THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 7 



postulate of the Christian Faith, is annulled by both 

 conceptions alike ; and while the theory of Cosmic 

 Theism, if treated with such idealistic methods as 

 those employed by Professor Joseph Le Conte in his 

 later writings, may be made to provide for a quasi- 

 immortality of the distinct single soul, we should 

 nevertheless remember that the ever-present brood- 

 ing of the immanent Cosmic Mind forever suppresses 

 the possibility of real freedom, and consequently 

 takes away from everlasting continuance all that 

 could make the soul a genuine individual, and there- 

 fore all the moral worth that alone could give to 

 continuance what religion means by Life Eternal. 



Under a sheer evolutionary account of man, the 

 world of real persons, the world of individual respon- 

 sibility with its harmony of spontaneous dutifulness, 

 disappears. With it disappears the genuine per- 

 sonality of God. An immanent Cosmic Conscious- 

 ness is not a personal God. For the very quality 

 of personality is, that a person is a being who 

 recognises others as having a reality as unquestion- 

 able as his own, and who thus sees himself as a 

 member of a moral republic, standing to other per- 

 sons in an immutable relationship of reciprocal duties 

 and rights, himself endowed with dignity, and ac- 

 knowledging the dignity of all the rest. The doctrine 

 of a Cosmic Consciousness, on the contrary, reduces 

 all created minds either to mere phenomena or, at 



