The other main source of our confusions over the Many and the One is the variety of meaning hidden in the concept Cause, and our propensity to take its most obvious but least significant sense for its supreme intent. Closest at hand, in experience, is our productive causation of changes in our sense-world, and hence most obvious is that reading of Cause which takes it as the producer of changes and, with a deeper comprehension of it, of the inalterable linkage between changes, whereby one follows regularly and surely upon another. Thus what we have in philosophy agreed to call Efficient Cause comes to be mistaken for the profoundest and the supreme form of cause, and all the other modes of cause, the Material (or Stuff), the Form (or Conception), and the End (or Purpose), its consequent and derivative auxiliaries. Under the influence of this strong impression, we either assume total reality to be One Whole, all-embracing and all-producing of its manifold modes, or else view it as a duality, consisting of One Creator and his manifold creatures. So it has come about that metaphysics has hitherto been chiefly a contention between pantheism and monotheism, or, as the latter should for greater accuracy be called, monarchotheism; and, it must be acknowledged, this struggle has been attended by a continued (though not continual) decline of this later dualistic theory before the steadfast front and unyielding advance of the older monism. Thus persistent has been the assumption that harmony can only be assured by the unity given in some single productive causation: the only serious uncertainty has been about the most rational way of conceiving the operation of this Sole Cause; and this doubt has thus far, on the whole, declined in favor of the Elder Oriental or monistic conception, as against the Hebraic conception of extraneous creation by fiat. The frankly confessed mystery of the latter, its open appeal to miracle, places it at a fatal disadvantage with the Elder Orientalism, when the appeal is to reason and intelligibility. It is therefore no occasion for wonder that, especially since the rise of the scientific doctrine of Evolution, with its postulate of a universal unity, self-varying yet self-fulfilling, even the leaders of theology are more and more falling into the monistic line and swelling the ever-growing ranks of pantheism. If it be asked here, _And why not?_--_where is the harm of it?_--_is not the whole question simply of what is true_? the answer is, _The mortal harm of the destruction of personality, which lives or dies with the preservation or destruction of individual responsibility; while the completer truth is, that there are other and profounder (or, if you please, higher) truths than this of explanation by Efficient Cause_. In fact, there is a higher conception of Cause itself than this of production, or efficiency; for, of course, as we well might say, that alone can be the supreme