r solutions, only they
emphasize the irrationality of our finite universe less than Bradley
does; and Royce in particular, being unusually 'thick' for an
idealist, tries to bring the absolute's secret forms of relief more
sympathetically home to our imagination.

Well, what must we do in this tragic predicament? For my own part, I
have finally found myself compelled to _give up the logic_, fairly,
squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life,
but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the
essential nature of reality--just what it is I can perhaps suggest
to you a little later. Reality, life, experience, concreteness,
immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows and
surrounds it. If you like to employ words eulogistically, as most
men do, and so encourage confusion, you may say that reality obeys a
higher logic, or enjoys a higher rationality. But I think that
even eulogistic words should be used rather to distinguish than
to commingle meanings, so I prefer bluntly to call reality if not
irrational then at least non-rational in its constitution,--and by
reality here I mean reality where things _happen_, all temporal
reality without exception. I myself find no good warrant for even
suspecting the existence of any reality of a higher denomination than
that distributed and strung-along and flowing sort of reality which we
finite beings swim in. That is the sort of reality given us, and that
is the sort with which logic is so incommensurable. If there be any
higher sort of reality--the 'absolute,' for example--that sort, by
the confession of those who believe in it, is still less amenable
to ordinary logic; it transcends logic and is therefore still less
rational in the intellectualist sense, so it cannot help us to save
our logic as an adequate definer and confiner of existence.

These sayings will sound queer and dark, probably they will sound
quite wild or childish in the absence of explanatory comment. Only the
persuasion that I soon can explain them, if not satisfactorily to all
of you, at least intelligibly, emboldens me to state them thus baldly
as a sort of programme. Please take them as a thesis, therefore, to be
defended by later pleading.

I told you that I had long and sincerely wrestled with the dilemma. I
have now to confess (and this will probably re-animate your interest)
that I should not now be emancipated, not now subordinate logic with
so ver