Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/554

540 CEITICAL NOTICES: " But God endeavours to produce whatever he -wills antecedently. The defeat of an antecedent volition means a defeated effort. And what I am unable to see is the possibility of explaining the- defeat of the effort solely from the nature of the being who made it. He only acts by his will. And if his will is directed to a> certain end, can there be anything in his nature which can hinder its execution? " (p. 230). Dr. McTaggart goes on to argue that to say that God is pre- vented from doing what he wishes to do by self-existent " laws " or necessities of things implies that we think of " the will of God and the law which prevents its realisation " as "so separate that, their opposition appears to present no difficulty " (p. 231) ; where- as "a law is not another existent thing, apart from the thing o which it is a law, and capable of acting on it, as a wall may check the course of a bullet. The law is simply the statement of how the thing will act under certain circumstances. In other words,, the law is not something which controls the thing's nature from without. . . . When we say that the law of the nature of wax is to melt at a certain temperature, this is not an outside authority to- which the nature of the wax submits. It is the nature of the wax. And so the difficulty remains unsolved how can God's nature at once impel towards an end and yet be the sole obstacle to his realising that end? Or again God's will and God's power ar& taken almost as separate beings " (p. 232). God's Power or lack of Power is regarded as limiting his good- ness. " But this view involves a disruption of God's nature which is indefensible. If there is a God, he is a person, and not an abstract quality. Still less is God to be resolved into a couple of abstract qualities which can be treated as opposing one another." And so- on. Doubtless there are difficulties in understanding how God's Power and his Goodness are related to one another. And Dr. McTaggart is the last man to deny that there are difficulties and unanswerable problems upon his own view of the Universe and upon every pos- sible view. I admit that the limitations of human thinking compel us to oppose God's Power to his Goodness in a way which cannot possibly be a full and adequate representation of the Eeality. But. I am one of those who have learned from Mr. Bradley at least this- much (and I do not doubt that so far Dr. McTaggart would agree with me) that all human thinking involves abstraction the looking at different aspects of Eeality apart in a way which cannot always fully correspond with their actual relations in Eeality, as Eeality would present itself to complete knowledge. I do not follow Mr. Bradley in saying that there are no relations in the ultimate Eeality, but the relations between the various aspects or elements of that Eeality cannot be precisely what they are in our thought. Take for instance the distinction between feeling and thought. Our thinking consists of clumsy processes of abstraction and inference. Such processes necessarily presuppose a limitation of knowledge >