ntial Address to the Aristotelian Society, printed in their
_Proceedings_ for 1907.

[4] _Principles of Human Knowledge_, pt. i., Sections 18, 20.

[5] _Principles of Human Knowledge_, pt. 1., Section 23.

[6] See Lecture IV., pp. 96-101, 123-6.

[7] I have attempted to meet this line of argument somewhat more
adequately, in the form in which it has recently been taken up by
Professor Hoeffding in his _Philosophy of Religion_, in a review in the
Review of Theology and Philosophy for November, 1907 (vol. iii.).

{29}

LECTURE II

THE UNIVERSAL CAUSE

In my last lecture I endeavoured to show that matter, so far from
constituting the ultimate Reality, cannot reasonably be thought of as
existing at all without mind; and that we cannot explain the world
without assuming the existence of a Mind in which and for which
everything that is not mind has its being. But we are still very far
from having fully cleared up the relation between the divine Mind and
that Nature which exists in it and for it: while we have hardly dealt at
all with the relation between the universal Mind and those lesser minds
which we have treated--so far without much argument--as in some way
derived from, or dependent upon, that Mind. So far as our previous line
of argument goes, we might have to look upon the world as the thought of
God, but not as caused by Him or due to His will. We might speak of God
as 'making Nature,' but only in the sense in which you or I make Nature
when we think it or experience it. {30} 'The world is as necessary to
God as God is to the world,' we are often told--for instance by my own
revered teacher, the late Professor Green. How unsatisfactory this
position is from a religious point of view I need hardly insist. For all
that such a theory has to say to the contrary, we might have to suppose
that, though God is perfectly good, the world which He is compelled to
think is very bad, and going from bad to worse. To think of God merely
as the Mind which eternally contemplates Nature, without having any power
whatever of determining what sort of Nature it is to be, supplies no
ground for hope or aspiration--still less for worship, adoration,
imitation. I suggested the possibility that from such a point of view
God might be thought of as good, and the world as bad. But that is
really to concede too much. A being without a will could as little be
bad as he could be good: he would be simply a being without a c