Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/143

106 tive response to the warnings of moral common-sense. No matter what show of logic may drive us into the corner, our instinctive moral sense prohibits us from entertaining the theorem that the single self who conducts the argument, albeit he is its cause, its designer, its engineer, and its authority, is the sole and absolute Reality, — the only being in existence having such compass, such sovereign judgment, such self-determining causality. By spontaneous moral sense we doubtless believe, indeed, that we are each entirely real, and a seat of inalienable rights; but this feeling of rights, though it be no more than a resentment at invasion, points directly to our belief that there are other beings as unreservedly real as we, with rights alike inalienable, who lay us under duty. Still, this uncomprehended instinct, ethical though it be, is not philosophy. Until we shall have learned how to give it in some way the authority of rational insight, we have no right to its effects when we are proceeding as thinkers; so far as we merely accept them, we do not think, we only feel.

Moved by this feeling, I say, we evade reading the result of this strange but striking dialectic as Solipsism, and, reading it from the reverse direction, we are fain to call it Cosmic Theism, under the silent assumption that its real contents are thus enlarged so that its embrace enfolds a universe of minds, or persons. And yet these so-called persons are rightly designated as only finite selves, mutually relative and phenomenal merely, since the reality of the unifying Organic Experience, as reached by the argument, requires that it shall be strictly one and