Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/452

Rh subject, I must refer to the full discussion of the matter in my fifth and seventh essays.

In accordance with this difference, I aim to show that the eternal world is a world of minds falling under the two heads of (1) God, and (2) non-divine consciousnesses who yet in their eternal aspect constitute with God and with each other an indivisibly harmonious whole. The characteristic difference between God and all the other minds, I find to lie in the possession by the latter, and by them only, of a sensuous consciousness, rising everlastingly, through a serial being in time and in space, toward a complete harmony with the eternal ideal that is the changeless central essence of each mind, and whose proper and only real object is God. In short, the new system refers the entire being and linkage of Nature to the minds other than God, so far as concerns its efficient causation. God is not the creator, in the sense of the literal producer, or First Cause, of any mind as such, nor even of that aspect in the conscious life of other minds which we know as their merely natural being, whether of psychic states or of physical processes. It is here that the system parts company with such an idealism as Berkeley’s, and takes part with that of Kant, or, still more closely in some regards, with the earlier theory of Aristotle.

As Final Cause, however, or attracting Ideal, God has, according to this view, absolute and immutable living relations to the being of all other minds (as these also, reciprocally, have to God's own being), and likewise to the being even of Nature; so that Nature takes its supreme law, the law of Evolution, from God’s existence as the eternally-realised Ideal of every mind. Hence, as Final Cause, God is at once (1) the Logical Ground apart from which, as Defining Standard, no consciousness can define itself as I, nor, consequently, can exist at all; and (2) the Ideal Goal toward which each consciousness in its eternal freedom