Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/100

Rh in our experience, but the growth of temptation out of victory is not morality. The very life of morality is toil, struggle, achievement; we must overcome difficulties; the stream of morality must rise higher than its source. Take progress away, and you destroy morality. This, after all, is very obvious, nor would I be understood to say that Professor Royce denies this. On the contrary, he is at considerable pains to assert and illustrate it. He maintains that the Supreme Being is moral for the very reason that he hates and conquers immorality. He maintains that evolution gives a truer view of reality than does descriptive science, for the reason that evolution asserts progress, apprehends the significance of progress, reads the beginning in the light of the end, would, as a completed doctrine (which it is not), uphold what Mr. John Fiske might call Cosmic Morality. But I venture to suggest that Goodness requires progress, and of the whole. That there is progress in bits of the Inclusive Self, Professor Royce does maintain; but if the Inclusive Self is to be moral, he must be in his totality progressive. The whole of him must advance without limitation towards some goal. If the universe is moral, it points in one direction; it has grown from a germ, budded out more and more widely, grown ever higher, at no time fully satisfied, ever striving onwards and upwards. But once admit movement in one direction, and all the antinomies — all the antagonistic contradictions — of time are upon us with undiminished force. The arbitrariness inherent in both beginning and end is not diminished by their coexistence. No real beginning or end can be rationally