d in a manner of which our own minds can give us but a very
faint and analogical idea. The world must be thought of as ultimately
the thought or experience of this Mind, which we call God. And this Mind
must be thought {119} of as not only a Thinker, but also as a Cause or a
Will. Our own and all other minds, no less than the events of the
material Universe, owe their beginning and continuance to this divine
Will: in them the thought or experience of the divine Mind is reproduced
in various degrees; and to all of them is communicated some portion of
that causality or activity of which God is the ultimate source, so that
their acts must be regarded as due mediately to them, ultimately to God.
But, though these minds are wholly dependent upon and in intimate
connexion with the divine Mind, they cannot be regarded as _parts_ of the
divine Consciousness. Reality consists of God and all the minds that He
wills to exist, together with the world of Nature which exists in and for
those minds. Reality is the system or society of spirits and their
experience. The character and ultimate purpose of the divine Mind is
revealed to us, however inadequately or imperfectly, in the moral
consciousness; and the moral ideal which is thus communicated to us makes
it reasonable for us to expect, for at least the higher of the dependent
or created minds, a continuance, of their individual existence, after
physical death. Pain, sin, and other evils must be regarded as necessary
incidents in the process by which the divine Will is bringing about the
greatest attainable good of all conscious beings. The question whether
our material Universe, {120} considered as the object of Mind, has a
beginning and will have an end, is one which we have no data for
deciding. Time-distinctions, I think, must be regarded as
objective--that is to say, as forming part of the nature and constitution
of the real world; but the antinomy involved either in supposing an
endless succession or a beginning and end of the time-series is one which
our intellectual faculties are, or at least have so far proved, incapable
of solving. The element of inadequacy and uncertainty which the
admission of this antinomy introduces into our theory of the Universe is
an emphatic reminder to us of the inadequate and imperfect character of
all our knowledge. The knowledge, however, that we possess, though
inadequate knowledge, is real knowledge--not a sham knowledge of merely
re