finite being in the cosmos, not with the cosmos in him, and indeed he has a very local habitation there, and very one-sided local and personal attachments.  If it should prove probable that the absolute does not exist, it will not follow in the slightest degree that a God like that of David, Isaiah, or Jesus may not exist, or may not be the most important existence in the universe for us to acknowledge.  I pray you, then, not to confound the two ideas as you listen to the criticisms I shall have to proffer.  I hold to the finite God, for reasons which I shall touch on in the seventh of these lectures; but I hold that his rival and competitor—­I feel almost tempted to say his enemy—­the absolute, is not only not forced on us by logic, but that it is an improbable hypothesis.

The great claim made for the absolute is that by supposing it we make the world appear more rational.  Any hypothesis that does that will always be accepted as more probably true than an hypothesis that makes the world appear irrational.  Men are once for all so made that they prefer a rational world to believe in and to live in.  But rationality has at least four dimensions, intellectual, aesthetical, moral, and practical; and to find a world rational to the maximal degree in all these respects simultaneously is no easy matter.  Intellectually, the world of mechanical materialism is the most rational, for we subject its events to mathematical calculation.  But the mechanical world is ugly, as arithmetic is ugly, and it is non-moral.  Morally, the theistic world is rational enough, but full of intellectual frustrations.  The practical world of affairs, in its turn, so supremely rational to the politician, the military man, or the man of conquering business-faculty that he never would vote to change the type of it, is irrational to moral and artistic temperaments; so that whatever demand for rationality we find satisfied by a philosophic hypothesis, we are liable to find some other demand for rationality unsatisfied by the same hypothesis.  The rationality we gain in one coin we thus pay for in another; and the problem accordingly seems at first sight to resolve itself into that of getting a conception which will yield the largest balance of rationality rather than one which will yield perfect rationality of every description.  In general, it may be said that if a man’s conception of the world lets loose any action in him that is easy, or any faculty which he is fond of exercising, he will deem it rational in so far forth, be the faculty that of computing, fighting, lecturing, classifying, framing schematic tabulations, getting the better end of a bargain, patiently waiting and enduring, preaching, joke-making, or what you like.  Albeit the absolute is defined as being necessarily an embodiment of objectively perfect rationality, it is fair to its english advocates to say that those who have espoused the hypothesis most concretely and seriously have usually avowed the irrationality to their own minds of certain elements in it.