Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/104

Rh it perceives in Time and in Space, or is transcendently different from these, and noumenal. The favourable significance of Cosmic Theism for man and his supreme interests, and of every other species of affirmative idealism, lies in its passing beyond the agnostic arrest at the Omnipresent Energy, by its recognition that the logic of evolution, as depicted in such an analysis as we have just made, requires in the Noumenon a self-conscious nature. This is a step greatly human, because it opens somewhat more widely than agnosticism, and certainly more affirmatively, the chance for hope that the existence of no conscious beings may fail of everlasting continuance and fulfilment. Yet it has also an unfavourable bearing on the highest human aspirations, not only because it fails to reach immortality as an assured and necessary truth, but for the far graver reason that it decidedly tends to leave all individual minds in the world of mere phenomena; or, if it permits them to be conceived of as sharing in absolute reality, by being parts or modes of the Sole Noumenon, deprives them by this very fact of that real freedom which is essential to personality and to the pursuit of a genuine moral ideal. It is there-