ing, where "wealth accumulates and men decay," will intensify and multiply evil and not good. The progress of the individual or of society towards real well-being is possible only as men discriminate among objects of pursuit and sources of enjoyment, according to their true worth, and so learn to value and seek better things.

CHAPTER XII.

THE ABSOLUTE: THE FIFTH ULTIMATE REALITY KNOWN THROUGH RATIONAL INTUITION.

54. The Absolute.

THE fifth ultimate reality known through Rational Intuition is the Absolute; and this is accordingly the fifth ultimate idea of the reason. I. The Absolute is that which exists independent of anything prerequisite to its existence; or, it is that which exists out of all necessary relations. The Absolute is the Unconditioned.

II. The belief that Absolute Being must exist is a rational intuition necessarily arising in the effort to complete the processes of thought in any line of investigation. For example, in knowing what is caused we necessarily believe that uncaused being must exist. If we admit the reality of force or energy in the course of nature and believe that every beginning or change of existence has a cause, then we necessarily know that there is a power which is not an effect, which persists in all changes, and is the unconditioned ground of the entire series. Otherwise power or force disappears, the course of nature ravels out, and all that is left is empty antecedence and sequence without real power or energy. So Spencer says: "The axiomatic truths of physical science unavoidably postulate Absolute Being as their common basis. The persistence of the universe is the persistence of that Unknown Cause, Power or Force which is manifested to us through all phenomena. Such is the foundation of any possible system of positive knowledge. Deeper than demonstration-deeper even than definite cognition-deep as the very nature of the mind, is the postulate at which we have arrived. Its authority transcends all other whatever; for not only is it given in the constitution of our own consciousness, but it is impossible to imagine a consciousness so constituted as not to give it Thus the belief which this datum constitutes has a higher warrant than any other whatever."* Thus we are not shut up to determine between the Absolute Being and an infinite series of finite causes, but between the Absolute Being and any cause or power whatever. A series of causes is

* First Principles, 22 74, 76, 77, pp. 256, 258, 98.

unthinkable, except as ultimately resting on an Absolute Cause or Power.

The same is true in the sphere of rationality. The possibility of concluding reasoning in an inference which gives knowledge, rests on universal truths regulative of all thinking. The validity of these universa! truths involves the existence of Reason unconditioned, universal and supreme, the same everywhere and always. Mathematics is a pure creation of the human mind resting on self-evident principles of reason. If our mathematics is not true in all the stars and planets, our astronomy is worthless. The same is true of all the universal principles which are laws of thought. If they are not true everywhere and always our science and all our reasoning give no knowledge; the human mind is constituted untrustworthy. Reason, then, must be universal and absolute, unconditioned by any change of finite things, the same everywhere and always. The alternative is not between the Absolute Reason and the human, but between the Absolute Reason and no Reason or rational knowledge.

Also, in extension in space, duration in time, or limitation in quantity, we find our thought carrying us to the infinite. Finite extension, ⚫ duration and quantity must be thought as embosomed in the immensity, eternity and plenitude of the infinite.

In our endeavors to know the manifold in the unity of an all-comprehending system, we find it only as the universe is the manifestation of the Absolute and Unconditioned One.

Thus in every line of thought the knowledge rises self-evident before us that there must be an Absolute and Unconditioned Being. We properly recognize it as a primitive and universal truth, known in rational intuition. The idea of Absolute Being and the belief of its existence are in the background of human consciousness and at the foundation of all knowledge through human thought. "A consciousness which has got rid of the thought of absolute being would become a prey to endless atomicism and dissolution."* The existence of Absolute Being underlies the possibility of all finite being, power, reasoning and rational knowledge.

In this rational intuition a new sphere of reality is opened to human intelligence.

