a something taken up for the sake of the argument. It is not shown from an examination of the fragmentary experience the only data for proving anything-that this must be really true according to the standard of truth furnished by this fragmentary experience. It is, then, admittedly an assumed truth. But the solipsist argues: This truth is not really true for me (i.e. he remembers that it is assumed truth); but it is absolutely true (i.e. he forgets that it is an assumed truth); to be true, however, a truth must be true to somebody; therefore, it must be true (ie. really true) to some one else.

It is clear that, in this argument, the solipsist forgets that there are only two kinds of truths which he has a right to recognize at all. There are assumed truths, which are assumed by himself; and there are real truths, which are real only in the sense that they can be justified by a reference to his fragments. If these fragments constitute a system, they can furnish a real truth something may be true or real in the sense that it belongs to the system. If, however, we assume these fragments to be so fragmentary that they can furnish no real truth, distinct from assumptions, our solipsist is left with no truth at all save assumed truth. Then he may not argue: This is not true for me, but it is true. If it is not true for him, i.e. if it is not a truth discovered in the fragments which are his all, it is not a truth at all, in any sense that can mean anything to him. The fragments are his; any real truth which they contain or may contain is or may be his; the assumptions are his. Where in all this is there any truth which may be referred to any one else? Even the Berkeleian, who holds that nothing can be true except as it is known to be true, may see that we have here no truth that need be referred to any mind save that of the possessor of the fragments.

Why does an argument so defective succeed in puzzling us as this one has done? It is because neither Professor Royce nor his reader really abstracts from what he is supposed to be abstracting from at the outset of the argument. There slips in at the very beginning the recognition of the system of things which is not supposed to make its appearance until the close of the argument. We involuntarily allow our solipsist, not merely a truth which may be abstracted from his fragments, but a truth independent of this. Thus, the system of things does not emerge from the supposed fragments as conclusion follows premises.

It is not surprising that Professor Royce and his reader should fall into this confusion. As I have pointed out above, it is really not legitimate to begin with these supposed fragments. In calling them fragments we tacitly recognize a larger whole; we say they exist, and we do not mean to give the word a significance drawn wholly from the fragments themselves; we speak of them as our experiences, and the words are meaningless unless we recognize a system of things, with its distinction of subjective and objective.

I have been betrayed into criticising Professor Royce's argument at much greater length than I had intended. The purposes of this chapter might have been sufficiently served, had I contented myself with pointing out that the argument, whether good or bad, is, after all, only an argument to prove the existence of the external world recognized by science, and that it is only through a confusion that the external world can be identified with what men mean and have meant by God.

But I have thought it right to do much more, and for the following reason: the original contributions which American scholars have so far made to philosophy have not, I think, been very striking; in this argument Professor Royce offers us a bold, independent, and highly ingenious speculation; he does not speak as the echo of a school, and, whether we approve the course of his argument or do not, we must admit that he has a right to an attentive hearing and to a frank and searching criticism. It is only in exercising the independence in speculation which he has exemplified, and in exercising an equal independence in criticising each other's efforts, that we can hope to do something more than paraphrase the words of those who have preceded us.

CHAPTER XXXV

OF GOD (Continued)

LET us come back to the Argument from Design, the only one which, as I have said, has really been taken seriously by mankind. As it is commonly brought before us, it argues about as follows:1

Things are constantly happening in the world about us; these happenings must have their causes, and these causes, in turn, their causes; no chain of causes, however, can be endless, but must end in a First Cause; for, unless we assume a First Cause, we have really no cause at all, but only a series of effects or results, all of which are uncaused.

、

Again Causes must be proportioned to effects. We always assume a builder to explain the building of a house; and if the plan of the house is particularly ingenious, we naturally infer that this is due to unusual ingenuity on the part of its author.

To use

a famous old illustration, no one, finding a watch in a desert place, would suppose that it had any other cause than the mind and hands of a watchmaker-the only thing we know capable of making a watch. If, now, we look at the world about us, do we not find on every side evidences of adaptation and apparent purpose? Are not means fitted to ends through the whole domain of nature, and is not the whole domain of nature one, a unit, a single system? If we go back to the cause of all this, must we not infer that there is but one First Cause, wise as well as powerful, who is the author of this harmonious plan, and the source of all its workings? And since the things we see indicate, not merely a plan, but a good plan, must we not infer that the Author of Nature is not merely a Mind, but a Good Mind- such a Being as we mean when we use the word "God"?

