Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/388

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PROFESSOR ROYCE ON HIS CRITICS
351

is precisely the presence of these individuals in the eternal world. And nothing else, as it seems to me, can be clear to us, as to individual fortunes, apart from particular empirical evidence; which, in this case, we do not possess. My theory, for instance, involves no sort of assertion that individual consciousness is temporally continuous, when one considers the time immediately before and after the death of a human being. As, in this life, consciousness is interrupted by sleep and by accidents, so the temporal processes, in whatever variety they have, which fulfil in their wholeness and in their relations to the eternal order the life of an individual, may be, for all that I can see, in any one of a large number of relations to us and to one another, — contemporaneous, continuously successive, or discontinuously successive, with temporal gaps of any magnitude. As the word “immortality” is commonly and almost inevitably bound up with very definite and, to my mind, very ill-founded hypotheses as to precisely these temporal mysteries, I can make use of the term only in so far as I explicitly add these provisos and explanations. Granting, however, the foregoing metaphysical theory of the individual, and the definitions associated with it, I have defined and defended a theory of immortality which, as I hope, may in some measure supply what my honoured teacher very rightly missed in my original discussion.

This is no place for any adequate consideration of the relation of Idealism to the doctrine of Evolution, — a relation which Professor Le Conte has briefly indicated in his critical paper, with a reference to