XVI PREFACE 



way subject to evolution ; except that in the case of 

 minds other than God, who have their differentiation 

 from him in a side of their being which is in one 

 aspect contradictory of their Ideal, this sense-world 

 of theirs is by its very nature, in its conjunction with 

 their total nature, under the law of return toward 

 the essential Ideal. In this world of sense, this 

 essentially incomplete and tentative world of expe- 

 rience, evolution must therefore reign universally ; 

 but beyond this world of phenomena it cannot go. 

 Every mind has an eternal reality that did not arise 

 out of change, and that cannot by change pass away. 



IX. These several conceptions, founded in the 

 idea of the World of Spirits as a circuit of moral 

 relationship, carry with them a profound change in 

 our habitual notions of the creative office of God. 

 Creation, so far as it can be an office of God toward 

 other spirits, is not an event — not an act causative 

 and effective in t'lDic. It is not an occurrence, dated 

 at some instant in the life of God, after the lapse 

 of aeons of his solitary being. God has no being 

 subject to time, such as we have ; nor is the funda- 

 mental relation which minds bear to him a temporal 

 relation. So far as it concerns minds, then, oration 

 must simply mean the eternal fact that God is a com- 

 plete moral agent, that his essence is just a perfect 

 Conscience — the immutable recognition of the world 



