Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/13

xii test of personality being the possession by God of a World of Persons, all really free, with whom he shares in moral relations, acknowledging Rights in them, and Duties towards them, — Professor Howison demurs, urging that no such World of Freedom can arise out of a process of natural evolution, as this is always a process of efficient causation, and so works by a vis a tergo, whose law is necessitation.

On the third question, which is thus brought strongly to the front, the divergence between Professor Howison and Professor Royce comes out at its sharpest. Here, Professor Howison maintains there is a chasm, incapable of closure, between the immanence of God, even as Professor Royce conceives this, and the real personality, the moral autonomy, of created minds. Professor Royce, in rejoinder, contends there is no such chasm, that a Divine Self-Consciousness continuously inclusive of our consciousness is demanded if a knowable God is to be proved, and that its existence is not only compatible with the existence of included conscious Selves, but directly provides for them, imparts to them as its own members its own freedom, and thus gives them all the autonomy permissible in a world that is moral. In this difference, it may be presumed that Professor Mezes and Professor Le Conte side tacitly with Professor Royce; though Professor Le Conte, of course, would only do so with the reservation that the reconciliation of the dispute must be sought in his theory of evolution. Professor Royce, however, pursues his object by another path, more purely in the region of idealistic psychology, and