II. I think we must concede that the second form of Monism, the religious principle, as Hartmann conceives it, affords us no more help than metaphysical monism. Love to God is, of course, an equivalent in the religious sphere of the identity-philosophy that we encounter in metaphysic. We may perhaps love God, suggests Hartmann, if we are convinced that life is a good or a blessing, or that it has some inherent meaning—things that so far are not at all evident.[1] Similarly with the idea of the grace of God—for Hartmann just 'takes up' this idea of ordinary Protestantism, and examines it without thinking of the many supporting considerations on which it rests in theological thought meaning to reject it at once if it does not suit his dialectic. It is to him unsatisfactory. It rests, he 'divines,' on the idea that God somehow enters into our lives and becomes one with us, suffering and rejoicing with us. Indeed, he willingly concedes that both Catholic and Protestant theology have a hold of the truth that an Absolute God (the God of Monism) must be conceived as Absolute Process. "So long as the Absolute is conceived as being in a state of rest (ruhendes Sein), as crystallized substance (verharrende Substanz), just so long has the individual person no other way of making his life divine or blessed, than by endeavoring to enter into the perfect repose of God. On the other hand, it is only when God Himself is thought of as real process or activity (realer Process), that the taking a share in the general activity of things becomes the true way of ennobling human life."
III. There are some six or seven pages in Hartmann's book upon this very thought of God as the Absolute Process of the world. It is dignified by him into a form of the Metaphysic of Ethics. It requires, however, no separate discussion, being simply the apotheosis, as it were, of the evolutionary idea (that the world is one gigantic evolutionary process) or a generalization of the philosophy of what might be called immanent dyn-
- ↑ We can always in reading Hartmann see how unjust he is to the deeper forms of theism. It is, e.g., perfectly consistent with the love of God to man that man should find almost all of the ordinary pursuits of life (personal or social 'happiness,' knowledge, culture, self-development) to be disappointing, and to be the cause of unhappiness.
