Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/478

Rh order in the world of ultimate reality — an order necessarily based upon the autonomy of the individual mind — we must abandon what may be called “creationism”; must abandon it in all its forms, and preeminently in the two forms which have coine into such serious conflict since the middle of the nineteenth century — I mean, of course, (1) the old dualistic (or transcendent) creationism of Hebraic theology, and (2) the later monistic (or immanential) creationism of Hegelianism and the evolutionary philosophy. If freedom is to be saved, I show it must be saved through such an idealism as replaces this “efficient” view of causation by a view purely final, or ideal, as the principle by which God sustains and rules the world. But, supposing this established, how do we know that a free world is a fact? If freedom requires that the soul shall be coexistent with God ill eternity, — that is, in the world of spontaneous first causes, — how are we to prove that freedom and such a world of coexistent self-active beings are both realities?

I answer here as I have answered in the book: By proving the reality of a priori knowledge in the individual. And for the detail of this proof I again refer readers to the first, to the third, and to the sixth essay.

The reviewer’s own habitual way of philosophising has led him, finally, into misconceiving my form of idealism as one-sided and merely subjective. “It remains to note,” he says, “what seems a confusion of ideas, reappearing from point to point of the argument, in a failure to recognise the distinction between a subjective and an objective view of the universe. It is human thought which organises the motley phenomena presented to the senses into the majestic order called Nature. And this is reasonable