Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/451

390 has reached a kindred view, closer to Mr. Davidson’s, in fact, than my own.

This common result is the doctrine that the world of absolute reality is a world of minds, each eternal in the sense of being immutably real, self-active, and self-determining; none of them is a derivative, or mere result, of the efficient causality of any other being whatever, though all coexist in a mutual recognition intrinsic to the nature of each. Thus, by their essential freedom, they constitute a moral order, in the profoundest and only proper meaning of that phrase.

But beyond this base-line of agreement, the system as it has developed in my own mind diverges in important ways from that reached by Mr. Davidson. In the first place, I have to dissent from the view recorded in his title of Apeirotheism: I am unable to regard as divine any of the individual minds that he took account of; they are, to me, all of a type which I should describe as human, in contrast to divine. In the second place, I find it necessary, in order to complete the logical circuit of the whole world of minds, to recognise in it a member to whom the name of God, as designating the absolutely realised perfection of Personality, is alone adequate. This supremely personal Being, this one and only God, my honored friend did not recognise, because, like so many of the members of the Ethical Societies who sympathised with his view or were directly influenced by his reasonings, he found neither necessity nor warrant for it: he could see no propriety in calling by the name of God any one of the eternal society of minds rather than another.

I must not burden the present pages with any argument upon the point of difference between myself and my lamented friend. Here I merely wish to set the difference forth, and to call attention to it as vital to the view I name Personal Idealism. Readers who care to follow up the