The unhappy slavery of the metaphysics of the past to the conception of causation has been responsible for some of the most fatal of the misfortunes of religion and of humanity. That the existence of God was to be proved only by the means of the concept of causation, was one of the most characteristic of the presuppositions of an earlier theology, and was often supposed to be maintained on the basis of the authority of Aristotle. As a fact, this method of dealing with the theory of Being was false to the deepest spirit of Aristotle himself. For Aristotle’s God is primarily the All-perfect Being, and is only secondarily the subject of which causation could be predicated in any form whatever. But however that may be, the theology which conceives the relation between God and the world, and between the world and the individual, as primarily a causal relation, subordinates the universal to the particular in theory, and the significant to the relatively insignificant in practical doctrine. The inevitable results of any such inversion of the rational order is a world where either fate reigns, or absolute mysteries are the final facts; or where both these unhappy results are combined. That just because the universe is through and through transparently significant, it may later prove to be worth while to regard my will as in this or that respect a cause of certain special results, is intelligible enough. But the genuine significance of my voluntary process is always an affair of my own consciousness regarding the present meaning of my life. You will in vain endeavor to deduce that meaning from the distinctly lower category of causal efficacy. That lower category of causation always implies a comment which somebody else,
