Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/144

Rh indivisible, and that the supposed manifold of finite selves shall none of them have any real and changeless Self but this. One single Infinite Self, the identical and sole active centre of all these quasi-selves, which are severally made up of specific groups of experiences more or less fragmentary, as the case may be, none of them with any inner organic unity of its own,—this is the theory; and even for this hollow shell of a personal and moral order we have no logical warrant, but have silently carried it in, over our argument, on the hint of moral sense that of course there are manifold centres—or, at any rate, manifold groups—of experience besides our own.

You will not, I hope, mistake my point. Like Professor Mezes, I am by no means saying that Professor Royce may not have, somewhere in the rich and crowded arsenal of his thinking, some other means of dealing with this question of the moral contents of the Absolute than the means presented in his address and his books. I am only saying that, so far as I can see, the required means is not provided anywhere in the books or the address. Especially is it not furnished in the curiously impressive argument which he has now restated so lucidly for us, and which makes, one may say, the very life of the philosophy that he sets forth in print.

In this last assertion, I reach the gravamen of all I have to say, in the way of criticism, about that very interesting and exceedingly hitting piece of dialectic. So I feel that I am in duty bound to support the assertion by an analysis of the argument as exact and close as I am able to make.