To this argument, as thus presented, there at once suggest

1 Some of the following reflections I have presented before in a little work which has for years been out of print: "A Plain Argument for God;" Philadelphia, 1889.

themselves certain objections. For one thing, it is by no means self-evident that the series of causes and effects may not be endless. There is no more sense in saying that, unless there be a first cause, there is no cause at all, and there is only a series of effects, than there is in saying that, unless there be some last effect, which does not in turn become a cause, there is no effect at all, and there is only a series of causes. A cause is a cause in relation to what follows it, somewhat as a father is a father; we do not have to investigate its pedigree before we can affirm that it is a cause. This part of the argument looks like a premeditated attempt to get back just as far as one wishes to go, and to have an excuse for not going farther.

Perhaps I should say: to get back as far as one does not wish to go; for I am sure that those who use the argument have no desire to be carried back to the point to which it would logically carry them. Here we have a second objection to the argument, and a very grave one. The argument is deistic, not theistic, i.e.

it gives one a God, not now revealed in the world, a present God, God whose only provable relation to the world is a thing of the past, and of a very remote past at that.

but a

Suppose some one to say: one to say: "The argument is excellent, I accept it. I believe that God created the world and set nature in motion, but I believe that there His contact with the world ceased. There is no evidence that He is now in any direct relation with me, or is in any sense present. His action belongs to the past, not to the present." How will the champion of this argument answer that? May he try to answer it by pointing to evidences of God's wisdom or goodness as seen in the world to-day? He will at once be told that, according to his own argument, to prove God the author of this goodness he must go back to a First Cause.

It is worth while to examine a little more carefully this deistic notion that God was more directly revealed in some remote beginning of things than He is in the present. The distinction between a relatively direct and a relatively indirect revelation of mind is one with which we are familiar enough. We read an old letter, and we refer the mind which it reflects to the past; we talk with a friend, and we do not refer to the past the ideas which seem to be revealed. The man who picks up the watch above referred to accounts for it by going back to certain bodily motions which have taken place at some time in the past, and these bodily motions he

regards as revealing mind as directly as it is conceivable that another mind should be revealed. He does not, be it observed, ascend the chain of physical causes until that chain runs out altogether, and nothing more that is physical is forthcoming. He goes back a little way, and then turns aside to a something not physical, because he finds in the physical what he regards as a direct revelation of mind.

Yet his argument for a Divine mind discovers no direct evidence for mind until it arrives at a last link in the physical chain a link which, if the teachings of science are to be accepted at all, we may assume to be much less clearly indicative of mind of any sort than what makes its appearance long after. It should be remembered that, in passing from this last link to God, he is tak ing a step which is not analogous to that which is taken when one passes from watch to watchmaker; he is taking a step which is analogous to that which is taken when one passes from the watchmaker's body to his mind. Is it clear that such a view of things is

reasonable?

As the reader has observed, I have criticised the argument we are discussing without going much beyond the standpoint of the man who urges it. It is open to criticism even on this basis. But one may go farther and say, that the whole argument as above set forth moves in an atmosphere of what we may call "ready-made" conceptions-conceptions taken up and used without previous critical analysis. It will not be profitable to dwell upon it at greater length, and I shall leave it with the remark that it is not taken very seriously even by those who defend it, for it is a deistic argument, and I know of no deists alive at the present day. This seems to indicate rather clearly that its champions rest their belief in God, which is a belief in a present God, not upon this argument in this form, but on something else.

It should be remarked that the above criticisms are not directed against the contention that a Divine Mind is revealed in the world. They bear only upon the peculiar way in which that Mind is supposed to be related to the world. Hence, I must not be supposed to be objecting to the argument from design in general, but only to one of the forms in which it has found expression. Can it be expressed in a more reasonable form?

Let us remember that we are in search of a mind. How can a mind be revealed? What does it mean to say that a mind