Note 359 — Chapter VIII · PRAGMATISM AND ANGLO-HEGELIAN RATIONALISM

As another instance of Dr. Bosanquet’s unintentional unfairness to his opponents, I would note his positive injustice to Theism as such. What many of us think of (however imperfectly) and believe in as God is invariably to him “a theistic Demiurge in his blankness and isolation.” I do not believe in such an abstract Demiurge any more than I believe in the separate, isolated self that he conjures up to his mind when he thinks of personality. The problem of the twentieth century may well be what Dr. Ward has signalised as the relation of God to the “Absolute” of the Hegelian metaphysicians, but this suggestion simply means to me the discovery on the part of philosophers of terms and concepts more adequate to the Supreme Being than either the Absolute, or the external deity rejected by Dr. Bosanquet.