r in some way. In general idealists
find in matter only the reflection in consciousness of the material
which sense experience supplies, and since the raw material is in every
way so different from the mental reflection, the idealist may defend his
position plausibly in assuming matter to be, in its phenomenal aspects,
really the creation of thought. But he must account for the persistency
of it and the consistency of experience so conditioned. He does this by
assuming the whole interrelated order to be held, as it were, in
solution, in some larger system of thought which really supplies for us
our environment and if he be both devout and consistent he calls this
the thought God.[37] In this way he solves his problem--at least to his
own satisfaction--and even supplies a basis for Theistic faith. But he
does not deny the working reality of his so-called material experiences
nor does he, like Mrs. Eddy, accept one aspect of this experience and
deny the other. This is philosophically impossible.

[Footnote 37: So Royce in "The World and the Individual."]

A thoroughgoing theistic monism must find in matter some aspect or other
of the self-revelation of God. It may be hard pressed to discover just
how the psychical is "stepped down" to the physical. (That is the
essential difficulty in all Creationism.) But something must be assumed
to get a going concern in any department of thought and there is much in
that resolution of matter into force and force into always more tenuous
and imponderable forms--which is the tendency of modern science--to
render this assumption less difficult to the rational imagination than
perhaps any other we are asked to make. When the final elements in
matter have become electrons and the electron is conceived as a strain
in a magnetic field and thus the

"Cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which is inherent,"

become the projection into sensibly apprehended form of the flux of an
infinite and eternal energy, it is not hard to define that energy in
terms of a divine will. Indeed it is hard not to do just that. But there
is no place in such a resolution as this for the conclusions of "Science
and Health."

Or we may accept in one form or another a dualism in which the
practical mind is generally content to rest. According to this point of
view we have to do with a reality which may be known under two aspe