PART II.
THEISM.
—
LECTURE XI.
THE IDEA OF CREATION.
We have seen that modern pluralism is, on its own
confession, ‘radically empirical.’ It makes no attempt
to deduce the universe from a single absolute principle,
or indeed to deduce it at all. The world is taken
simply as we find it, as a plurality of active individuals
unified only in and through their mutual interactions.
These interactions again are interpreted throughout
on the analogy of social transactions, as a mutuum commercium;
that is to say, as based on cognition and
conation. To the speculative mind pur sang there is
nothing satisfactory about such a view unless perhaps
its frankness.
But then, on the other hand, there are objections to all attempts to proceed altogether a priori. It seems obviously puerile to ask, for example, for a sufficient reason why there is something rather than nothing. This notion of being absolutely thoroughgoing, of building up a metaphysic without presuppositions, one that shall start from nothing and explain all, is, I repeat, futile. Such a metaphysic has its own
