s 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 us to
co-operate in his purposes, and who furthers ours if they are worthy.
He works in an external environment, has limits, and has enemies. When
John Mill said that the notion of God's omnipotence must be given up,
if God is to be kept as a religious object, he was surely accurately
right; yet so prevalent is the lazy monism that idly haunts the region
of God's name, that so simple and truthful a saying was generally
treated as a paradox: God, it was said, _could_ not be finite. I
believe that the only God worthy of the name _must_ be finite, and I
shall return to this point in a later lecture. If the absolute exist
in addition--and the hypothesis must, in spite of its irrational
features, still be left open--then the absolute is only the wider
cosmic whole of which our God is but the mos