garded as habitual modes of action that nature has acquired. The whole cosmos is thus seen to be ingrained with habit, and this is another character that shows its mental nature.

(5) Freedom and purpose are still more characteristic marks of the soul that we found exhibited in nature, and we need not go over this ground again. Purpose is written broadly and brightly over nature, and freedom is involved in all the marks of mind found in nature. That freedom is not strangled by law and habit is proven in our own experience. Law and habit are not incompatible with freedom, but are the very means that reason would choose and has chosen, and so they are the grooves in which reason moves, the track along which freedom flies and finds its liberty.

Thus the same general characters that mark the soul also mark the world and add their weight to the conclusion that the phenomenal world is a manifestation of mind.

8. MAN THE KEY OF THE UNIVERSE

We saw in Chapter VII that the soul is reality itself, consisting of the self in its threefold nature of thought, sensibility, and will, and characterized by unity, growth, law, habit, freedom, and purpose. In this chapter we have examined the fabric of the phenomenal world and have found it matching the soul in all these points, woven of the same threads, and exhibiting the same pattern, and thus showing its ontological cause to be of the same piece with the ontological soul of man. The

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process by which this result is reached consists in starting with our own soul as this is expressed in our phenomenal bodily activities, tracing the same phenomenal activities through nature, and drawing the conclusion that as these activities manifest mind in our own body, they also manifest mind in nature. Man thus becomes the key of the universe. As he consists of an ontological soul manifesting itself in a phenomenal body, so the ontological world consists of a vaster soul manifesting itself in the phenomenal world. Man is a bit of reality that is representative of all reality, and the universal and ultimate reality of the world is thus seen to be soul or spirit. The soul of a man is a little world, and the world is a great Soul.

CHAPTER IX

THE WORLD AND GOD

We are now prepared to announce the grand conclusion of idealism: the world is the phenomenon of God. This conclusion may be unfolded under several heads.

I. GOD REVEALED IN THE WORLD

(1) A phenomenon, as we have seen, is the impression made upon our minds by an objective reality. An orange is the phenomenon of an objective reality which affects our consciousness so that we experience the sensations of yellow color, pungent odor, acid taste, and hardness to the touch, grouped in spatial form. The phenomenal object is a complex state of our consciousness; and the corresponding objective reality is not an extended, colored, pungent, acid and hard lump of matter, but, as our whole argument has shown, is itself mental in nature and can only be a corresponding mental state in another mind. What is thus true of the orange is also true of the whole material universe. As a phenomenon it exists wholly in our own consciousness and is a mental state, a complex set of sensations of light, heat, color, odor, taste, and touch, projected in spatial forms and occurring in an orderly succession and forming a system.

It may be thought absurd that the whole mighty cosmos can thus be crowded into our tiny consciousness, but the difficulty disappears under reflection. Consciousness is not to be compared with the cosmos in size, for bulk is a spatial form and does not apply to the reality of either consciousness or the cosmos. The human mind, however limited it may be in power, is yet capable of grasping great ideas, and so it may hold the cosmos in its consciousness. Further, our consciousness at any time grasps the cosmos at only a few points, giving us a mere outline or sketch of the system. This outline we then proceed to fill out as our experience grows, or we fill it out in theory. Our universe is thus largely a theoretical construction, and only a few points of it exist as sensations in our minds. And finally it is evident that as a matter of fact the cosmos as we know it does exist in our consciousness. We know it only as a set and system of sensations, and these are nothing but states of our own consciousness.

The world is thus a phenomenon in our minds, but it is a phenomenon or appearance of something: what is this something? We have already seen, through the argument of Chapter VIII, that this ontological reality which is the cause of the phenomenal world, is mind, soul, spirit. The unity of the phenomenal world, as we have seen, carries with it the unity of the ontological cause, or leads to one Spirit as the agent back of the grand appearance of this world. This Spirit we call God. The world, then, is the phenomenal result of the

immediate impact, influence, or causal activity of God on our souls. God reveals himself to us as the world, and the world is our experience of God.

(2) Can we now penetrate through the world to the nature of God? The first fundamental fact we know about God from the world is that he is consciousness. Our whole examination of the fabric of the world showed its kinship with our minds, and therefore its spiritual nature.

God and man are one kind of reality.

Can we now go beyond this general fact and reach the structural nature of God? Here we must proceed with becoming caution and modesty. We cannot hope by searching to find out God, and yet we may hope to get some glimpses of his nature. We must here start with the groundwork of our own soul, which is our primary and fundamental bit of reality. This bit of reality, we have a right to assume until the assumption is proved or disproved, is representative of all reality. This is the minute base line from which we project and construct the infinite nature of God, as the astronomer uses the diminutive orbit of the earth to compute the parallax and enormous distance of the stars; or as the physicist from the composition of the tiny flame in his laboratory determines the composition of the sun and stars, so from the nature of our own soul we deduce the nature of God. God is mirrored in man as the great globe of the sun is mirrored in the dewdrop.

The fundamental nature of the human soul is a threefold structure of self-conscious thought, sensibility, and