Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 12.djvu/546

 532 CRITICAL NOTICES : whether this supreme self-consciousness has any existence except in its finite manifestations. And, in so far as this view is suggested, there arises the old difficulty how Nature which is denied any existence apart from mind can be said to exist when and in so far as it does not fall within the experience of any individual soul. I do not, however, actually attribute to Mr. Haldane such pseudo- Idealism as this. But I could wish he would have been a little clearer on the subject, particularly in a course of Lectures which is designed to help towards a philosophical view of Keligion. The Theologians on the whole get off very easily in Mr. Haldane's pages, but it is a pity that philosophers should not do a little more to help those much-abused persons to a more philosophical creed than that which they are accused of holding, especially when the philosopher is one who (like Mr. Haldane) professes not to be out of sympathy (in their ultimate meaning) with common religious beliefs. There is one point on which Mr. Haldane cannot be accused of indefiniteness in dealing with the relation between God and the world. He tells us emphatically, though without much argument, that He is not at its Cause. I will not attempt to argue the question further, but will only say that it is unfair to men like Lotze and Prof. James Ward and Dr. Stout to assume that this position can be disposed of by the contemptuous denial that God is a "physical cause ". That God is not a cause in the sense in which one phenomenal event or ' sum of conditions ' is the cause of another event is just what they assert : only they deny that this mechanical conception of causality is the true and ultimate idea of it. Nothing can be more welcome to those who hold this view than Mr. Haldane's demonstration of the fact that Biology goes beyond the Category of Causality as it is understood in Physics, though it would seem more natural to say that in Biology we have to do with a kind of Causality which cannot be represented as a mechanical "uniformity of succession" than to say bluntly that " the act of determination and conservation amid the change of substance is not one in which we can perceive any relation like that of cause and effect" (p. 238). Still more startling is the attempt to show that in Biology time-distinctions are altogether transcended (p. 282). And it is not only with philosophers who may be said to represent the interests of Theism that Mr. Haldane brings himself into collision by his repudiation of the idea of Causality as applied to God. That the ultimate Eeality as a whole (however understood) is the cause of its changing appearances or of the particular events within it, is asserted as strongly by those who speak of the ultimate Reality as an "it" or by those who think of that Eeality as God. If the word " cause " is not to be used, some other is wanted. If the notion which men like Lotze express by saying that " Nature is the name for an event whose cause is God " is to be discarded, what real meaning is left in Mr. Haldane's admission that the ultimate Reality must be thought of as " Will " no less than