But one as we are in this material sense with the absolute substance, that being only the whole of us, and we only the parts of it, yet in a formal sense something like a pluralism breaks out.  When we speak of the absolute we take the one universal known material collectively or integrally; when we speak of its objects, of our finite selves, etc., we take that same identical material distributively and separately.  But what is the use of a thing’s being only once if it can be taken twice over, and if being taken in different ways makes different things true of it?  As the absolute takes me, for example, I appear with everything else in its field of perfect knowledge.  As I take myself, I appear without most other things in my field of relative ignorance.  And practical differences result from its knowledge and my ignorance.  Ignorance breeds mistake, curiosity, misfortune, pain, for me; I suffer those consequences.  The absolute knows of those things, of course, for it knows me and my suffering, but it doesn’t itself suffer.  It can’t be ignorant, for simultaneous with its knowledge of each question goes its knowledge of each answer.  It can’t be patient, for it has to wait for nothing, having everything at once in its possession.  It can’t be surprised; it can’t be guilty.  No attribute connected with succession can be applied to it, for it is all at once and wholly what it is, ’with the unity of a single instant,’ and succession is not of it but in it, for we are continually told that it is ‘timeless.’

Things true of the world in its finite aspects, then, are not true of it in its infinite capacity. Qua finite and plural its accounts of itself to itself are different from what its account to itself qua infinite and one must be.

With this radical discrepancy between the absolute and the relative points of view, it seems to me that almost as great a bar to intimacy between the divine and the human breaks out in pantheism as that which we found in monarchical theism, and hoped that pantheism might not show.  We humans are incurably rooted in the temporal point of view.  The eternal’s ways are utterly unlike our ways.  ’Let us imitate the All,’ said the original prospectus of that admirable Chicago quarterly called the ‘Monist.’  As if we could, either in thought or conduct!  We are invincibly parts, let us talk as we will, and must always apprehend the absolute as if it were a foreign being.  If what I mean by this is not wholly clear to you at this point, it ought to grow clearer as my lectures proceed.

LECTURE II

MONISTIC IDEALISM