Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/349

THE ABSOLUTE OF HEGKLIANISM. which this might be taken. It might mean that God, reality, h;is no existence outside the process of human development, and that the growth of the human spirit is literally and absolutely the growth of God's consciousness of himself. At the other extreme, we might hold that, essentially as my life has its content in its relations to other lives in the universe, at the same time that it is unitary and self-contained in point of existence, so God has a unity of consciousness which opposes itself to human selves, at the same time that the relations in which these human selves stand to his life enter into its content. History thus reveals in very truth the life of God, but not that life in its entirety. In this way we do not identify God with man, and we have no difficulty in thinking his existence through eternity and before the human race appeared. This is the position which I myself shall adopt. Or we might try to steer a middle course between these two, and while we deny to God a separate personality, might yet grant that his life is not exhausted in human development. This latter theory is hardly intelligible except on one assumption at least, if it is, its upholders may fairly be called upon to show it. It would be possible, I suppose, to look for the surplus of God's life in other finite selves apart from mankind, but except for this expedient the way in which a surplus could exist is not clear. A physical fact, on the basis of Hegelianism, has no medium of existence except in conscious experience, and experience which does not take the form of a self we know nothing about. 1 If, therefore, we set up any reality before human beings existed, it must be a conscious experience, and, as such, a self-conscious unity which, from the standpoint I adopt in looking at it in its previous existence, into which human life does not yet enter, is at least as distinct from my self as I am from my neighbour. And if a reality, appearing to us as nature, existed before the period of human life, then it is quite arbitrary to deny the existence of nature now beyond its appearance in human experience ; and consequently, unless we adopt Mr. Bradley's Pan-mixism, we have a fact of reality distinct from human lives, and forming the same sort of conscious unity which they form, and which we call a self. And as it would be impossible to deny the dependence in some sense of our lives upon this original unity, we should come back to the second of the alternatives I have mentioned. Now Hegelianism seems, at least, to deny the 1 Cf. Dewey, MIND, vol. xii., p. 88.