Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/34

Rh reality of knowledge, and is essential to the knowledge of reality, (2) the conception of Individuality, and the Principle of Individuation, and (3) the conception of Moral Freedom, — all with the object of furnishing the philosophical proof that the answer Yes is the truth. Professor Howison, on the other hand, maintains that the answer is unqualifiedly No; and after considering everything advanced in the Supplementary Essay, he still holds to the answer.

The significance, then, of the present discussion is that it enters the historical conflict in religious philosophy at just the crisis which has above been described. Professor Royce represents, in a fresh and subtly reasoned way, the Idealistic Monism which has now been explained as one of the main sides in that conflict, and which he, in the pages that follow, himself explains with greater fulness and force. The Pluralistic Idealism which Professor Howison in opposition contends for, receives in the book no correspondingly detailed defence, analytic and affirmatively theoretical. Professor Howison’s contribution to the discussion is by the exigencies of the case chiefly critical and consequently negative. Its office must be regarded as fulfilled, for the time being, if it has served the important purpose of challenging the Monism — especially the idealistic form of this — which so long has filled the philosophic and religious imagination, and which has received at the hands of Professor Royce a defence so detailed, so carefully organised, and so expressive. If it help, as its author ventures to hope it may, to serve the further object of directing philosophical discussion upon the field where the next