The professor also insists that by taking the system of the world pluralistically we banish what he calls our "foreignness"—by which I understand him to mean our apartness from the world (i.e., universe).
"We are indeed internal parts of God, and not external creations, on any possible reading of the panpsychic system. Yet because God is not the absolute, but is himself a part when the system is conceived pluralistically, his functions can be taken as not wholly dissimilar to those of the other smaller parts,—as similar to our functions, consequently. 'Having an environment, being in time, and working out a history just like ourselves, he escapes from the foreignness from all that is human, of the static, timeless, perfect absolute. * * * * No matter what the content of the universe may be, if you only allow that it is many everywhere and always, that nothing real escapes from having an environment, so far from defeating its rationality, as the absolutists so unanimously pretend, you leave it in possession of the maximum amount of rationality practically obtainable by our minds. Your relations with it, intellectual, emotional and active, remain fluent and congruous with your own nature's chief demands." (pages 318, 319.)
We may not here and now, of course, enter into all the explanations and arguments that Professor James enters upon in treating this subject, but the purpose of his whole work is to establish the idea that the unity one discovers in the laws and forces of our universe, grows out of a "free harmony of individual entities;" that the absolute reality is a system of self-active beings forming a unity; and hence, he concludes the world to be "a pluralistic universe." With this view Professor Howison, of the University of California, if I understand him aright, in his contribution to a volume on the Conception of God, largely agrees.
To this may be added also the views of Arthur Kenyon Rogers Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy in Buttler College recently expressed in a book entitled "The Religious Conception of the World," "An Essay in Constructive Philosophy," 1907. On the particular point in question, "the nature of the unity of God and of lesser conscious beings," he says:
"The modern world is coming more and more to feel that if there is to be any real body and permanent satisfaction to the spiritual life, it will have to be carried back in large part to the sort of experience that we get concretely and verifiably in our every-day human and social relationships. * * * * Now here also in the social realm there is a verifiable and significant sense in which we may talk of identifying ourselves with others. But it distinctly is not to merge our conscious lives into a single and inseparable whole of conscious content. Rather it is to work for common interests and care for the same things, to feel a concern each for the other's welfare, a respect for his character, a regard for the essential individuality of the other. Two things in this situation—and these two the most fundamental—are wholly foreign to an absolute merging and absorption. Love, as human love, presupposes necessarily the self-identical and independent consciousness of the one toward whom it is directed. And the moral life, about which some of the deepest values cling, in its turn involves alike a personal autonomy which absorption would destroy, and an extra-personal, an outgoing and unselfish concern for others, for which no converging of all reality to a single self-conscious centre could find a place. * * * *
"We have only, then, to extend this conception a step farther, in order to pass from what is merely an account of the social order to a philosophy of the universe. The ultimate way for understanding the universe is not self-consciousness, but a society of selves. But in this community there is one member who occupies a quite exceptional position. For God, as the inner reality of what we call the world of nature, stands clearly somehow in a special way at the centre of things, as human selves do not. In him there are summed up the conditions which are needed to account fully for the lesser world of our own more immediate social experience, since the lives of men confessedly have their roots in nature. In him therefore we may suppose the unity of the whole is directly reflected, and there are gathered the broken threads of the universal purpose as it appears in our partial and limited human experiences. But none the less, if we are to follow the conception, is he still only one member of the community, and not the whole sum of existing things. He exists as one whose nature needs the positing of other lives which do not come within the same immediate conscious unity as his own. He also is a social being as men are, and finds his life in social co-operation, though the complete conditions of his life may be eternally present to his consciousness as they are not to ours. But while his knowledge thus may cover all existence, the inclusion will be one of knowledge simply. My conscious life will still be mine alone, which no one else in the universe can directly share, not even God himself. No one else feels my feelings or has my sensations. * * * *
"And this is the position which has already been argued for in a preceding chapter. In other words, God does not create us by an arbitrary choice of his, so that our nature as human selves is merely secondary and derivative. This nature of ours is an ultimate fact of reality. It is implicated in the deepest constitution of the universe, in the nature of God himself. Reality is a confederacy of free beings; and no one of these is ultimately responsible for the others, since each alike is essential to the whole with which reality is identified."
From all this, then, it appears that the doctrine of a plurality of divine intelligences existing in the universe, as taught by our prophet, is receiving confirmation by the works and the philosophizing of some of the foremost learned men of our country, and, for that matter, of the world.
Perhaps you will be putting to me the question: What of all this? Why discuss questions of this character? What spiritual or moral force may one gather from a contemplation of such themes? Well, in the first place, to Latter-day Saints, those who have faith in the dispensation of the fulness of times and in the Prophet Joseph Smith—does it mean nothing to you to find the inspirations of God in this man confirmed by the conclusions of plodding philosophers who come trailing in seventy-five years after the words of the prophet have gone forth to the world? After he has been denounced as charlatan, as false prophet and deceiver, for advancing the truths we have been considering—does it mean nothing to you to find that the truths which he stood for are permeating the philosophies of men and are receiving the sanction and approval of the learned? It means much to me; it gives confirmation to my faith; and I rejoice in the triumph that the truth is achieving. Then to all, whether Latter-day Saints or not, it seems to me that to have fixed in the mind, in the consciousness, the thought of the reality of things—the reality of God, the reality of the divine in man, the consciousness that this spirit within us is of a divine nature, and that it is capable of attaining to something really good and great—to something really worth while—to goodness, power and glory, to have that thought present to consciousness, as we go about the duties of life—to feel that "for a wise and glorious purpose God has placed us here on earth," and has merely "withheld the recollection of our former friends and birth"—to be conscious of all this, I say, is to gather strength for the battle of life. To feel that we, in the essence of us, are one with God, and that he envelopes us closely about by spiritual influences that we can call to our assistances—to be conscious of the fact that our life is part of God's life—to be conscious of this is to banish from us the thought of failing in life. We gather spiritual strength, and force and power to meet the responsibilities and duties of life, by contemplation of these high themes. This is the practical effect of these doctrines—we know that our life touches the life of God; that our life is one with God's life, and this inspires to noble efforts, out of which may grow the highest and most glorious results possible in human existence.
Part IV.
Miscellaneous Discourses.