he says he has ‘never doubted.’  This candid confession of a fixed attitude of faith in the absolute, which even one’s own criticisms and perplexities fail to disturb, seems to me very significant.  Not only empiricists, but absolutists also, would all, if they were as candid as this author, confess that the prime thing in their philosophy is their vision of a truth possible, which they then employ their reasoning to convert, as best it can, into a certainty or probability.

I can imagine a believer in the absolute retorting at this point that he at any rate is not dealing with mere probabilities, but that the nature of things logically requires the multitudinous erroneous copies, and that therefore the universe cannot be the absolute’s book alone.  For, he will ask, is not the absolute defined as the total consciousness of everything that is?  Must not its field of view consist of parts?  And what can the parts of a total consciousness be unless they be fractional consciousnesses?  Our finite minds must therefore coexist with the absolute mind.  We are its constituents, and it cannot live without us.—­But if any one of you feels tempted to retort in this wise, let me remind you that you are frankly employing pluralistic weapons, and thereby giving up the absolutist cause.  The notion that the absolute is made of constituents on which its being depends is the rankest empiricism.  The absolute as such has objects, not constituents, and if the objects develop selfhoods upon their own several accounts, those selfhoods must be set down as facts additional to the absolute consciousness, and not as elements implicated in its definition.  The absolute is a rationalist conception.  Rationalism goes from wholes to parts, and always assumes wholes to be self-sufficing.[14]

My conclusion, so far, then, is this, that altho the hypothesis of the absolute, in yielding a certain kind of religious peace, performs a most important rationalizing function, it nevertheless, from the intellectual point of view, remains decidedly irrational.  The ideally perfect whole is certainly that whole of which the parts also are perfect—­if we can depend on logic for anything, we can depend on it for that definition.  The absolute is defined as the ideally perfect whole, yet most of its parts, if not all, are admittedly imperfect.  Evidently the conception lacks internal consistency, and yields us a problem rather than a solution.  It creates a speculative puzzle, the so-called mystery of evil and of error, from which a pluralistic metaphysic is entirely free.

In any pluralistic metaphysic, the problems that evil presents are practical, not speculative.  Not why evil should exist at all, but how we can lessen the actual amount of it, is the sole question we need there consider.  ‘God,’ in the religious life of ordinary men, is the name not of the whole of things, heaven forbid, but only of the ideal tendency in things, believed in as a superhuman person who calls