciousness. 2 Personally, I am disposed even to add that we 1 The somewhat ostrich-like expedient of attempting to solve philo- sophical difficulties by referring them to a divine consciousness has been a familiar one in modern speculation, since the time of Descartes ; and it is still often, more or less explicitly, made use of. But it is surely evident that a truly conceptual object cannot, properly speaking, be contained in a divine mind, any more than in a human mind, unless the divine mind is something wholly different from anything that we under- stand by a mind. If a divine mind means a mind that is completely developed a mind to which the universe has become perfectly trans- parent such a mind would still, as far as I can see, distinguish itself from the world that it apprehends. Indeed, I cannot but think that such a mind would be more conscious of going beyond itself in the act of knowledge than the comparatively undeveloped human mind is ; just as the human mind is more clearly conscious of this than the animal mind is. The only difference would be that the fully developed mind would not be conscious of any irreducible surd in the world that it apprehended. There would be no baffling puzzles, no unexplained contingencies. It would have come to its kingdom. The world would be its world ; but it would still be its world. 2 There is of course a great deal here that requires much more explana- tion than I am able in this place to supply. To a certain extent I have indicated the view that I take on several of the points here referred to, in my previous paper on ' The Infinite and the Perfect '. With regard to time, for instance, my view is that reality is or contains a time-process, through which intelligent beings are gradually developed. This process I believe to be eternal, but not tuneless ; and how this is possible I have tried to show in the paper to which I refer. Since it is eternal, the end may be regarded as returning into the beginning ; and I think this is the true sense in which it may be maintained that God creates the world. He is, I mean, as Aristotle thought, both the beginning and the end of the world-process. Strictly speaking, it seems clear that there cannot be any such thing as creation. The universe must be eternal. But at all this I can only hint. The recognition, however, that ' eternal ' does not mean the same as ' timeless ' seems to me quite fundamental. I may note, in passing, that the ultimate difficulty in Mr. Joachim's book on The Nature of Truth seems to arise from a failure to draw this distinction. Such a failure is probably the greatest stumbling-block in the way of idealistic theories in general.