Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/124

Rh the Expiation as the very condition on which alone his offence is possible and actual. Such is the conception of Absolute Reality that has been set forth to us this evening with such resources of subtlety, of acuteness, of comprehensiveness, of possessions in weighty material, of almost boundlessly flexible expression; and we are asked to receive it as the philosophic account, the only account genuine and authentic, of the conception of God. God, we are told, is that one and sole Absolute Experience, the utter union of Absolute Thought and Absolute Perception, of ideal and fact, in which all relative and partial experiences are directly taken up and included, though indeed reduced and dissolved, and to be some part of which is all that existence or reality means, or can mean, for anything else that claims to be, whether it be called material or mental. And that the God thus conceived is the only authentic God of philosophy is declared on the ground — or, rather, on the claim — that upon this conception alone can God be proved real. The conception — so our chief speaker’s implication runs — may indeed be far different from what under an experience less organised than the philosophic, less brought to coherence, we had fancied the name “God” to mean; but what that name does mean must be exactly this, no more and no less: That which rigorous thought, penetrating to its inevitable and final implications, can and does make out to be not merely Idea but Reality. Our master-question about it, Professor Royce would say, must not be whether we like it, nor whether it agrees with something we had sup-