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114
THE CONCEPTION OF GOD

multitude of quasi-selves. Accordingly, for the sake of argument, this grant shall be made during the rest of the discussion.


VI
CRITICISM OF THE SYSTEM OF PROFESSOR LE CONTE

And now, in view of the phase last assumed by our question, we naturally turn to the other system of Idealism offered us — that of Dr. Le Conte; for its very object seems to be, to provide for the desired world of freedom. It certainly accepts one aspect of the theory from which we have just parted — the immanence of God in Nature; interpreted, too, pretty much in the way that Professor Royce and other Hegelians interpret it. But, this accepted. Dr. Le Conte’s view is apparently an attempt to supplement it by such a use of the theory of evolution as shall establish a conception of the Ultimate Reality which will thoroughly answer to the Vision Beatific — the conception of a World of Spirits, all immortal, and all genuinely real because themselves centres of origination and thus really free; not that they now are so, in the present order of Nature where we see them, but that the evolutional account of their origin clearly indicates that they will become so. Characteristic of this new form of Idealism, is its effort to unite the Hegelian form with the form that I have been trying to set before you, — the monistic form with the pluralistic. Its means for this union is, the method it takes to prove the coming reality of the