APPENDIX B 391 



subject, I must refer to the full discussion of the matter in 

 my fifth and seventh essays. 



In accordance with this difference, I aim to show that the 

 eternal world is a world of minds falling under the two 

 heads of (i) God, and (2) non-divine consciousnesses who 

 yet in their eternal aspect constitute with God and with 

 each other an indivisibly harmonious whole. The charac- 

 teristic difference between God and all the other minds, I 

 find to lie in the possession by the latter, and by them only, 

 of a sensuous consciousness, rising everlastingly, through a 

 serial being in time and in space, toward a complete har- 

 mony with the eternal ideal that is the changeless central 

 essence of each mind, and whose proper and only real 

 object is God. In short, the new system refers the entire 

 being and linkage of Nature to the minds other than God, 

 so far as concerns its efficient causation. God is not the 

 creator, in the sense of the literal producer, or First Cause, 

 of any mind as such, nor even of that aspect in the con- 

 scious life of other minds which we know as their merely 

 natural being, whether of psychic states or of physical pro- 

 cesses. It is here that the system parts company with such 

 an idealism as Berkeley's, and takes part with that of Kant, 

 or, still more closely in some regards, with the earlier 

 theory of Aristotle. 



As Final Cause, however, or attracting Ideal, God has, 

 according to this view, absolute and immutable living rela- 

 tions to the being of all other minds (as these also, recipro- 

 cally, have to God's own being), and likewise to the being 

 even of Nature ; so that Nature takes its supreme law, the 

 law of Evolution, from God's existence as the eternally- 

 realised Ideal of every mind. Hence, as Final Cause, 

 God is at once (i) the Logical Ground apart from which, 

 as Defining Standard, no consciousness can define itself as 

 /, nor, consequently, can exist at all; and (2) the Ideal 

 Goal toward which each consciousness in its eternal freedom 



