Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/14

Rh devotes his Supplementary Essay, in its main purpose, to a systematic investigation of the nature and the source of Individuation. He seeks in this way to show how Personality, conceived as self-conscious individuality, flows directly and even solely from his conception of God, when the essential implications of this are developed. Here Professor Howison’s contention is, that this theory of the Person, making the single Self nothing but an identical part of the unifying Divine Will (as Professor Royce is explicit in declaring), gives to the created soul no freedom at all of its own; that the moral individual, the Person, cannot with truth be thus confounded with the logical singular; and that personality, as reached by this doctrine, is so truncated as to cease being true personality. The central topic of the book, proving thus to be this question of Free Personality, marks by the region entered, and by the method of investigation employed, the advance of philosophical thought into a new stadium.

On a different matter, of high philosophical import, with weighty religious consequences, the parties in the discussion all appear to agree. They unite in recognising, in some form or other, an organic correlation among the three main objects common to philosophy and religion, — God, Freedom, Immortality. They differ, to be sure, as to precisely what, and exactly how much, these three elements of the One Truth mean; but they agree that neither of the three can adequately be stated except with the help of the properly correlative statement of the other two. Thus: No God except with human Selves