The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Hartshorne speaks of God in different places as "the living universe in which all beings have their life" ("Formal Validity," etc.: 236); "a Life concerned for all life" (IO: 222); "the Life in and for which all things live" (LP: 296 f.); "the living whole" (RSP: 151 f.), and so on.

How he uses "life" and its cognates in such formulations is revealed, presumably, by his statement that "the closer one came to [sc. the limiting idea of strict determinism], the closer one would come to no good as well as no evil—simply no life at all" (PCH: 623). See also his statement that "life consists of really distinct and additional creative acts or self-determining experiences that have as their data [all] previous instances of the same principle of creativity and that offer themselves as data for all future instances, whatever instances there may be, and above all for the Eminent Creativity" ("Theism in Asian and Western Thought": 411).

Summer 1996

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