an object. The
distinction is no doubt from many points of view important, but we must
not speak of 'conceptual space' and 'perceptual space' as if they had
nothing to do with one another. If the relations of conceptual space
were not in some sense contained or implied in our perceptions, no amount
of abstraction or reflection could get the relations out of them.

[8] _Sociology_, vol. iii. p. 172.

[9] _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii. pp. 191-2.

[10] For a further discussion of the subject the reader may be referred
to my essay on 'Personality in God and Man' in _Personal Idealism_.

{58}

LECTURE III

GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS

A course of purely metaphysical reasoning has led us up to the idea of
God--that is to say, of a conscious and rational Mind and Will for
which the world exists and by which that world and all other spirits
are caused to exist. I have passed over a host of difficulties--the
relation of God to time, the question whether or in what sense the
world may be supposed to have a beginning and an end, the question of
the relation in which God, the universal Mind, stands to other minds,
the question of Free-will. These are difficulties which would involve
elaborate metaphysical discussions: I shall return to some of them in a
later lecture. It must suffice for the present to say that more than
one answer to many of these questions might conceivably be given
consistently with the view of the divine nature which I have contended
for. All that I need insist on for my present purpose is--

(1) That God is personal in the sense that He is a {59} self-conscious,
thinking, willing, feeling Being, distinguishable from each and all
less perfect minds.

(2) That all other minds are in some sense brought into being by the
divine Mind, while at the same time they have such a resemblance to, or
community of nature with, their source that they may be regarded as not
mere creations but as in some sense reproductions, more or less
imperfect, of that source, approximating in various degrees to that
ideal of Personality which is realised perfectly in God alone. In
proportion as they approximate to that ideal, they are causes of their
own actions, and can claim for themselves the kind of causality which
we attribute in its perfection to God. I content myself now with
claiming for the developed, rational human self a measure of freedom to
the extent which I have just defined--that it i