Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/154

Rh to me beset with obscure alternatives, between which either the certainty, or else the value, of the life to come vanishes away. Whether we take the immanence of God in Nature to mean his omnipresence in and throughout Nature, — which is something unintelligible, — or whether we say, in consonance with Idealism, that Nature is immanent in God, the doctrine implies that God operates evolution, including the evolution of man in every aspect of his being, by direct causation — by his own immediate efficiency. Any secondary causes that may operate — though according to the theory of evolution these are indeed real and infinitely complex — are only mediate or transmissive, and are not true causes; God must ever remain the only real agent. In short, we have again a system of Monism; and all the hostilities to the strict personality of created minds that we found in the doctrine of Professor Royce are on our hands once more. And if it be said that just here it is that the philosophic virtue of evolution displays itself, by showing us that the world of efficient causation is only a means to an end coming beyond it, to whose realisation it surely points, — showing us that full self-activity, real freedom, is the plain goal, which moreover can only be won through immortality, — then I am led to ask: How will the goal be attained? I ask myself: So long as man remains a term in Nature, how can he ever escape from that causal embrace in which Nature is held immanent in God? This very immanence in God will no doubt maintain in existence some form of Nature, as long as God himself exists; and thus I can easily conceive of the