Page:Philosophical Review Volume 12.djvu/689

No. 6.] wave of change, it is a smaller wave of variation by which the organism adjusts itself to environment. For example, a sudden change of altitude causes a corresponding change in the number and condition of the blood corpuscles. All these changes show that the problem to be studied in the organism is always a change of structure; in the machine, on the other hand, the change consists in the development of power while the structure remains the same.

The writer, by exposing the inadequacies of all other current philosophies, suggests the moral need for his system of Personal Idealism. The external world is a world of minds, human and divine. The difference between these lies in the possession by the former of a sensuous consciousness, rising everlastingly, through a serial being in time and space, toward the divine mind, their eternal and essential ideal, in striving after which they seek to harmonize the rational and sensuous parts of their nature. Human minds, which are non-derivative, self-active, and determining, coexist in a mutual recognition, essential to them, and constitute the only truly moral order possible. God is the absolutely realized perfection of personality, both the logical ground of existence and its ideal goal. He is not an efficient but a final cause, and so is responsible for the good in the world but not the evil, which results from the failure of human beings to determine their wills by reason. Thus creation and regeneration are valid terms, but only in the sense of final causation. With reference to creationism, historic philosophies fall into four groups: (1) those which directly express, or are unconsciously influenced by post-exilic Hebraism, (2) pantheistic emanationism, (3) materialism, and (4) positivism. The third and fourth groups, confessedly necessarian, afford no basis for individual freedom and deny the existence of the problem of evil. The second swallows up individual activity in that of the monistic whole, which thus becomes the source of wrong-doing. The first is unavoidably deterministic, through its postulate of beings who register the will and plan of a literal creator, the acknowledged author of evil. As opposed to these systems, Personal Idealism establishes the reality of moral freedom and solves the enigma of evil. It shows the socially objective nature of the self-active consciousness, and the validity of the belief in God. It offers the hope of the steady improvement of this world by our moral endeavor, and proves that fulfilled freedom depends upon the immortality of the individual, in the sense of the everlastingness of his process of experience. The writer's postulate of deity and denial of divinity to all other minds, differentiate his idealism from Davidson's apeirotheism, with which it is otherwise in agreement.