326 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



tion it in a sense that God does not. They, we shall 

 find, must be directly and productively causal of it, 

 while God's conditioning of it can only be indirect 

 and remote; namely, as we shall see, by the constant 

 reference to him, as their ruling Ideal, which these 

 nature-begetting minds spontaneously have. In short, 

 in securing freedom we come to a Plurahstic Ideal- 

 ism, instead of the idealistic monism that has so long 

 dominated philosophical theism. 



II 



This exaltation of man over the entire natural 

 world, however, though easily shown to accord with 

 the teaching of Jesus, and to be clearly prefigured in 

 it, is nearly antipodal to ordinary notions, to the cur- 

 rent popular "philosophy" assumed to be founded on 

 science, and to much of traditional theology. But 

 by this fact we must not be disturbed, if we mean to 

 be in earnest about human freedom and human capa- 

 bility of life really moral and religious. And the next 

 step in our inquiry will reinforce this "divinising of 

 the human " very decidedly. 



For we must now push the question of reconciling 

 determinism and freedom beyond the region of their 

 mere ideas, and face its greater difficulties when deter- 

 minism means the definite order in the live Divine 

 Mind, and freedom means the self-directing activity 

 of men or other real spirits not divine. It might per- 



