If, therefore, on the grounds {45}
suggested by the Hegelian or other post-Kantian Idealists, we have been
led to think that the ultimate Reality is Mind or Spirit, we should
naturally conclude by analogy that it must be Will as well as Thought
and--I may add, though it hardly belongs to the present argument to
insist upon that--Feeling. On the other hand if, with men like
Schopenhauer and Edouard von Hartmann,[5] we are conducted by the
appearances of design in Nature to the idea that Nature is striving after
something, that the ultimate Reality is Will, we must supplement that
line of argument by inferring from the analogy of our own Consciousness
that Will without Reason is an unintelligible and meaningless
abstraction, and that (as indeed even Hartmann saw) Schopenhauer's Will
without Reason was as impossible an abstraction as the apparently
will-less universal Thinker of the Hegelian:[6] while against
Schopenhauer and his more reasonable successor, Hartmann, I should insist
that an unconscious Will is as unintelligible a contradiction as an
unconscious Reason. Schopenhauer and Hegel seem to have seen, each of
them, exactly {46} half of the truth: God is not Will without Reason or
Reason without Will, but both Reason and Will.

And here I must try to meet an inevitable objection. I do not say that
these three activities of the human intellect stand in God side by side
with the same distinctness and (if I may say so) irreducibility that they
do in us. What feeling is for a Being who has no material organism, we
can form no distinct conception. Our thought with its clumsy processes
of inference from the known to the unknown must be very unlike what
thought is in a Being to whom nothing is unknown. All our thought too
involves generalization, and in universal concepts (as Mr. Bradley has
shown us) much that was present in the living experience of actual
perception is necessarily left out. Thought is but a sort of
reproduction--and a very imperfect reproduction--of actual, living,
sensible experience. We cannot suppose, then, that in God there is the
same distinction between actual present experience and the universal
concepts employed in thinking which there is in us. And so, again,
willing must be a very different thing in a being who wills or creates
the objects of his own thought from what it is in beings who can only
achieve their ends by distinguishing in the sharpest possible manner
between the indefinit