Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/134

Rh which comes so short of Aristotle’s greatest philosophical hints, — is occasion enough for thinkers like Hegel and our chief speaker to see a great resemblance between St. Thomas’s view and theirs, and to overlook the contradiction between these aspects of his doctrine and those in which he reflects the Christian aperçu of genuine creation, and the consequent distinctness of the world from God. This ought to carry as a corollary the unqualified freedom of men in the City of God; and if St. Thomas fails to draw that corollary, the explanation must be sought in his prepossession by the older and prechristian tradition. Aristotle, after justifiable criticism of Plato’s course with the world of Ideas, unquestionably struck into a new path more thoroughly idealistic. Had he explored this far enough, and with close enough scrutiny, it must have led him beyond Pantheistic Idealism. But his doctrine that the criterion of deity is Omniscience, and that creation is simply the divine Still Vision — — had its discussion arrested too early to admit of that achievement. The descent of the doctrine we have heard to-night is correctly traced from Aristotle’s; and the doctrine does not get essentially beyond his, nor attain any distinction between the Creator and the creation sufficient to make out creation as creation at all. Unless creators are created, nothing is really created.

I venture, you see, to dissent from Professor Royce when he claims that the conception of God — if God we may name it — afforded by his Monistic Idealism is distinctly theistic instead of pantheistic. Unquestionably, “it is not the conception of any Unconscious