postulate of the Christian Faith, is annulled by both conceptions alike; and while the theory of Cosmic Theism, if treated with such idealistic methods as those employed by Professor Joseph Le Conte in his later writings, may be made to provide for a quasi-immortality of the distinct single soul, we should nevertheless remember that the ever-present brooding of the immanent Cosmic Mind forever suppresses the possibility of real freedom, and consequently takes away from everlasting continuance all that could make the soul a genuine individual, and therefore all the moral worth that alone could give to continuance what religion means by Life Eternal.
Under a sheer evolutionary account of man, the world of real persons, the world of individual responsibility with its harmony of spontaneous dutifulness, disappears. With it disappears the genuine personality of God. An immanent Cosmic Consciousness is not a personal God. For the very quality of personality is, that a person is a being who recognises others as having a reality as unquestionable as his own, and who thus sees himself as a member of a moral republic, standing to other persons in an immutable relationship of reciprocal duties and rights, himself endowed with dignity, and acknowledging the dignity of all the rest. The doctrine of a Cosmic Consciousness, on the contrary, reduces all created minds either to mere phenomena or, at
