THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 



43 



it perceives in Time and in Space, or is transcen- 

 dently different from these, and noumenal. The 

 favourable significance of Cosmic Theism for man 

 and his supreme interests, and of every other species 

 of affirmative idealism, lies in its passing beyond 

 the agnostic arrest at the Omnipresent Energy, by 

 its recognition that the logic of evolution, as depicted 

 in such an analysis as we have just made, requires 

 in the Noumenon a self-conscious nature. This is 

 a step greatly human, because it opens somewhat 

 more widely than agnosticism, and certainly more 

 affirmatively, the chance for hope that the existence 

 of no conscious beings may fail of everlasting con- 

 tinuance and fulfilment. Yet it has also an unfavour- 

 able bearing on the highest human aspirations, not 

 only because it fails to reach immortality as an 

 assured and necessary truth, ^ but for the far graver 

 reason that it decidedly tends to leave all individual 

 minds in the world of mere phenomena ; or, if it 

 permits them to be conceived of as sharing in abso- 

 lute reality, by being parts or modes of the Sole 

 Noumenon, deprives them by this very fact of that 

 real freedom which is essential to personality and 

 to the pursuit of a genuine moral ideal.^ It is there- 



^ See Professor Royce in Ilie Conception of God, pp. 322-326. 

 New York, The Macmillan Company, 1897. 



2 For the thorough, if unwitting and unwilling, acknowledgment of 

 this by a leading representative of this philosophy, see Professor Royce's 



