is this but to say that as the ideal is the truth of the actual, so the supreme reality can only be the perfect embodiment and realisation of the ideal ? In no one of these three terms do we depart from the single concrete fact of moral experience; abstract any one of them, and that concrete experience becomes impossible.

What is the concrete fact, the single term of which these three are only aspects, but selfhood or personality? Behind the actual there is the ideal self, and behind the ideal the real or divine Self. The whole drift of the argument serves to show that, in essence, God and man must be one, that God-the supreme moral source and principle, the alpha and the omega of the moral as of the intellectual life-is the eternally perfect Personality, in whose image man has been created, and after the pattern of whose perfect nature, the archetypal essence of his own, he must unceasingly strive to shape his life. Since the moral ideal is an ideal of personality, must not the moral reality, the reality of which that ideal is the after-reflection as well as the prophetic hint, be the perfection of personality, the supreme Person whose image we, as persons, bear and are slowly and with effort inscribing on our natural individuality? We must thus complete the Kantian theory of autonomy; that alone does not tell the whole story of the moral life. Its unyielding 'ought,' its categorical imperative, issues not merely from the depths of our own nature, but from the heart of the universe itself. We are self-legislative: but we re-enact the law already enacted by God; we recognise, rather than constitute, the law of our own being. The moral law is the echo within our souls of the voice of the Eternal, whose offspring we are.

All this, I need hardly say, is not intended as mathematical demonstration. Philosophy never is an 6 exact science.' Rather it is offered as the only sufficient hypothesis of the moral life. The life of goodness, the ideal life, is necessarily a grand speculation, a great leap in

the dark.' It is a life based on the conviction that its source and its issues are in the eternal and the infinite. Its mood is strenuous, enthusiastic, possessed by the persuasion of its own infinite value and significance. The man lives under the power of the idea of the supreme reality of moral distinctions, and of their absolute significance. To invalidate the hypothesis would be to invalidate the life which is based upon it. But the life of goodness is unyielding in its demand for the sanction, in ultimate divine Reality, of its own ideal. For that ideal is infinite-to make it finite were to destroy it; and, as infinite, it must seek its complement in the infinite or God. And if a life thus founded is in reality an infinite Peradventure, one long Question always repeated, its progress brings with it the gradual conversion of the speculative peradventure into a practical certainty; the persistent question is always answering itself. The touch of this transcendent faith alone transfigures man's life with a divine and absolute significance, and endows it with an imperishable and unconquerable strength. “If God be for us, who can be against us?" "We feel we are nothing, but Thou wilt help us to be." are in alliance with the Power that rules the universe, we may well feel confident that "we can do all things "; we must go this warfare at our own charges, we may as well give up the struggle. But the very essence of goodness is that it will never give up, but perseveres even to the end. One thing alone would be fatal to it-the loss of belief in its own infinite reality, in its own absolute worth. With that surrender would come pessimism. But again the good life never is pessimistic.1

If indeed we

if

1 Cf. Professor James, International Journal of Ethics, vol. i. pp. 352, 353: "When, however, we believe that a God is there, and that he is one of the claimants, the infinite perspective opens out. The scale of the symphony is incalculably prolonged. The more imperative ideals now begin to speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance, and to utter the infinitely penetrating, shattering, tragically challenging mode of appeal. . . All through history, in the periodical conflicts of puritanism with the

10. Objections to anthropomorphism: (a) from the standpoint of natural evolution. The objection is made to such an ethical or personal conception of God, that it is anthropomorphic, and rests, like all anthropomorphism, upon a false estimate of man's place in the universe, upon such an exaggerated view of his importance as is fatal to the vision of God in his true being. This objection comes from two sides-from that of Naturalism and from that of Transcendentalism, or from that of empirical and from that of dialetical Evolutionism. The former need not detain us long; the latter will require more careful consideration.

