agreeably to our trumps.  We can vaguely generalize this into the doctrine that all the evil in the universe is but instrumental to its greater perfection.  But the scale of the evil actually in sight defies all human tolerance; and transcendental idealism, in the pages of a Bradley or a Royce, brings us no farther than the book of Job did—­ God’s ways are not our ways, so let us put our hands upon our mouth.  A God who can relish such superfluities of horror is no God for human beings to appeal to.  His animal spirits are too high.  In other words the ‘Absolute’ with his one purpose, is not the man-like God of common people.

7.  Aesthetic union among things also obtains, and is very analogous to ideological union.  Things tell a story.  Their parts hang together so as to work out a climax.  They play into each other’s hands expressively.  Retrospectively, we can see that altho no definite purpose presided over a chain of events, yet the events fell into a dramatic form, with a start, a middle, and a finish.  In point of fact all stories end; and here again the point of view of a many is that more natural one to take.  The world is full of partial stories that run parallel to one another, beginning and ending at odd times.  They mutually interlace and interfere at points, but we cannot unify them completely in our minds.  In following your life-history, I must temporarily turn my attention from my own.  Even a biographer of twins would have to press them alternately upon his reader’s attention.

It follows that whoever says that the whole world tells one story utters another of those monistic dogmas that a man believes at his risk.  It is easy to see the world’s history pluralistically, as a rope of which each fibre tells a separate tale; but to conceive of each cross-section of the rope as an absolutely single fact, and to sum the whole longitudinal series into one being living an undivided life, is harder.  We have indeed the analogy of embryology to help us.  The microscopist makes a hundred flat cross-sections of a given embryo, and mentally unites them into one solid whole.  But the great world’s ingredients, so far as they are beings, seem, like the rope’s fibres, to be discontinuous cross-wise, and to cohere only in the longitudinal direction.  Followed in that direction they are many.  Even the embryologist, when he follows the development of his object, has to treat the history of each single organ in turn.  Absolute aesthetic union is thus another barely abstract ideal.  The world appears as something more epic than dramatic.

So far, then, we see how the world is unified by its many systems, kinds, purposes, and dramas.  That there is more union in all these ways than openly appears is certainly true.  That there may be one sovereign purpose, system, kind, and story, is a legitimate hypothesis.  All I say here is that it is rash to affirm this dogmatically without better evidence than we possess at present.