Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/225

206 mental life; or yet other of the frequently great creations of Nineteenth Century thought. These are names for abstractions, but for abstractions based in some cases upon a vast experience, and in these cases justified precisely as empirically valid conceptions. The world of these principles is neither independently real nor yet illusory, nor yet precisely a spiritual reality. It is said to be true for us men. In that world the older faiths may indeed seem endangered. God is, from such a point of view, no longer a person, not yet is he the mystical Absolute. The impersonal conception of a Righteous Order of the universe remains. Theology, one holds, must reconstruct its notions accordingly. What remain to us to-day are Virtual Entities, so to speak, — Laws and Orders of truth, — objects that are to us as if they were finally real. This as if, or as it were, becomes to some thinkers, a sort of ultimate category. One no longer proves that God exists, but only that, It is as if he were. God too, like a logarithm, or like a treaty of peace between two nations, is to be, to such minds, a virtual entity or else nothing.

Thinkers of this general type, I say, you all know. Their spirit, as you read modern books, you have constantly before you. Their characteristic metaphysical conceptions are founded upon this, our third view of the ontological predicate. In future this Third Conception may therefore come to be remembered as the typical ontological idea current in the Nineteenth Century, — in this age of critical rationalism, and of a cool respect for truths which do everything but take on the form of individual life.