own others.  They are negated by what is external to them.  The absolute is true because it and it only has no external environment, and has attained to being its own other. (These words sound queer enough, but those of you who know something of Hegel’s text will follow them.) Granting his premise that to be true a thing must in some sort be its own other, everything hinges on whether he is right in holding that the several pieces of finite experience themselves cannot be said to be in any wise their own others.  When conceptually or intellectualistically treated, they of course cannot be their own others.  Every abstract concept as such excludes what it doesn’t include, and if such concepts are adequate substitutes for reality’s concrete pulses, the latter must square themselves with intellectualistic logic, and no one of them in any sense can claim to be its own other.  If, however, the conceptual treatment of the flow of reality should prove for any good reason to be inadequate and to have a practical rather than a theoretical or speculative value, then an independent empirical look into the constitution of reality’s pulses might possibly show that some of them are their own others, and indeed are so in the self-same sense in which the absolute is maintained to be so by Hegel.  When we come to my sixth lecture, on Professor Bergson, I shall in effect defend this very view, strengthening my thesis by his authority.  I am unwilling to say anything more about the point at this time, and what I have just said of it is only a sort of surveyor’s note of where our present position lies in the general framework of these lectures.

Let us turn now at last to the great question of fact, Does the absolute exist or not? to which all our previous discussion has been preliminary.  I may sum up that discussion by saying that whether there really be an absolute or not, no one makes himself absurd or self-contradictory by doubting or denying it.  The charges of self-contradiction, where they do not rest on purely verbal reasoning, rest on a vicious intellectualism.  I will not recapitulate my criticisms.  I will simply ask you to change the venue, and to discuss the absolute now as if it were only an open hypothesis.  As such, is it more probable or more improbable?

But first of all I must parenthetically ask you to distinguish the notion of the absolute carefully from that of another object with which it is liable to become heedlessly entangled.  That other object is the ‘God’ of common people in their religion, and the creator-God of orthodox christian theology.  Only thoroughgoing monists or pantheists believe in the absolute.  The God of our popular Christianity is but one member of a pluralistic system.  He and we stand outside of each other, just as the devil, the saints, and the angels stand outside of both of us.  I can hardly conceive of anything more different from the absolute than the God, say, of David or of Isaiah. That God is an essentially