Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/140

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And now let me continue such reply to this as I would make, by saying, next, how altogether acute and sound I think it is as a supplement to that phase of merely subjective Idealism which now goes by the name of Agnosticism — a supplement exposing the misnomer in virtue of which such agnostic Idealism calls the Ultimate Reality the Unknowable, when yet it has no footing upon which to affirm the reality of the Inscrutable Power except the self-asserted authority of thought, — the “inconceivability of the opposite,” as Mr. Spencer calls it, — by which he undoubtedly means, as we all see after his famous discussion of this Axiom with Mr. Mill, the unthinkableness of the opposite. The real meaning of the situation is, — as I believe Professor Royce to have shown unanswerably, and more pointedly than anybody else has shown it, — that the thinker is just unavoidably affirming his own all-conditioning reality as critic, as judge, as organiser, and as appraiser of values, in and over the field of his possible experience; the thinking self is seen to be the very condition of the possibility of even a fragmentary and seemingly incoherent or isolated experience, and the all-coherent unity of its inevitable reality passes ceaseless sentence on the mere phenomenon, declares the isolation and fragmentariness of this to be only apparent, supplants the incoherence of its immediate aspect by coherence that marches ever wider and higher, and so places the phenomenon in a real system that takes it out of the category of illusion by giving it a continual and endlessly ascending approximation to unqualified reality. Thus the Ultimate Reality