Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/136

Rh a literalness indeed appalling, He is we, and we are He; nay, He is I, and I am He. And I think it will appear later, from the nature of the argument by which the Absolute Reality as Absolute Experience is reached, that the exact and direct way of stating the case is baldly: I am He. Now, if we read the conception in the first way, what becomes of our ethical independence? — what, of our personal reality, our righteous i.e. reasonable responsibility — responsibility to which we ought to be held? Is not He the sole real agent? Are we anything but the steadfast and changeless modes of his eternal thinking and perceiving? Or, if we read the conception in the second way, what becomes of Him? Then, surely, He is but another name for me; or, for any one of you, if you will. And how can there be talk of a Moral Order, since there is but a single mind in the case? — we cannot legitimately call that mind a person. This vacancy of moral spirit in the Absolute Experience when read off from the end of the particular self, is what Professor Mezes pertinently strikes at in the first of his two points of criticism. Judging by experience alone, — the only point of view allotted by Professor Royce to the particular self, — judging merely by that, even when the experience is not direct and naïve but comparatively organised, there is no manifold of selves; the finite self and the Infinite Self are but two names at the opposite poles of one lonely reality, which from its isolation is without possible moral significance. This is doubtless a form of Idealism, for it states the Sole Reality in terms of a case of self-consciousness. When read