that of social Deity,” he gives even this a purely temporal colouring by speaking of this social God as “never [italics mine again] without filial spirits reflecting the glory of the Eternal Reason.” But, I repeat, I have taken every precaution to prevent the reader from supposing me to mean by “eternal” this popular error; I have expressly warned everybody that I do not intend by the " eternal reality " of the individual his everlasting preëxistence, nor any mere preëxistence at all. Let me ask readers to consult what I have printed on my pp. 351, 352 seq., and to compare with this the statements on pp. 338, 339.
Ill
REAL PROOFS OF THE SYSTEM, AND TRUE ROLE IN IT OF FINAL CAUSE
Misled no doubt, at least in part, by the preceding misconception, the reviewer next asks what “ladder we are offered for a climb to this position” of individual eternity, to affirm which “of all souls, of every individual member of the human race,” he says, “seems stupendously audacious.” This “audacity,” like the other “audacity” of making out all minds to be co-creators with God, he appears to infer from his sense of the insignificance of most human lives, as exhibited in their temporal history; a sense that, of late, it seems a good deal the fashion to feel, and in regard to which, and its real baselessness, I think it sufficient here to refer readers to the telling exposure of it, though in another connexion, that Professor James has made on pp. 36-41 of his Ingersoll lecture, Human Immortality.
When the reviewer attempts to answer this question about the ladder I offer for climbing to this audacious height, he goes astray again. He thinks the ladder is my substitution of Final Cause for the time-honored Efficient Cause, as the true mode of the causal relationship between
