t ideal portion, and which
in the more usual human sense is hardly to be termed a religious
hypothesis at all. 'Cosmic emotion' is the better name for the
reaction it may awaken.

Observe that all the irrationalities and puzzles which the absolute
gives rise to, and from which the finite God remains free, are due to
the fact that the absolute has nothing, absolutely nothing, outside of
itself. The finite God whom I contrast with it may conceivably have
_almost_ nothing outside of himself; he may already have triumphed
over and absorbed all but the minutest fraction of the universe; but
that fraction, however small, reduces him to the status of a
relative being, and in principle the universe is saved from all the
irrationalities incidental to absolutism. The only irrationality left
would be the irrationality of which pluralism as such is accused, and
of this I hope to say a word more later.

I have tired you with so many subtleties in this lecture that I will
add only two other counts to my indictment.

First, then, let me remind you that _the absolute is useless for
deductive purposes_. It gives us absolute safety if you will, but
it is compatible with every relative danger. You cannot enter the
phenomenal world with the notion of it in your grasp, and name
beforehand any detail which you are likely to meet there. Whatever the
details of experience may prove to be, _after the fact of them_
the absolute will adopt them. It is an hypothesis that functions
retrospectively only, not prospectively. _That_, whatever it may be,
will have been in point of fact the sort of world which the absolute
was pleased to offer to itself as a spectacle.

Again, the absolute is always represented idealistically, as the
all-knower. Thinking this view consistently out leads one to frame
an almost ridiculous conception of the absolute mind, owing to the
enormous mass of unprofitable information which it would then seem
obliged to carry. One of the many _reductiones ad absurdum_ of
pluralism by which idealism thinks it proves the absolute One is as
follows: Let there be many facts; but since on idealist principles
facts exist only by being known, the many facts will therefore mean
many knowers. But that there are so many knowers is itself a fact,
which in turn requires _its_ knower, so the one absolute knower has
eventually to be brought in. _All_ facts lead to him. If it be a fact
that this table is not a chair, not a rhinoceros, not a l