Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/278

 264 CRITICAL NOTICES : might be satisfied without the others. We might know the uni- verse, e.y., and know it to refuse satisfaction to our demands for beauty, or for love. In that case it would give us something we had willed namely, knowledge but not everything, nor, per- haps, what we regarded as highest. In such a case as this " the eternal fulfilment of my own life " would not be realised. Such a contingency could be disproved by a system which worked out in comparative detail the ultimate nature of the real and of the good, and which would then show, of these indepen- dently attained results, that in fact they coincided. I do not mean to assert that the identity, if attained, would be a mere brute conjunction. On the contrary, it would doubtless be a supreme unity compared to which both reality and goodness would be mere abstractions. But it remains true that the good and the real can only be united through a third term. It is impossible to prove that the ultimately real is as such the ulti- mately good, or that the ultimately good is as such the ultimately real. Dr. Boyce now passes on to the personality of the Absolute " In the world as we define it, there can exist no fact except as a known fact, as a fact present in some consciousness, namely, precisely to the consciousness that fulfils the whole meaning of whoever asserts that this fact is real. In view of this essential feature of our finite situation as thinkers, it follows at once that the w r hole world of truth and being must exist only as present, in all its variety, its wealth, its relationships, its entire constitution, to the unity of a single consciousness, which includes both our own and all finite conscious meanings in one final eternally present insight " (p. 397). It may, perhaps, be granted that we cannot conceive reality except as conscious experience, and that there is much which we call real of which it is in the highest degree improbable that any finite being is at present, conscious. It is by no means as certain, however, that there is anything which we should at present call real of which no finite being ever was or ever will be conscious. Of course a consciousness which has been or will be is, so far, a consciousness which now is not. And if the existence of finite selves was merely temporal, we should have to postulate the infinite consciousness which is perpetually conscious of all reality. But Dr. Eoyce would not, I suppose, deny that a finite self had an eternal significance. And surely this leaves another alternative open that we call Being real of which no finite self is at present conscious because we find in its future or past consciousness of it sub specie temporis, the sign of a timeless consciousness of it sub specie (eternitaiis. Of the rest of the lecture it is only possible to mention in passing the well-balanced exposition which is given of the extent to which we are justified in interpreting the universe in terms of our own consciousness. Dr. Eoyce steers a middle course between Mr.