time as merely subjective; we can show that it belongs to the very essence of the Universe we know; we can show that it is as 'objective' as anything else within our knowledge. But how to reconcile this objectivity with the difficulty of thinking of an endless succession no Philosopher has done much to explain. For religious purposes it seems enough to believe that each member of the time-series--no matter how many such events there may be, no matter whether the series be endless or not--is caused by God. The more reflecting Theologians have generally admitted that the act of divine Conservation is essentially the same as that of Creation. A God who can be represented as 'upholding all things by the power of his word' is a creative Deity whether the act of creation be in time, or eternally continuous, or (if there were any meaning in that phrase) out of time altogether.[2] {93} (3) _The creation of spirits_. It may seem to some of you that I may have so far left out, or too easily disposed of, an important link in our argument. I have given reasons for thinking that the material world cannot be explained without the assumption of a universal Consciousness which both thinks and wills it. I have assumed rather than proved that the lesser minds, in which the divine experience is partially reproduced, are also caused to exist and kept in existence by the same divine Will. But how, it may be said, do we know that those minds did not exist before the birth of the organisms with which upon this planet they are connected? The considerations which forbid our thinking of matter as something capable of existing by itself do not apply to minds. A consciousness, unlike a thing, exists 'for itself,' not merely 'for another': a mind is not made what it is by being known or otherwise experienced by another mind: its very being consists in being itself conscious: it is what it is for itself. It is undoubtedly impossible positively to disprove the hypothesis of eternally pre-existent souls. Sometimes that hypothesis is combined with Theism. It {94} is supposed that God is the supreme and incomparably the most powerful, but not the only, self-existent and eternal Spirit. This hypothesis--sometimes spoken of as Pluralism[3]--has many attractions: from the time of Origen onwards the idea of Pre-existence has seemed to many to facilitate the explanation of evil by making it possible to regard the sufferings of our present state as a disciplinary process for getting rid of an original or a pre-natal sinfulness. It is a theory not incapable of satisfying the demands of the religious Consciousness, and may even form an element in an essentially Christian theory of the Universe: but to my mind it is opposed to all the obvious indications of experience. The connexion between soul and body is such that the laws of the soul's development obviously form part of the same system with the laws of physical nature.