Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/460

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ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY

suffering of conscious beings, as to revolt minds even as little developed in goodness as ours. How dare we say that such things are wrought even by the consent of divine Justice and Love? Still less, surely, dare we say that they are wrought by a God's predestinating edict.


II

Under such lights as these, which are shed from what the vast majority of thinking men agree is the profoundest and best that is in us, all such systems as we have described display their final moral incompetency. Let us turn now to the new view, the view that abandons both monism and monarchotheism, that abandons creationism in both its forms, takes resort to Final Cause as the primary and only explanatory principle, and holds to an Eternal Pluralism of causal minds, each self-active, though all recognisant of all others, and thus all in their central essence possessed of moral autonomy, the very soul of all really moral being. How will this view adjust itself to the primary conditions of moral life ? In answering this, I must avoid all practical detail, and confine myself to the universal conditions of moral activity.

(1) The first of these conditions is the reality of moral freedom. Upon this the new system is clear, absolutely clear, and alone is so. It alone founds the real and the phenomenal world in the unqualified reality of a world of individual minds, each of them individual in the only sufficing sense — the sense of self-active intelligence as well as of complete particular identity. It establishes this as a fact in the only way in which such establishment is possible; that is, by proving for each mind a system of a priori cognition, here following and at the same time clarifying the argumentation of Kant, and taking care to note, and to refute, the counter-argumentation founded on the theory of natural evolution. It provides, too, for freedom in both