Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/172



public discussion at Berkeley, whose documents the Philosophical Union published shortly after the event, in pamphlet form, was, as a fact, immediately succeeded by several more private meetings, in which the leader of the original debate had ample opportunity to reply to his critics, and to expound further consequences of his theses. The proceedings of these meetings remained unprinted. More than a year has since passed. The Philosophical Union now desires to give the whole discussion a more permanent form, and in doing so kindly invites the present writer to put on record his replies to his critics, to extend and confirm, at his pleasure, his main argument, and to expound some further developments of his doctrine.

In accepting, once more, the hospitality of the Union, and in using it in the following pages, I feel it all the more my duty, as the guest thus invited to return to such pleasant company, not to mar a controversy, whose principal interest lies in the instructive contrast of the points of view adopted by the speakers, — not to mar this controversy, I say, through any idle effort to make, as it were, an end