VII
THE FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTION IN PROFESSOR ROYCE’S ARGUMENT: ITS KANTIAN BASIS
What, now, are we to say of this argument, finally? What are we to say to the claim that the surprising but in some sort irresistible conception reached by it must be accepted as the philosophical conception of God, be our spontaneously religious conception of that Being as different from this as it may? This claim is rested on the two premises, (1) that no conception of God can have any philosophical value unless it can be proved real, or, in other words, unless it is the conception that of itself proves God to exist; and (2) that the conception discussed before us is the only conception that can thus prove its reality. The first of these, as I have already said to you earlier, nobody with a proper training in philosophy would deny. The second has a very different standing, and I take but little risk, I am sure, when I question its truth entirely.
Why, then, should such an assumption be made? I answer: Because of a still deeper assumption; namely, that, since the thinking of Kant, the sole terms on which thought can be objectively valid are settled beyond revision. The thinking being, it is here said, cannot possibly get beyond itself; there is no way, therefore, by which thought can reach reality, — unless, indeed, reality is something within the whole and true compass of the thinker’s own being, as contrasted with its merely apparent and partial
