Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/390

Rh so far as we view it as a real progress from death to life, or from even what Professor Le Conte calls a diffused form of Divine Energy to a personal form, is not yet rightly viewed. Nature, on any level, is, according to my hypothesis, a hint of “other finite life than ours,” — of a life presumably as individuated, as concrete, as our own; only that such life, by virtue of what I have hypothetically regarded as a “difference in the time-span,” or length of a “typical passing present moment,” or else by virtue of other differences, is so remote from ours that both its meaning and its individuation are unintelligible to us, so far as we appeal to direct experience. Thus, for instance, a being whose present moments were a million years long might have a very definite finite individuation, but though my finite experience gave me hints of the mere existence of his life, I should fail entirely, within my time-span, to observe any significant events in that life. In brief, in view of such hypotheses we should have no right to speak of “dead Nature,” but only of “uncommunicative Nature.” And the process of evolution would have to be viewed, not as a process whereby dead Nature passed into life, or diffused Energy into individuated form, but as a process whereby our finite human type of life has become differentiated in the midst of a world some of whose individuals are nearer to us, in the “time-span” of their consciousness, or in other respects, than are others. I have not here to defend or develope such hypotheses. Enough, so long as they seem to me even bare possibilities I must regard natural evolution as a process too ambiguous to