Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/50

Rh universally clear but absolutely passionless insight. An Omniscient Being could answer your bitter Why? when you mourn, with an experience that would not simply ignore your passion. For your passion, too, is a fact. It is experienced. The experience of the Omniscient Being would therefore include it. Only his insight, unlike yours, would comprehend it, and so would answer whatever is rational about your present question.

This is what I mean by saying that the definition of God by means of the attribute of Omniscience would involve far more than the phrase “mere omniscience” at first easily suggests. As a fact, in order to have the attribute of Omniscience, a being would necessarily be conceived as essentially world-possessing, — as the source and principle of the universe of truth, — not merely as an external observer of a world of foreign truth. As such, he would be conceived as omnipotent, and also in possession of just such experience as ideally ought to be; in other words, as good and perfect.

So much, then, for the mere preliminary definition. To this definition I should here add a word or two of more technical analysis. We mortals have an incomplete experience. This means that the ideas awakened in us by our experience far transcend what we are now able to verify. We think, then, of actual or of possible experience that is not now ours. But an Omniscient Being would have no genuine or logically permissible ideas of any experience actually beyond his own or remote from his own. We express this by saying, technically, that an Omniscient Being would