ixth lecture,
on Professor Bergson, I shall in effect defend this very view,
strengthening my thesis by his authority. I am unwilling to say
anything more about the point at this time, and what I have just said
of it is only a sort of surveyor's note of where our present position
lies in the general framework of these lectures.

Let us turn now at last to the great question of fact, _Does the
absolute exist or not_? to which all our previous discussion has been
preliminary. I may sum up that discussion by saying that whether
there really be an absolute or not, no one makes himself absurd
or self-contradictory by doubting or denying it. The charges of
self-contradiction, where they do not rest on purely verbal reasoning,
rest on a vicious intellectualism. I will not recapitulate my
criticisms. I will simply ask you to change the _venue_, and to
discuss the absolute now as if it were only an open hypothesis. As
such, is it more probable or more improbable?

But first of all I must parenthetically ask you to distinguish the
notion of the absolute carefully from that of another object with
which it is liable to become heedlessly entangled. That other object
is the 'God' of common people in their religion, and the creator-God
of orthodox christian theology. Only thoroughgoing monists or
pantheists believe in the absolute. The God of our popular
Christianity is but one member of a pluralistic system. He and we
stand outside of each other, just as the devil, the saints, and the
angels stand outside of both of us. I can hardly conceive of anything
more different from the absolute than the God, say, of David or of
Isaiah. _That_ God is an essentially 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