Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/283

man intelligence is itself an activity, a working towards an end, and since the logical monist thinks the external universe after the analogy of the human reason, the constant tendency is for him to conceive the world as a process whereby his World Spirit makes actual what was potential. Modern science, in fact, when viewed speculatively, though it does not confirm, yet lends itself easily to such efforts, and we can always, if we choose, imagine the evolution of the organic kingdom as possibly the process of self-manifestation of one eternal rational Power. Only in this way we are very far from a satisfactory ontology. A world, the work or the child of the universal reason, developing in time, how can any reflective mind be content with this account of things? The universal reason surely means something by its process, surely lacks something when it seeks for higher forms. Now, on a lower stage the universal reason has not yet what it seeks, on the higher stage it attains what it had not. Whence or how does it obtain this something? What hindered the possible from being forthwith actual at the outset? If there was any hindrance, was this of the same nature with the universal reason, or was it other? If other, then we are plunged into a Dualism, and the good and evil principles appear once more. But if there was no external hindrance, no illogical evil principle in existence, then the universal reason has irrationally gone without the possible perfection that it might possess, until, after great labor, it has made actual what it never ought to have lacked. The infinite Logos thus becomes no more than the “child