Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/242

 228 G. H. HOWISON : views and mine might be correctly brought into collocation with the views of our Oxford colleagues, with those of Prof. James, and even with those of more pronounced individualists, I mean the head of Pluralism : in one way or another, we all hold out for manifold realities that are all alike indisputable. But only some of us set this Pluralism forth by an idealistic method, and hence arrive at what we call the " eternity " of the many minds. By this we mean simply their absolute reality, or the self-based, self -active nature of their being, nothing else at all, except as something else may be implied by this absoluteness ; least of all, do we mean merely the eveiiastingness, their existence " from all eternity," as the common saying is. Our doctrine has nothing whatever to do with the superstition, born of fancy, about pre-existence. In this matter I suppose Mr. McTaggart to be in entire accord with me, and I am therefore somewhat surprised to note in his review certain misapprehensions of my position. These I will now specify. (1) He speaks of my doctrine that only an eternal being can really be free, as a " remark ". This language is seriously mislead- ing ; the reader must surely get from it the impression that my statement of this view is merely incidental and by-the-way. On the contrary, it is in fact basic and central to the whole theory of my book, is developed with emphatic prominence, and is argued out with much detail. (See my pp. 326-343.) (2) A more important misapprehension is this: "It [the system of Personal Idealism] offers a God of whom personality, morality, and affection can reasonably be predicated, since, though perfect, he is finite. (I am not sure if Dr. Howison would accept the word finite, but in effect, it seems to me, he holds God to be finite, since he makes him one of a community of spirits, each of whom has 'a reality as inexpugnable as his own '.)" Indeed I do not accept the word, nor can. I am surprised that my real view in this matter should have escaped Mr. McTaggart. So far from holding God to be finite, I hold, and in my book clearly teach, that all minds are infinite (in the true qualitative sense of the word), and God pre-eminently so. (See my pp. 330 seq,, 363, and 373). Eternity, self-existence, self-activity, freedom, and infinity, are to me all interchangeable terms, and are so treated wherever they turn up in the course of my book. My reviewer falls into a non sequitur when he concludes that I make God finite because I make him one of a community of spirits, each absolutely real ; not God's finitude, but his definiteness, is what follows from that. This confusion of the definite with the finite is very common, and is the explanation of two tendencies in sceptical thinking the tendency to deny the personality of God, whose infinity is sup- posed to mean his utter indefiniteness, and the tendency, in recoil from the former, to assert God's finitude in order to save his per- sonality, which of course must be definite. But the true infinite, as distinguished from the pseudo-infinite, the infinite of quality in