great claim made for the absolute is that by supposing it we make
the world appear more rational. Any hypothesis that does that will
always be accepted as more probably true than an hypothesis that makes
the world appear irrational. Men are once for all so made that they
prefer a rational world to believe in and to live in. But rationality
has at least four dimensions, intellectual, aesthetical, moral, and
practical; and to find a world rational to the maximal degree _in all
these respects simultaneously_ is no easy matter. Intellectually, the
world of mechanical materialism is the most rational, for we subject
its events to mathematical calculation. But the mechanical world
is ugly, as arithmetic is ugly, and it is non-moral. Morally,
the theistic world is rational enough, but full of intellectual
frustrations. The practical world of affairs, in its turn, so
supremely rational to the politician, the military man, or the man of
conquering business-faculty that he never would vote to change the
type of it, is irrational to moral and artistic temperaments; so that
whatever demand for rationality we find satisfied by a philosophic
hypothesis, we are liable to find some other demand for rationality
unsatisfied by the same hypothesis. The rationality we gain in one
coin we thus pay for in another; and the problem accordingly seems at
first sight to resolve itself into that of getting a conception which
will yield the largest _balance_ of rationality rather than one which
will yield perfect rationality of every description. In general, it
may be said that if a man's conception of the world lets loose any
action in him that is easy, or any faculty which he is fond of
exercising, he will deem it rational in so far forth, be the faculty
that of computing, fighting, lecturing, classifying, framing schematic
tabulations, getting the better end of a bargain, patiently waiting
and enduring, preaching, joke-making, or what you like. Albeit the
absolute is defined as being necessarily an embodiment of objectively
perfect rationality, it is fair to its english advocates to say that
those who have espoused the hypothesis most concretely and seriously
have usually avowed the irrationality to their own minds of certain
elements in it.

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
w