Probably the weightiest contribution to our feeling of the rationality of the universe which the notion of the absolute brings is the assurance that however disturbed the surface may be, at bottom all is well with the cosmos—­central peace abiding at the heart of endless agitation.  This conception is rational in many ways, beautiful aesthetically, beautiful intellectually (could we only follow it into detail), and beautiful morally, if the enjoyment of security can be accounted moral.  Practically it is less beautiful; for, as we saw in our last lecture, in representing the deepest reality of the world as static and without a history, it loosens the world’s hold upon our sympathies and leaves the soul of it foreign.  Nevertheless it does give peace, and that kind of rationality is so paramountly demanded by men that to the end of time there will be absolutists, men who choose belief in a static eternal, rather than admit that the finite world of change and striving, even with a God as one of the strivers, is itself eternal.  For such minds Professor Royce’s words will always be the truest:  ’The very presence of ill in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order....  We long for the absolute only in so far as in us the absolute also longs, and seeks through our very temporal striving, the peace that is nowhere in time, but only, and yet absolutely, in eternity.  Were there no longing in time there would be no peace in eternity....  God [i.e. the absolute] who here in me aims at what I now temporally miss, not only possesses in the eternal world the goal after which I strive, but comes to possess it even through and because of my sorrow.  Through this my tribulation the absolute triumph then is won....  In the absolute I am fulfilled.  Yet my very fulfilment demands and therefore can transcend this sorrow.’[7] Royce is particularly felicitous in his ability to cite parts of finite experience to which he finds his picture of this absolute experience analogous.  But it is hard to portray the absolute at all without rising into what might be called the ‘inspired’ style of language—­I use the word not ironically, but prosaically and descriptively, to designate the only literary form that goes with the kind of emotion that the absolute arouses.  One can follow the pathway of reasoning soberly enough,[8] but the picture itself has to be effulgent.  This admirable faculty of transcending, whilst inwardly preserving, every contrariety, is the absolute’s characteristic form of rationality.  We are but syllables in the mouth of the Lord; if the whole sentence is divine, each syllable is absolutely what it should be, in spite of all appearances.  In making up the balance for or against absolutism, this emotional value weights heavily the credit side of the account.

The trouble is that we are able to see so little into the positive detail of it, and that if once admitted not to be coercively proven by the intellectualist arguments, it remains only a hypothetic possibility.