coherent universe.’  Next, we find a loyal clinging to the rationalist belief that sense-data and their associations are incoherent, and that only in substituting a conceptual order for their order can truth be found.  Third, the substituted conceptions are treated intellectualistically, that is as mutually exclusive and discontinuous, so that the first innocent continuity of the flow of sense-experience is shattered for us without any higher conceptual continuity taking its place.  Finally, since this broken state of things is intolerable, the absolute deus ex machina is called on to mend it in his own way, since we cannot mend it in ours.

Any other picture than this of post-kantian absolutism I am unable to frame.  I see the intellectualistic criticism destroying the immediately given coherence of the phenomenal world, but unable to make its own conceptual substitutes cohere, and I see the resort to the absolute for a coherence of a higher type.  The situation has dramatic liveliness, but it is inwardly incoherent throughout, and the question inevitably comes up whether a mistake may not somewhere have crept in in the process that has brought it about.  May not the remedy lie rather in revising the intellectualist criticism than in first adopting it and then trying to undo its consequences by an arbitrary act of faith in an unintelligible agent.  May not the flux of sensible experience itself contain a rationality that has been overlooked, so that the real remedy would consist in harking back to it more intelligently, and not in advancing in the opposite direction away from it and even away beyond the intellectualist criticism that disintegrates it, to the pseudo-rationality of the supposed absolute point of view.  I myself believe that this is the real way to keep rationality in the world, and that the traditional rationalism has always been facing in the wrong direction.  I hope in the end to make you share, or at any rate respect, this belief, but there is much to talk of before we get to that point.

I employed the word ‘violent’ just now in describing the dramatic situation in which it pleases the philosophy of the absolute to make its camp.  I don’t see how any one can help being struck in absolutist writings by that curious tendency to fly to violent extremes of which I have already said a word.  The universe must be rational; well and good; but how rational? in what sense of that eulogistic but ambiguous word?—­this would seem to be the next point to bring up.  There are surely degrees in rationality that might be discriminated and described.  Things can be consistent or coherent in very diverse ways.  But no more in its conception of rationality than in its conception of relations can the monistic mind suffer the notion of more or less.  Rationality is one and indivisible:  if not rational thus indivisibly, the universe must be completely irrational, and no shadings or mixtures or compromises can obtain.  Mr. McTaggart writes,