polytheistic; but the word ‘polytheism’ usually gives offence, so perhaps it is better not to use it.  Only one thing is certain, and that is the result of our criticism of the absolute:  the only way to escape from the paradoxes and perplexities that a consistently thought-out monistic universe suffers from as from a species of auto-intoxication—­the mystery of the ‘fall’ namely, of reality lapsing into appearance, truth into error, perfection into imperfection; of evil, in short; the mystery of universal determinism, of the block-universe eternal and without a history, etc.;—­the only way of escape, I say, from all this is to be frankly pluralistic and assume that the superhuman consciousness, however vast it may be, has itself an external environment, and consequently is finite.  Present day monism carefully repudiates complicity with spinozistic monism.  In that, it explains, the many get dissolved in the one and lost, whereas in the improved idealistic form they get preserved in all their manyness as the one’s eternal object.  The absolute itself is thus represented by absolutists as having a pluralistic object.  But if even the absolute has to have a pluralistic vision, why should we ourselves hesitate to be pluralists on our own sole account?  Why should we envelop our many with the ‘one’ that brings so much poison in its train?

The line of least resistance, then, as it seems to me, both in theology and in philosophy, is to accept, along with the superhuman consciousness, the notion that it is not all-embracing, the notion, in other words, that there is a God, but that he is finite, either in power or in knowledge, or in both at once.  These, I need hardly tell you, are the terms in which common men have usually carried on their active commerce with God; and the monistic perfections that make the notion of him so paradoxical practically and morally are the colder addition of remote professorial minds operating in distans upon conceptual substitutes for him alone.

Why cannot ‘experience’ and ‘reason’ meet on this common ground?  Why cannot they compromise?  May not the godlessness usually but needlessly associated with the philosophy of immediate experience give way to a theism now seen to follow directly from that experience more widely taken? and may not rationalism, satisfied with seeing her a priori proofs of God so effectively replaced by empirical evidence, abate something of her absolutist claims?  Let God but have the least infinitesimal other of any kind beside him, and empiricism and rationalism might strike hands in a lasting treaty of peace.  Both might then leave abstract thinness behind them, and seek together, as scientific men seek, by using all the analogies and data within reach, to build up the most probable approximate idea of what the divine consciousness concretely may be like.  I venture to beg the younger Oxford idealists to consider seriously this alternative.  Few men are as qualified by their intellectual gifts to reap the harvests that seem certain to any one who, like Fechner and Bergson, will leave the thinner for the thicker path.