The evolutionary view of the universe, it is held, emphasises the lesson of the Copernican change of standpoint. As the geo-centric conception was supplanted by the helio-centric, so must the anthropo-centric view give place to the cosmo-centric. As man has learned that his planet is not the centre of the physical universe, he is now learning that he himself is only an incident in the long course of the evolutionary process. His imagined superiority to nature, his imagined uniqueness of endowment, must disappear when he is found to be the product of natural factors, and the steps are traced by which he has become what he is.

But such a deduction from the theory of evolution is

don't-care temper, we see the antagonism of the strenuous and genial moods, and the contrast between the ethics of infinite and mysterious obligation from on high, and those of prudence and the satisfaction of merely finite needs. The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest. Our attitude towards concrete evils is entirely different in a world where we believe there are none but finite demanders, from what it is in one where we joyously face tragedy for an infinite demander's sake. Every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set free in those who have religious faith. For this reason the strenuous type of character will, on the battle-field of human history, always outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the wall."

the result of a misinterpretation of that theory. Here, as elsewhere, the theological consequence is a metaphysical deduction from scientific statements, rather than a finding of science itself. It is for science to discover the laws of phenomena, or the manner of their occurrence, to describe the 'how' of the world and of man. The' what' and the 'why' are questions for philosophy. The 'laws' of nature which science discovers may be at the same time the 'ways' of God, the modes of the divine activity. Why should not evolution by natural selection be the mode of the divine activity? Even if evolution be the

supreme law of the universe, it is only the highest generalisation, the most comprehensive scientific statement of the phenomenal process. But the process does not explain itself. The genetic method' may be adequate for science; it is not adequate for philosophy. Philosophy can never rest in a universe of mere becoming, it must explain becoming by being rather than being by becoming. Heraclitus, as a philosophical Evolutionist, recognised this in his assertion of the law or path. (ódós) of the process; and Aristotle saw still more clearly that the process of evolution is not self-explanatory, that becoming rests on being, that the rí korv of the actual presupposes the οὐσία or τί ἦν εἶναι of the essential and ideal. In other words, we understand the becoming only when we refer it to the being that is becoming. The very conception of evolution, philosophically understood, is teleological. Evolution is not mere change or indefinite movement; it is progress, movement in a certain direction, towards a definite goal. "The process of evolution is itself the working out of a mighty teleology, of which our finite understandings can fathom but the scantiest rudiments." It has been truly said that "evolution spells purpose." The philosophic lesson of Evolutionism is the constant lesson of science itself, that the universe is a universe, a many which is also a one, a whole through 1 J. Fiske, Cosmic Philosophy, vol. ii. p. 406.

all its parts. And while it is the business of the scientific Evolutionist to analyse this whole into its component parts, it is for philosophy to make the synthesis of the parts in the whole.

To discover this total meaning of the evolutionary process, this end which is at the same time the beginning of the entire movement, philosophy must reverse the evolutionary method, as understood by science, and explain the lower in terms of the higher, rather than the higher in terms of the lower; the earlier in terms of the later, rather than the later in terms of the earlier; the simpler by the more complex, rather than the more complex by the simpler. For it is in the higher and later and more complex that we see the unfolding of the essential nature of the lower and earlier and simpler forms of being. In the latter we discover what the former had it in them to become, what the former in promise and potency already were. The oak explains the acorn, even more truly than the acorn explains the oak. Now the highest and latest and most complex form of being that we know is man; and thus teleology becomes inevitably anthropomorphism. The superiority of the anthropo-centric view to the cosmo-centric receives a new vindication when we see that man, instead of excluding, includes nature. "That which the pre-Copernican astronomy naïvely thought to do by placing the home of man in the centre of the physical universe, the Darwinian biology profoundly accomplishes by exhibiting man as the terminal fact in that stupendous process of evolution whereby things have come to be what they are. In the deepest sense it is as true as ever it was held to be, that the world was made for man, and that the bringing forth in him of those qualities which we call highest and holiest is the final cause of creation." 1 For in man we now see, with a new distinctness, the microcosm; he sums up in himself, repeats 1 J. Fiske, The Idea of God, Pref., p. 21.