being is derived must possess at least as much worth or value as the derived being; and that in thinking of that Reality by the analogy of the highest kind of existence known to us we shall come nearer to a true thought of it than by any other way of thinking possible to us. This is a line of argument which I hope to develope further when I come to examine the bearing upon the religious problem of what is as real a part of our experience as any other—our moral experience.

I will remind you in conclusion, that our argument for the existence of God is at present incomplete. I have tried to lead you to the idea that the ultimate Reality is spiritual, that it is a Mind which knows, or is conscious of, matter. I have tried to lead you with the Idealist to think of the physical Universe as having no existence except in the mind of God, or at all events (for those who fail to follow the idealistic line of thought) to believe that the Universe does not exist without such a Mind. What further relation exists between physical nature and this Universal Spirit, I shall hope in the next lecture {27} to consider; and in so doing to suggest a line of argument which will independently lead to the same result, and which does not necessarily presuppose the acceptance of the idealistic creed.

LITERATURE

The reader who wishes to have the idealistic argument sketched in the foregoing chapter developed more fully should read Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge. For the correction of Berkeley's sensationalistic mistakes the best course is to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason or the shorter Prolegomena to any future Metaphysic or any of the numerous expositions or commentaries upon Kant. (One of the best is the 'Reproduction' prefixed to Dr. Hutchison Stirling's Text-book to Kant.) The non-metaphysical reader should, however, be informed that Kant is very hard reading, and is scarcely intelligible without some slight knowledge of the previous history of Philosophy, especially of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, while some acquaintance with elementary Logic is also desirable. He will find the argument for non-sensationalistic Idealism re-stated in a post-Kantian but much easier form in Ferrier's Institutes of Metaphysic. The argument for a theistic Idealism is powerfully stated (though it is not easy reading) in the late Prof. T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, Book I. In view of recent realistic revivals I may add that the earlier chapters of Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality still seem to me to contain an unanswerable defence of Idealism as against Materialism or any form of Realism, though his Idealism is not of the theistic type defended in the above lecture. The idealistic argument is stated in a way which makes strongly for Theism by Professor Ward in Naturalism and Agnosticism—a work which would perhaps be the best sequel to these lectures for any reader {28} who does not want to undertake a whole course of philosophical reading: readers entirely unacquainted with Physical Science might do well to begin with Part II. A more elementary and very clear defence of Theism from the idealistic point of view is to be found in Dr. Illingworth's Personality Human and Divine. Representatives of non-idealistic Theism will be mentioned at the end of the next lecture.

[1] Mind, vol. iv. (U.S.), 1885.

[2] I do not mean of course that in the earliest stages of consciousness this distinction is actually made; but, if there are stages of consciousness in which the 'I' is not realized, the idea of matter or even of an 'object' or 'not-self' existing apart from consciousness must be supposed to be equally absent.

[3] I have dealt at length with this forgotten thinker in a Presidential 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 Höffding in his Philosophy of Religion, in a review in the Review of Theology and Philosophy for November, 1907 (vol. iii.).

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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 character. From an intellectual point such a way of looking at the Universe might be more intelligent or intelligible than that of pure Materialism or pure Agnosticism; but morally and religiously I don't know that, when its consequences are fully realized, it is any great improvement upon either of them.[1] {31} Moreover, even intellectually it fails to satisfy the demand which most reflecting people feel, that the world shall be regarded as a Unity of some kind. If God is thought of as linked by some inexplicable fate to a Nature over which He has no sort of control—not so much control as a mere human being who can produce limited changes in the world,—we can hardly be said to have reduced the world to a Unity. The old Dualism has broken out again: after all we still have God and the world confronting one another; neither of them is in any way explained by the other. Still less could such a world be supposed to have a purpose or rational end. For our own mere intellectual satisfaction as well as for the satisfaction of our religious needs we must go on to ask whether we are not justified in thinking of God as the Cause or Creator of the world, as well as the Thinker of it.

This enquiry introduces us to the whole problem of Causality. The sketch which I gave you last time of Bishop Berkeley's argument was a very imperfect one. Bishop Berkeley was from one point of view a great philosophic iconoclast, though he destroyed only that he might build up. He destroyed the superstition of a self-existing