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xvi way subject to evolution; except that in the case of minds other than God, who have their differentiation from him in a side of their being which is in one aspect contradictory of their Ideal, this sense-world of theirs is by its very nature, in its conjunction with their total nature, under the law of return toward the essential Ideal. In this world of sense, this essentially incomplete and tentative world of experience, evolution must therefore reign universally; but beyond this world of phenomena it cannot go. Every mind has an eternal reality that did not arise out of change, and that cannot by change pass away.

IX. These several conceptions, founded in the idea of the World of Spirits as a circuit of moral relationship, carry with them a profound change in our habitual notions of the creative office of God. Creation, so far as it can be an office of God toward other spirits, is not an event — not an act causative and effective in time. It is not an occurrence, dated at some instant in the life of God, after the lapse of aeons of his solitary being. God has no being subject to time, such as we have; nor is the fundamental relation which minds bear to him a temporal relation. So far as it concerns minds, then, creation must simply mean the eternal fact that God is a complete moral agent, that his essence is just a perfect — the immutable recognition of the world