off in the second way, it has been known in the history of philosophy as Solipsism.[1] To read it so is a harsh reductio, and rather unfair, as it can equally well be read in the other way. But that other way is the only way of escape from what our moral common-sense pronounces an intolerable absurdity. It bears the more dignified name of Monistic Idealism, or Idealistic Monism. If it is to be called a conception of God at all, it is the conception that presents God as All and in all. If the syllables “theism” can be affixed to it at all, they can only be so as part of the correcter name Pantheism. And so it seems to me that we should by no means assent when Professor Royce is disposed to insist that every ethical predicate which the highest religious faith of the past has attributed to God is capable of exact interpretation in terms of his view. Where is the attribute of Grace, the source of that Life Eternal which alone, according to the Fourth Gospel, knows God as the true God, and which is freedom and immortality?
IV
WORTH OF MONISTIC IDEALISM AS AGAINST AGNOSTICISM: ITS FAILURE AS A RELIGIOUS METAPHYSIC
But, after all, what we have now for some minutes been saying amounts only to a contrast between different conceptions, and, at last, to a mere dispute over names. For philosophy, nothing is settled by
- ↑ From solus ipse (he himself alone), as the appropriate name for the theory that no being other than the thinker himself is real.
