Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/299

274 power you please is a possibility; but our great trouble will then lie in the fact that only experience can establish such an hypothesis, which by its very nature needs a posteriori proof. And experience, as summed up in science, has in fact simply no need of that hypothesis. Hence we shall be left altogether in doubt, at least while we study the World as Power.

Such is the argument in its most general statement. Now as to the points in greater detail. The great difficulty mentioned above as lying in the way of the hypothesis of an infinite creative power is a difficulty in the conception of creation itself. Creation, for the popular conception, certainly involves producing a thing of some kind by a creative act, the thing produced existing forthwith outside of the creator. To give up this separation of creator and product is to become pantheistic. And with monism we are not here concerned. But now the idea of an infinite creative Power outside of his products involves more than one difficulty. We shall not dwell on the old difficulty that this infinite Power would become finite as soon as there was in existence something outside of it. We shall proceed at once to a more fruitful and serious difficulty, which we find in the fact that the concept of producing an external thing involves, of necessity, a relation to a Law, above both producer and product, which determines the conditions under which there can be a product at all. The creative power must then work under conditions, however magical and mysterious its acts may be. And working under condi-