Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/26

Rh correlated world of Mind, and implicated together with Nature in the consciousness of God, — components in that Consciousness, in fact, — items in the Divine Self-Expression unfolding from eternity to eternity. By this theory of a Divine Immanence, fulfilling the “Divine Omnipresence” of the traditional faith, they aimed at once to convict Kant of construing God as a “thing in itself,” — of the very fallacy of “transcendental illusion” which he had himself exposed in his Transcendental Dialectic, — and to refute his criticism, made in the same place, of the Ontological Proof for the existence of God. Drop, they said, this whole illusion of the “thing in itself,” shown to be meaningless and therefore null, and God, human freedom, and human immortality would once more fall within the bounds of knowledge, since the being of God would become continuous with the being of man, the being of man with the being of God.

The condition of this apparent victory for religion, however, as we must not fail to note, was the acceptance of the Immanent God, the all-pervasive Intelligence; precisely as later, in the system of Spencer, the solution of the tension between Positivism and agnostic Pietism was the acceptance of the Immanent Unknowable. But more worthy of note is the fact, that in the continuous dialectical development involved in the self-expression of the “Divine Idea,” as this was worked out by Hegel, provision had been made, as if ready to hand, not only for the great law of evolution in the creation, but—of far greater significance—for its explanation by something more