Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/147

110 that lies implicit in his seeming finitude. It is just I in my counter aspect — my reverse instead of my obverse, my other-side of infinite judicialness — coming forward to execute my proper act of infallible certainty. In such an “affectation of omniscience,” unquestionably, does any and every least assumption of certainty in a judgment involve the thinker who makes it. This, to my mind, is the exact and whole meaning of Professor Royce’s proof, unless we grant him the gratuitous assumption of an indefinite multitude of simultaneous or successive thinkers; and this, surely, we must not do when we are professing the philosophical temper of “proving all things.”

There are those, no doubt, who would see in the phase that the argument is now made to assume, only a fine occasion for very knowing smiles. Chief among such, of course, are the agnostics in whose especial behoof the argument was contrived out of their own chosen materials, with the benign intent of disciplining them out of their scepticism, through chastening supplied by exposed self-contradiction. They are likely now saying to themselves: “The argument has proved a little too much; it reinforces our point very happily: he who would not cut the absurd figure of claiming omniscience must take the lowly rôle of our humble philosophy — the rôle of confessed ignorance and incurable uncertainty.” But such is not the way in which I would read the lesson. Indeed, I hear in fancy, even now, the author of this singular argument saying to these jubilant doubters: “Well, — confessed ignorance, and uncertainty really incurable it is, is it? Here’s at you again, then! And