III. We cannot know a priori what the Absolute Being is; but, so far as this knowledge is possible, only a posteriori, in knowing that it accounts for the universe, including both man and nature. In the rational intuition that Absolute Being exists, it is known as the ground of the universe. The knowledge of being has been attained, as already

• Dorner, Christlichen Glaubenslehre, 18, 2 B.

explained. This intuition gives us knowledge that a being exists that is absolute and unconditioned; and by thought we know further that, as the ultimate ground of the universe, the absolute must have all the powers necessary to account for its existence; as manifested or revealed in the universe, the Absolute must be endowed with the powers which can account for the existence and ongoing of the universe and which thus are revealed in it. Hence the Absolute is the All-conditioning as well as the Unconditioned. By rational intuition man knows that absolute being exists; his knowledge of what it is, is progressive with his progressive knowledge of man and nature in the universe.

Kant objects that, though the idea of God is necessary to the Reason, it has no content in consciousness. The foregoing remarks show that we do have knowledge what God is as he reveals himself in the unimay add that the idea has content in consciousness through the five ultimate ideas of the Reason. Kant admits that it has content

verse.

I

in consciousness through the practical reason, in the knowledge of right and wrong. God speaks in our hearts in his moral law. But we now see that God, the Absolute Reason, equally reveals himself in our consciousness in the rational ideas of the True, the Perfect and the Good or Worthy. Also, God reveals himself in our consciousness in our religious experience; especially in the experience of a Christian man, the purest, loftiest and most comprehensive experience of God's gracious revelation of himself. Even in the religiousness of ruder men who know not Christ, God has "not left himself without witness." God acts on men and they react upon his influences; and thus they find him in their own consciousness. They know him and the spiritual sphere by this action and reaction, in a manner analogous to that in which they know the world of sense. No Christian man will say that the idea of God is an empty idea void of content in his own consciousness. He will say, "I know him whom I have believed;" not the idea of him or propositions about him, but HIM.

of

Herbert Spencer, recognizing the belief of the existence of Absolute Power as a primitive datum of consciousness and a priori to the individual, would account for the belief as the result of the experience the human race, registered through innumerable generations in the human organism and transmitted by heredity. If so, men must have experienced the action of God on them through all generations, until religious belief and worship have become constitutional and the idea of an Absolute Being and the belief of his existence have become primitive data of consciousness.

55. The Pseudo-Absolute.

I. The true absolute must be distinguished from false ideas of it assumed in the current objections to theism. These appear in various forms.

Some forms of the pseudo-absolute originate in the attempt to know what the absolute is a priori; that is, by simply developing the words, absolute, unconditioned, infinite. Then the idea of the absolute necessarily remains void of content and negative; it is not conditioned by dependence on any cause; it is not limited in time, space or quantity; and there is no reality of which we predicate the unconditionateness and the illimitation.

Other forms of the pseudo-absolute arise from attempting to deter mine empirically what the absolute is. The necessary result is that some conception of the finite is mistaken for the absolute. Of these I may mention two which have played important parts in the objections to theism.

One is the idea of the absolute as "the ALL," the mathematical sum total of all that is, the "omnitudo realitatis." It is supposed that the absolute is to be found by adding together all finite things, until we reach "the All." But "the All" thus found must always be itself finite. The other is the idea that the absolute is the largest general notion or logical concept. The greater the extent of a general notion the less its content. A general notion including all reality in its extent would have no content. It would have no peculiar quality by which it could be distinguished from anything else; it would be entirely indeterminate. If we say that this is the general notion of being, then we merely hypostasize the copula; to affirm that anything is a being is then the weakest and least significant of affirmations; anything is a being which can be connected by the copula is with any predicate. Being then is entirely indeterminate; it is equal to nothing. And precisely this is what some eminent philosophers mean by the Absolute. So Hamilton says that the idea of the absolute is attained "only by thinking away every character by which the finite was conceived." We must, then, think away all that we know of concrete being and its properties and powers; and what is left is the Absolute. This is very like the famous metaphysical process of ascertaining what a swallow's nest in a clay-bank is, by thinking away the bank and leaving the hole. The Absolute would be a logical general notion and the world-process would be a process of logic. II. Many of the current objections against theism are founded on a false idea of the absolute and from it derive all their force.

1. It is said that the absolute is "pure being," it is "the thing in itself;" it is "out of all relations." These are results of attempting to