Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/416

 402 CRITICAL NOTICES : <jan be accepted which does not both connect the various individual centres of experience and also allow for their genuine individuality. The type of unity sought for is finally discovered in the idea of soul. In its simplest forms life involves a central activity, and this force which unites and dominates all the vital elements we may name, provisionally, Will. Analogically the question may then be put : " Is it possible that the principle which obtains in the microcosm has its counterpart in the macrocosm ? May not a supreme Will be the ground of all interactions between spiritual substances? " Mr. Galloway answers the question in the affirma- tive, so reaching the primary and formal determination of the principle he seeks. Thereafter it is further qualified as Self-con- scious Will and the Will of a complete or perfect Personality. I should be inclined to characterise the pages in which this is done as the most powerful in the book. Important steps in the progress of the argument are the proof that Will per se cannot evolve self- consciousness (this against Hartmann), and that a self-conscious World-ground cannot be the purely immanent unity of all indi- vidual selves (in opposition to Mr. McTaggart). And perhaps the most significant words in the volume are those to be found on page 255 : "It will be a gain if recent discussions have made it clear that the philosophic Absolute and the religious idea of God cannot, as they stand, be made to coincide. If the notion of the Absolute is right, our view of religion cannot hold good : if the claim of religion is valid, the idea of the Absolute must be revised." I should surmise that in his reasoning for a Supreme Self who is the .ground of all that is, yet is not the whole of experience, Mr. Galloway would find himself in close, though independent, sym- pathy with the positions of Dr. Eashdall. A philosophically- minded theologian, however, might say that the proper corollary of his statement that there must be an element of difference in God, a not-self or other which in no way impedes the activity of the self, is some form of the doctrine of the Trinity ; at all events if we are not to descend to the level of sub-personal categories in construing the Divine Nature. I need not follow this excellent chapter in detail, but two points may be noted : first, the assertion that if we are to predicate ethical qualities of the Deity it cannot be on grounds of an intellectual kind, and must be in virtue of a supreme judgment of worth; secondly, the importance attached to the sense of dependence, of incompleteness and need, in the evolution of religion. Discussion may doubtless be also excited in certain quarters by his statement <(p. 282) that " in the higher development of religion the transcen- dent aspect comes to clear consciousness ". But there is a whole- some absence of modernity in Mr. Galloway's refusal thus to make religion (or philosophy, for that matter) geo-centric, or to negate and reverse, in the speculative sphere, the Copemican expansion of the world of science. I take leave of this work, the value of which is quite out of proportion to its comparative brevity, with