Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/355

 THK AUsor.fTK OK HKGKrjANISM. 341 future, except the very inuaediate future, is not consciously in- volved in the present ; and if it is not consciously involved, it is quite impossible to get any notion as to what its existence means, since ve are ex In/pot hc*i shut off from appealing to a reality contemporaneous with present experience, hut. beyond it. But will not the same difficulty exist, it may be asked, in any conception of reality as a process? Not the same diffi- culty, if we hold fast to the distinction already drawn. The trouble comes in making ultimate reality a growth of know- ledge, as our experience is ; and, in consequence of this, a development which is cut up into a multitude of relatively disconnected steps, or acts, as our experience is, again. We may have progress, however, without what in the popular sense we call a i/ruwtli, and it only is the former which is applicable to God. Growth involves judgment, thought, and as such is the characteristic of all human experience. But the thinking process with us is a mark of our limitation, and would never arise unless we were met by an obstacle which demanded knowledge we do not possess ; and an obstacle implies conditions which are not summed up in the experience itself, and which, therefore, are impossible to God, who is all in all. But because God does not have to stop and think how to surmount difficulties, it does not follow that his life is not in some sense a process. Our own experience teaches us how this can be. I may be doing something whose com- pletion requires a considerable number of steps, and yet the end in its relation to the different parts, as each in turn comes up, is consciously present throughout them all. Now this, to be sure, is always a particular experience, which soon comes to an end ; but we may take it as a type of what reality is most truly. If for God all existence enters into the embrace of a unitary purposive whole, we can see how, in principle, it may be a process, without being in the ordinary sense a growth. God does not come to know himself, but he pro- gressively realises himself in action. The future is present as what we call a purpose, the past as what in human life we call a memory ; and since no fact can ever, not simply cease to exert an effect, as it does with us also, on the constantly- progressing achievement of which it is a part, but cease to enter consciously into God's experience as having this relation to the whole with us, on the contrary, things tend to pass from memory there is nothing in the whole world, present, past or future, which has not an eternal existence in the life of God. So even for our own lives : it is only for us as we directly experience them that they are a growth ; as entering