assumption of a universal Consciousness
which both thinks and wills it. I have assumed rather than proved that
the lesser minds, in which the divine experience is partially reproduced,
are also caused to exist and kept in existence by the same divine Will.
But how, it may be said, do we know that those minds did not exist before
the birth of the organisms with which upon this planet they are
connected? The considerations which forbid our thinking of matter as
something capable of existing by itself do not apply to minds. A
consciousness, unlike a thing, exists 'for itself,' not merely 'for
another': a mind is not made what it is by being known or otherwise
experienced by another mind: its very being consists in being itself
conscious: it is what it is for itself. It is undoubtedly impossible
positively to disprove the hypothesis of eternally pre-existent souls.
Sometimes that hypothesis is combined with Theism. It {94} is supposed
that God is the supreme and incomparably the most powerful, but not the
only, self-existent and eternal Spirit. This hypothesis--sometimes
spoken of as Pluralism[3]--has many attractions: from the time of Origen
onwards the idea of Pre-existence has seemed to many to facilitate the
explanation of evil by making it possible to regard the sufferings of our
present state as a disciplinary process for getting rid of an original or
a pre-natal sinfulness. It is a theory not incapable of satisfying the
demands of the religious Consciousness, and may even form an element in
an essentially Christian theory of the Universe: but to my mind it is
opposed to all the obvious indications of experience. The connexion
between soul and body is such that the laws of the soul's development
obviously form part of the same system with the laws of physical nature.
If one part of that system is referred to the divine Will, so must the
whole of it be. The souls, when they have entered animal bodies, must be
supposed to be subject to a system of laws which is of one piece with the
system of physical laws. If the physical part of the world-order is
referred to the divine Will, the psychical part of it must be equally
referred to {95} that Will. The souls might, indeed, conceivably have an
independent and original nature of their own capable of offering
resistance to the divine intentions. But we see, to say the least, no
indications of a struggle going on between an outside divine Will and
independent beings