Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/312

Rh in this external world see how, nor could we find proof of the fact. What a Power causes, that the power seems responsible for. And so the Powers that cause the inestimable might of evil in the world seem of very doubtful religious worth.

We have already suggested in outline why this doubtful residt was to be expected. These Powers were assumed to exist apart from our thought, in tiuie and space, and to work in time. They have, as workers in time, no certain and eternal significance. A single Infinite Power is, properly speaking, a misnomer. If a power produces something that is external to itself, then the very idea of such an occurrence implies another power, separate from the first, and therefore limiting it. If however the power is identical with its own products, then the name power no longer properly belongs to it. For, as we shall see when we come to speak of the world in its other aspect, namely, as eternal, the conceptions of power and product, of cause and effect, and of all like existences, are found to be only subordinate to the highest conception of the world as Thought. For the Eternal Thought are all these powers; but in themselves they belong to the flux of things. Each one of them says. Not in me, when you ask it for the significance of the world as a whole. Each power says: “I work here along with the others. I fight, I strive, I conquer, I obey, I seek my ends as I can. But beyond me are the conditions that limit me.” And these conditions are the other powers. The world of powers is the world of the children of the dragon’s teeth. Their struggles are