SOURCE: "Samuel Alexander's Theism," in The Hibbert Journal, Vol. XL, No. 2, January, 1942, pp. 146-55.

In the following essay, Laird examines Alexander's views on the nature and existence of God.

Alexander was, quite certainly, a theist in his own Alexandrian way, a way that was never insincere. Indeed his "nisus theory of deity," to judge for instance from Mr Brightman's Philosophy of Religion (1940), seems by now to have taken its place as one of the accepted types of text-book theism. It has almost achieved respectability, like an eccentric old friend whose ways have become too familiar to startle.

A letter of Alexander's which came to me recently in rather an odd way, since it was sent me by the purchaser of a pamphlet into which it had been gummed, gives a more personal statement than was usual with its author.

"I never was negative in respect of that subject...