Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/138

Rh settling any number of such things. The real question is, not whether we like or dislike the view before us; not whether it is Christian, or Thomistic, or Aristotelian; but, simply, Is it true? Professor Royce or Hegel might well turn on us and ask: “Is not ‘God’ a name for the Ultimate Reality; and is it not demonstrable that the conception in question is the Ultimate Reality? — has it not been so demonstrated here and to-night? If this is the conception of the Absolute; if the Absolute must be the Omniscient, or, in other words, the Absolute Experience, — has not this ideal of an Absolute Experience demonstrated itself to be real, by the clear showing that the supposition of its unreality, if affirmed real, commits us to its reality? — in short, that the real supposition of its unreality is a self-contradiction, and therefore impossible to be made?”

To this, I will venture to say, as the first step in a reply: The gist of the proof is the proposition, that a supposition which turns out to be impossible, or, in other words, which cannot really be made, — and hence never is really made, — affords no footing for a dispute; in such case, the opposite supposition is the only one tenable; we are in presence of a thought which our mind thinks in only one way, so that it cannot, and in reality does not, have any alternative or opposed thought at all. Such a thought is sometimes called “necessary”; and then the question will inevitably arise: Is the necessity objective, or is it merely subjective? — is such a thought the infallible witness of how reality has to be, or merely the unimpeachable witness of how the thinker has to think? —