Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/501

thoughts into the unity of one conscious moment, so, we affirm, does the Universal Thought combine the thoughts of all of us into an absolute unity of thought, together with all the objects and all the thoughts about these objects that are, or have been, or will be, or can be, in the Universe. This Universal Thought is what we have ventured, for the sake of convenience, to call God. It is not the God of very much of the traditional theology. It is the God of the idealistic tradition from Plato downwards. Our proof for it is wholly different from those baseless figments of the apologetic books, the design-argument, and the general argument from causality. Since Kant, those arguments must be abandoned by all critical philosophers, and we have indicated something of their weakness. They have been aptly compared to medieval artillery on a modern battle-field. We accept the comparison. Kant gave to modern philosophy new instruments, and these it is our duty to apply as we can to the old questions that the whole history of thought has been trying to understand. Our special proof for the existence of an Universal Thought has been based, in the foregoing, upon an analysis of the nature of truth and error as necessary conceptions. We do not regard the Universal Thought as in any commonly recognized sense a Creator. A creator would be finite, and his existence would have to be learned from experience. The Universal Thought is infinite, and its existence is proved independently of experience. For the rest, we have insisted that experience furnishes no evidence of single creative powers that