in somehow.  Only an enemy of philosophy can speak lightly of it.  Rationalism starts from the idea of such a whole and builds downward.  Movement and change are absorbed into its immutability as forms of mere appearance.  When you accept this beatific vision of what is, in contrast with what goes on, you feel as if you had fulfilled an intellectual duty.  ’Reality is not in its truest nature a process,’ Mr. McTaggart tells us, ’but a stable and timeless state.’[2] ‘The true knowledge of God begins,’ Hegel writes, ’when we know that things as they immediately are have no truth.’[3] ’The consummation of the infinite aim,’ he says elsewhere, ’consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished.  Good and absolute goodness is eternally accomplishing itself in the world:  and the result is that it needs not wait upon us, but is already ... accomplished.  It is an illusion under which we live. ...  In the course of its process the Idea makes itself that illusion, by setting an antithesis to confront it, and its action consists in getting rid of the illusion which it has created.’[4]

But abstract emotional appeals of any kind sound amateurish in the business that concerns us.  Impressionistic philosophizing, like impressionistic watchmaking or land-surveying, is intolerable to experts.  Serious discussion of the alternative before us forces me, therefore, to become more technical.  The great claim of the philosophy of the absolute is that the absolute is no hypothesis, but a presupposition implicated in all thinking, and needing only a little effort of analysis to be seen as a logical necessity.  I will therefore take it in this more rigorous character and see whether its claim is in effect so coercive.

It has seemed coercive to an enormous number of contemporaneous thinkers.  Professor Henry Jones thus describes the range and influence of it upon the social and political life of the present time:[5] ’For many years adherents of this way of thought have deeply interested the british public by their writings.  Almost more important than their writings is the fact that they have occupied philosophical chairs in almost every university in the kingdom.  Even the professional critics of idealism are for the most part idealists—­after a fashion.  And when they are not, they are as a rule more occupied with the refutation of idealism than with the construction of a better theory.  It follows from their position of academic authority, were it from nothing else, that idealism exercises an influence not easily measured upon the youth of the nation—­upon those, that is, who from the educational opportunities they enjoy may naturally be expected to become the leaders of the nation’s thought and practice....  Difficult as it is to measure the forces ... it is hardly to be denied that the power exercised by Bentham and the utilitarian school has, for better or for worse, passed into the hands of the idealists....  “The Rhine has